Chapter 6

Damian stood on the cliff path with the stuffed toy in his hands and understood what she had done.

She had not brought the child. The infant was safe in the nursery — confirmed within minutes by a panicked call to the nanny on duty. The entire scene had been engineered: the midnight departure, the drive, the figure at the cliff edge, the bundle, every detail calibrated to make him believe he was watching his child die.

She hadn't wanted the child's life. She had wanted to destroy his.

He put his hand over his mouth. He stood there for a very long time.

"Search the base of the cliffs," he said. His voice didn't sound like his own. "Every meter. I don't care how long it takes."

Three days later, he had not slept.

He had been at the cliffs or on the water or at the command post at the base of the headland, and his suit was wrecked, and his security team had stopped offering him food after he'd swept it off the table twice, and there was still no sign of her.

On the third afternoon, he made his way down to the narrow shelf of rock at the base of the cliff, where the tide had exposed a section of the shingle. The search teams had been over it several times. He went himself anyway.

He found her jacket first — a torn section of the lining, caught in a crack between two rocks. He held it and did not let himself think too clearly about what that meant.

Then he saw it.

Half-buried in a crevice, bleached and fraying, the cord almost entirely worn through: a small silver charm on a red ribbon. He recognized it before his mind had properly caught up. He'd worn it for two years after she'd given it to him — she'd had it blessed at a chapel, she'd told him, she'd climbed an entire stone staircase on her knees to get it blessed properly, and he'd told her it was excessive, and she'd pressed it into his hand anyway.

If you lose it, she had said, I'll stop loving you.

He had said something dismissive. He hadn't meant it, the dismissiveness, but he hadn't corrected himself, and she hadn't pushed.

He crouched down, reaching for it. The ribbon was still intact. He was almost touching it.

A gust of wind came off the water — sharp, salt-heavy, sudden — and swept the charm off the rock and into the sea.

He heard himself make a sound he didn't recognize.

He was pulled out of the water by his own security team — he hadn't even registered stepping off the rock — and taken to hospital. He woke in a private room with an IV in his arm and a persistent pain behind his ribs that had nothing to do with the fall.

He was lying there, watching the ceiling, when he became aware of a nurse passing in the corridor.

He sat up. He recognized her. The ward uniform was different, but he recognized the face — she had been on duty the night his son died. He had seen her leave the room.

"Stop," he said.

She stopped.

"You were on the neonatal unit," he said. "Four months ago. You were there when my son died." He swung his legs off the bed. "What are you still doing here? Why were you not dismissed?"

"It was Celeste." The nurse's voice was barely above a whisper. "She said the baby was a donor. She said we could take as much as we needed. She said if anything happened, she'd protect us."

Damian stood very still. "Say that again."

"She told us — told us the child was there specifically as a donor, that any blood draws were approved, that—" The nurse's hands were shaking. "She said we'd be fine. She said she had Mr. Blackwood's full backing."

He made himself breathe. He told her to stay in the hospital and not speak to anyone, and he had two of his security team stand watch outside her door, and then he drove back to Blackwood Manor at a speed that made his driver visibly nervous.

The manor was quiet in the late afternoon. Too quiet.

He was crossing the entrance hall toward the staircase when he heard voices from the small sitting room off the east corridor — Celeste's voice, low and unhurried, the way she spoke when she was sure no one was listening.

He stopped.

"— disposed of properly? No trace?"

A pause, then someone else: "All taken care of, Miss. Nothing for Mr. Blackwood to find."

"Good." A small exhale. "I almost made a mistake, you know. That night in the hospital — Damian was looking at her differently. There was a moment where I thought—" A pause. "It doesn't matter now. The child worked out. Everything is stable."

The housekeeper's voice, low and placating: "You've worked so hard, Miss. And the Mr. has loved you for so many years — even without all of this, you'd always have been—"

"That's not how it works." Celeste's tone shifted, flat and cold beneath the surface warmth. "Do you think he would have stayed if there'd been no pregnancy? She was starting to matter to him. I could see it. He'd started to look at her the way he used to look at me. I needed something he couldn't walk away from." A pause. "It was the only way."

Damian felt the blood leave his face.

He was back in that room — the night of their son's death, the bourbon, the complete collapse of every self-possession he'd spent thirty-eight years building. He had woken in the dark thinking he was holding Lily. The familiarity of the perfume. The accommodation, uncanny and almost prescient, to everything he'd asked for. He had known, on some level he hadn't been willing to access, that something was wrong.

He had told himself he was grieving.

He had told himself it didn't matter.

His hand hit the sitting room door hard enough to crack it against the wall.