CELESTE'S POV
We decided, that same week, what to actually do with them, since a household this size has never once had room for anyone who doesn't earn their keep in some fashion, whatever fashion that turns out to be.
Alec went to the ledgers within the month. A small mercy, and a calculated one, since a man raised by an accountant father tends to read a set of books the way other men read a room, and I wanted eyes on our accounts that Dario Voss's people hadn't already bought.
Jace took longer to place, mostly because Claire kept finding reasons to delay it.
Arden suggested we keep him as a driver since the old one had been killed, but a driver went out on the road, exposed and difficult to control. I wasn't handing Dario Voss a second chance at a man he'd already gone to considerable trouble to fake kill once.
I wanted Jace in the security room instead. Cameras, access logs, the compound's eyes. Somewhere inside the walls, under guard, where I could keep him breathing while I decided what else he was worth.
Moving into the main house was never on the table. Whatever Claire's arrangement with Jace might have suggested to an outsider, neither man was meant to become part of our household. Alec and Jace were to stay in the east cottages, inside the compound wall, close enough to watch and far enough that the house itself remained ours
CLAIRE
For the first two weeks, Jace stayed in the guest wing, and so did I, more nights than not. That was never a secret from anyone under this roof. I have a habit, older than either of us likes to examine too closely, claiming an attractive stranger's first night and neither of us pretending it means anything past that.
I gave Jace back after two weeks, and the ease of that decision says something true about who I was before this house taught me otherwise. He was pleasant company. I'll grant him that. He was also, within three days, more work than I had patience for, watchful in a way that put me constantly on the back foot, careful with his words in a way that made every conversation feel like a negotiation I hadn't agreed to enter. I like my men easy. Loud, uncomplicated, grateful for my attention in a way that costs me no particular effort to maintain. Jace cost effort.
I found Celeste in the study, going over Petrov's confession page for what had to be the twentieth time, and dropped into the chair across from her without waiting to be asked.
"I'm done with him," I said. "I can't look at him every morning."
She looked up, amused.
"He's not difficult," I corrected myself, a part of me wanting to defend myself for some reason. "He watches me eat breakfast like he's assembling a report on my soul, and frankly, I don't have the patience to be catalogued that closely by a man I only mean to borrow for the night."
Celeste's mouth twitched. "That sounds difficult."
"It is."
"You've survived worse."
"I have also survived worse by getting rid of it."
That earned me the faintest smile before her attention returned to the page.
I leaned forward. "Besides, he's wasted on me."
Celeste looked up again. "Wasted?"
"He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't trust us. He doesn't even pretend to like me."
"You seem offended."
"I'm not offended."
"You are."
"I'm bored. That is not the same thing. It is when the man in question looks at me like he's trying to determine whether I'm going to poison him."
"Are you?"
"Not today."
Celeste gave me a look.
I smiled.
She was quiet for a moment, her fingers resting against the edge of Petrov's confession. Then she said, "I'll take him."
I blinked. "You'll what?"
"I'll take Jace."
I stared at her. "Since when?"
"Since you decided you were finished with him."
"That was approximately thirty seconds ago."
"Then I'm efficient."
I laughed once. "You don't even like him."
"I don't dislike him."
"That's hardly an endorsement."
"I don't need to like him."
There was something about the way she said it that made me pause. I studied her face, but she had already lowered her eyes to the page again.
"You've been spending enough time with him to know he's difficult, I've been spending enough time with him to know he notices things."
"And?" I asked.
"And Jace notices the room."
I leaned back. That was true. I'd noticed it too. The way his eyes moved whenever someone entered. The way he remembered where everyone had been sitting. The way he never seemed entirely relaxed, even when he was pretending to be. "He's still not your type," I said.
"Neither is Petrov."
"Petrov is no one's type."
"Exactly." I laughed again, but Celeste didn't. She closed the file.
"Let me have him, Claire." There was no explanation attached to it. No argument. Just that quiet certainty she used when she had already made up her mind. I could have asked why. Instead, I shrugged.
"Fine. He's yours."
"Thank you."
"And if he starts watching you eat breakfast like you're evidence in a murder trial, don't come complaining to me."
"I'll survive."
"I'm sure you will."
I stood, smoothing down my dress. At the door, I glanced back at her. "You know, for someone who claims not to care about him, you seem very interested."
Celeste's expression didn't change. "Maybe I am."
I smiled. That was the first answer she'd given me all morning that sounded like a lie.
"You take the accountant's son," she said.
"Gladly," I said, already standing, already moving toward the door with the satisfaction of a woman who's just traded down a complication for something more manageable. "Try not to bore him to death with all that silence, sister. Some of us actually enjoy being asked questions."
She didn't dignify that with an answer, which from Celeste has always meant I'd landed closer to true than she wanted to admit.
I didn't ask why she wanted him so quickly. At the time, I assumed it was convenience. Celeste had always been practical about people, especially after the warehouse. If someone had a use, she found it. If they didn't, they didn't stay in our orbit for long.
Jace was useful. At least, that was what I told myself.
There was something in the way she'd asked for him that I couldn't quite place. Not interest. Not exactly. Celeste had never looked at him the way I looked at men, and whatever had caught her attention seemed to have very little to do with his face. I let it go. There were too many things happening inside that house to question every decision my sister made.
~
I told Jace plainly, the next morning in bed that this arrangement was over. I was done with him.
"Whatever has been happening between us wasn't really about you specifically," I said. ""I wanted to satisfy my curiosity and it has been. It won't happen again, and it isn't a demotion. I don't expect you to understand it, and I don't expect it to happen again."
He took that with more composure than I'd braced for. "I appreciate you telling me plainly. I'll admit I've spent some time confused about where I stood."
"You'll stand wherever this house decides you're useful," I said. "That's not an insult. It's simply how this works, until it doesn't."
I studied him a moment. "I'm not interested in competing with my sister over you, if that's what you're bracing for. Whatever this becomes, it won't be that."
His expression barely changed. "Good," he said.
I smiled. "See? We're already communicating. You'll be moved into the security room, under Celeste. Nothing about your situation changes except who you report to." I stood, done with the conversation before it could turn into anything softer than it needed to be. " Do the work. See where it gets you."
ALEC'S POV
They gave me the ledgers, in a room with no windows and a door that locked from the outside, which told me everything I needed to know about how much trust I'd actually earned versus how much use they'd decided to make of me. I want to be precise about that distinction, because I understand now how easily the two get confused by anyone desperate enough to mistake one for the other, and I had spent five months by then being exactly that desperate.
Celeste brought them in herself, three crates of bound ledgers and loose receipts stacked on a hand truck she wheeled in without asking anyone to do it for her, which told me something about her too, though it would take me longer to work out what. She set the crates down in the middle of the floor, straightened, and looked at me the way you look at a tool you haven't decided yet whether to trust with anything sharp.
"You read numbers the way your father did," she said. Not a question. "That's the theory, at least. I'd like to find out if it's true."
I didn't ask how she knew that about him. I had stopped being surprised, by then, by how much these two women already seemed to know about lives that weren't supposed to be theirs to know. "What am I looking for?"
"Anything that doesn't add up. Anything that's been made to look like it adds up when it doesn't. I'll tell you which is which once you've found something." She crouched, flipped open the top ledger to a page at random, and turned it toward me. "This house moves considerably more money than it declares anywhere official. Most of that is by design. Some of it, I suspect, is not."
"And if I find the part that isn't by design?"
"Then you tell me. Not Claire, not Dax, not anyone who happens to be standing nearby when you find it. Me." She stood, brushed nonexistent dust from her knees, and looked at me a moment longer than the instruction required. "I'm told you're careful. I'd like to see whether that's true of you the way it was true of him, or whether it's simply something you learned to perform because it kept you alive longer than the alternative would have."
I didn't have an answer for that worth giving her, so I gave her silence instead, and she seemed to find that answer acceptable enough, because she left without waiting for a better one.
The room itself told its own story, if you knew how to read a room the way I'd learned to read one growing up in a house where my father brought his work home more often than he ever admitted to my mother. No windows, as I've said, but also no restraints, no guard posted directly outside the door the way there had been in the depot where they'd first kept me — only a lock, and the understanding, unspoken but perfectly clear, that the lock existed less to keep me contained than to keep the ledgers themselves contained, a distinction I found myself turning over more than once in those first days, trying to decide whether it meant anything about how they'd come to see me, or whether I was simply hungry enough for a kindness to invent one where none had actually been offered.
I worked twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day, not because anyone asked that of me but because the alternative was sitting alone with nothing but my own thoughts for company, and my own thoughts, in those first weeks, were not company I particularly wanted to keep. The numbers gave me somewhere to put all of it — the grief I hadn't finished feeling for my father, the fear I hadn't finished feeling for myself, the particular guilt of having survived a warehouse that had killed or sold nearly everyone else who'd passed through it that same week. A column of figures does not ask you how you're managing. It only asks you to be precise, and precision, I discovered, was something I still had left in me even when very little else was.
I understand now that it was a test from the very first crate. I understood it a little, even then, sitting alone with three years of a stranger's careful fraud laid out in front of me like a puzzle I hadn't asked to solve. I had watched my father do this exact work at a kitchen table for most of my childhood, hunched over columns of numbers with a pencil he sharpened obsessively, the particular quiet concentration of a man who had learned that numbers, unlike people, could not lie to you unless you let them. I used to think that quiet was boredom. I understood it, by my ninth day in that house, as something closer to survival — the specific, narrow peace of a man who has found exactly one thing in his life he can still control completely.
I found the first real thread by the end of the first week, and I want to be honest that I nearly didn't report it, because reporting it meant admitting how quickly I'd made myself useful to people who had made it very clear my usefulness was the only currency I currently possessed.
It was small. A supplier account, invoiced monthly for warehouse maintenance at a rate that hadn't changed in two years despite everything around it — fuel, labor, materials — rising steadily over the same period. Numbers that stayed unnaturally still are, in my experience, considerably more suspicious than numbers that move. A man padding an invoice adjusts it constantly, nervously, the way a bad liar keeps changing small details of a story that was fine the first time he told it. A number that never moves is a number someone set once and stopped thinking about, because they didn't expect anyone to ever look closely enough to notice.
I brought it to Celeste myself, at the hour she'd told me to bring her anything worth bringing. After the house had gone quiet, when the guards outside my door changed shift and the hallway noise thinned into something almost peaceful. She read the page twice before she looked up at me.
"You found this in a week."
"It isn't hidden well. Whoever set it up wasn't expecting anyone to actually read the books. They were expecting someone to file them."
"That's precisely what my last three bookkeepers did," she said, and something in her voice made it clear this was not a compliment aimed at the bookkeepers. "Do you know what this account actually is?"
"No. I didn't have clearance to trace it past the invoice."
"Good instinct, stopping there. Most men in your position would have kept pulling the thread just to prove they could." She set the page down, studied me the particular way she studied everything, like she was deciding how much of a room's weight a given piece of furniture could actually hold before she leaned on it fully. "It's a shell. One of several Kade's people run through legitimate-looking maintenance contracts, moving money that doesn't want to be seen moving. You've just found me a thread into his operation inside a stack of ledgers I'd nearly given up expecting anything useful out of."
I did not tell her, that night, what it cost me to hand her something that useful. I have thought about it often since the particular, ugly irony of proving myself valuable to two women running an empire built on the same quiet, careful numbers work that killed my father, using the same skill he taught me at a kitchen table before either of us understood what it would eventually cost him. I told myself, that first week, that this was different. That I was doing it to survive, not to disappear into it the way he had. I understand now that he probably told himself the exact same thing, for considerably longer than a week, before the difference between those two things stopped being a difference he could still see
Claire brought my meals herself, most evenings, though nothing about the arrangement suggested she'd been assigned the task. I understood, within the second week, that this was simply how she operated. She did precisely what she wanted and dared anyone in her own house to question it, and no one, myself least of all, was foolish enough to try.
"You've made yourself indispensable already," she said, one evening, setting the tray down with more force than the food required. "Celeste hasn't stopped talking about the shell account. It's genuinely irritating, listening to my sister be impressed by someone."
"I didn't do it to impress her."
"I know. That's what makes it work." She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, studying me with the frank, unhurried attention she gave to everything she found even slightly interesting. "Most people who want something from Celeste try to be charming about it. You just keep quietly being correct at her instead. It's a considerably more effective strategy, though I imagine it's exhausting to maintain."
"I'm not trying to get anything from her."
"Everyone in this house is trying to get something from someone," Claire said, not unkindly, the way you'd correct a child's misunderstanding of a rule they hadn't yet learned applied to them too. "You'll work out eventually what it is you actually want. Most people do, given enough time and not much else to occupy them."
She left before I could ask her what she thought that thing was, which I suspect she intended. I sat with the question longer than I meant to, that night, turning it over the way I'd learned to turn over a column of numbers that refused to balance — certain there was an answer in there somewhere, if I was patient enough, and careful enough, to actually find it.