CHAPTER TWO — The Man the Rain Won't Touch (2)

The air in the car changed. Elowen's heart was hammering, and not with fear—with something sharper, more alive, the feeling of a door opening in a room she'd thought was locked forever.

"My mother," she said. "You knew my mother."

"I did." His voice was soft. "And she was the bravest person I ever met. Which is why—" he looked at her—"I'm giving you this."

He reached into his coat and held out a photograph. Elowen took it with hands that weren't quite steady.

It was old, creased, faded at the edges. Two women, young and laughing, their arms around each other, in a garden full of roses.

One of them was her mother.

"Who's the other one?" Elowen asked, and her voice was barely a whisper.

"Your mother's aunt." Kael's voice was careful. "Her name is Selene. And she's been hiding from the same people who killed your mother for forty years."

The car pulled over instead of pulling up.

They were on a quiet side street, the hotel's awning visible half a block away, and Kael Thorne turned in his seat to face her with the full, unsettling weight of his attention.

"Since you're asking questions," he said, "let me ask you one."

"What?"

"What do you want?"

It was such a simple question. No one had asked her that in years. Not her father, who wanted her to be convenient. Not Margaret, who wanted her to be invisible. Not Lila, who wanted her to be gone.

"I want," Elowen said slowly, testing the words as they left her mouth, "to take back everything she stole. The scholarship. The dress. The name. The life." Her voice steadied, warming like steel. "I want her to stand in front of every person who's ever believed her story and have to explain why she's a liar."

Kael Thorne smiled.

It was the first real smile she'd seen on his face, and it changed him entirely—the cold, beautiful mask cracking into something dangerous and delighted, like a wolf who'd just heard a particularly promising rumor about a sheep.

"Good," he said softly. "I was hoping you'd say that."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a fan of entertainment." He put the car back in gear and pulled up to the curb of the hotel, engine humming. "And I have a feeling you're going to be very entertaining."

The doorman opened her door. Elowen stepped out onto the pavement, and the night wrapped around her like a wet coat.

"Thank you," she said. "For the ride. And the room. And..." She hesitated. "For not asking me to explain."

The man's smile was a slash of white in the dark. "Keep the dress. It suits you better than the one you lost."

The window rolled up. The black Phantom pulled away from the curb and vanished into the city like it had never existed, leaving Elowen Voss standing on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue with a hotel key card in her hand and the strangest feeling that she'd just made a deal she didn't understand.

The room was a suite. Of course it was a suite. He was the kind of man who didn't book anything smaller.

The front desk had handed her the key card without asking for her name, which was either very modern or very sinister, and the elevator had taken her up in silence to a floor that smelled like fresh flowers and old money. The suite itself was all cream silk and dark wood, a sitting room larger than her bedroom at the Voss house, with a bowl of green apples on the table and a note in an elegant, unreadable hand.

Consider it a loan. — K.T.

No phone number. No address. No way to find him, if she'd wanted to.

Elowen stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the city glitter below her, and tried to process the last hour. She should have been terrified. She'd gotten into a stranger's car, accepted a hotel room from a man she couldn't name, and agreed—vaguely, dangerously—to let him watch her take her life back.

Instead, she felt something she hadn't felt in years: awake.

Her phone was dead, but the room had a landline, and she used it to call the one person in the world she still trusted: her mother's lawyer, Harold Finch, a man with the loyalty of a bulldog and the discretion of a vault. He picked up on the second ring.

"Miss Voss." His voice was wary. "It's nearly one in the morning."

"I know. I'm sorry." Elowen sat on the edge of the bed, the phone cradled against her ear. "Harold, I need you to do something for me. Quietly."

"...What?"

"Check my mother's trust. The one she set up for me. I want to know if anyone's touched it."

The silence on the other end of the line was long enough to make her stomach drop.

"Miss Voss," Harold said slowly, "I was going to call you in the morning."

"Why?"

"Because..." He sighed, and she heard the sound of papers shuffling, of a man doing mental arithmetic he didn't like. "There was a meeting at the bank last week. Your father's wife. She had a power-of-attorney document that appears to be signed by you."

Elowen's blood went cold. "I've never signed a power of attorney."

"That's what I thought." Harold's voice was grim. "Miss Voss, I'd like you to come to my office tomorrow. Bring identification. We need to talk about forgery."

"Harold." Elowen's voice was very quiet. "How bad is it?"

The silence stretched. She heard him exhale, the sound of a man choosing his words like a surgeon choosing where to cut.

"The trust is structured so that the principal becomes fully yours at twenty-five. Until then, it's managed by a board of three trustees: your father, the bank, and myself." He paused. "Last week, your father's wife presented a power of attorney bearing your signature, transferring your voting rights to her for the purpose of 'family estate management.' The bank accepted it."

"They accepted a forged document."

"They accepted a document," Harold corrected, "that, on its face, looked perfectly valid. Your signature is not difficult to find, Miss Voss. It's on your scholarship applications, your lease, your father's birthday cards." His voice hardened. "A competent forger with access to your paperwork and a week of practice could reproduce it well enough to fool a bank teller."

The word access hung in the air.

Elowen thought about the camera in her bathroom. The phone that kept coming back dead. The mail that sometimes arrived opened, resealed with a damp seam. The way Lila had always, always found a reason to be in her room.

"She's been practicing," Elowen said, and it wasn't a question.