Chapter 2 2. The Arrival

Caden

Twelve hours before I saw her again.

I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, drinking whiskey I couldn't taste and rereading a two-line message from a dead man's lawyer.

James Ellington passed on Sunday evening. Your presence is required for the reading of the will.

Required. Even from a casket, the old man was still giving me orders.

I sat with my forehead against the window while England fell away beneath me, and I'd waited to feel something. Grief, maybe. Relief. Hatred. Six years of rehearsing what I'd say to James Ellington when I finally came back through those gates, and the bastard had gone and made sure I'd be delivering it to a box.

That was the thing nobody tells you about revenge speeches. They require the audience to be alive.

So no, I didn't cry over the Atlantic. But somewhere over Greenland I caught myself doing the math — she'll be twenty-four now, she'll have finished her master's, she'll be there — and my heart was going like I'd sprinted the length of the plane, and I ordered another whiskey and told myself it was turbulence.

Six years. I'd survived six years without seeing her by being very, very disciplined about it. No photographs. No searching her name at two in the morning — well. Almost no searching her name at two in the morning.

I'd built companies with that discipline. Buried my parents' ghosts with it. Put ink over every inch of skin that remembered New York.

And now, here I am, walking into the house I grew up half-belonging to, past the casket of the man who'd made me and broken me in the same decade, up the stairs I used to take three at a time, and all that discipline died in a doorway.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

Because there she was. Hazel Rose Ellington, standing in my old room in her funeral black dress, her fingers resting on a pencil mark I'd made the week she turned eighteen.

She turned her head a fraction toward the window, and the light caught her skin, and her ocean blue eyes shone against the sunlight and my breath caught in my throat.

She was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever had to walk away from. Worse — she’s even more than that now. Her skin was flawless, like porcelain. Her body small, and slender, and I remember just how easy it was to lift her in my arms.

Her hair was longer. Darker than I remembered, or maybe memory had been lying to me for years, sanding her down into something survivable. Because the real Hazel was not survivable. The real Hazel was standing in the light from my old window looking like the one prayer I'd never let myself finish, and if I didn't say something in the next three seconds, I was going to do something unforgivable.

So I did what I do. I smiled.

"Still stalking in my room, are we?"

She turned, and her face did that thing — that fraction of a second where everything showed, the grief and the shock and six years of how dare you, before the Ellington in her slammed every door in the house. God, I'd missed that. I'd missed being the thing she locked up against.

"Hello, Hazy," I said, and watched the name land like I'd thrown it.

"Caden." She said. And the moment she said my name, something twisted in my chest. "You're back."

"Yeah," I said. "I'm back."

And then neither of us said anything for a while, and the room got very loud about it.

She looked older. Not aged, just more refined, like a blade that had been through the last stage of sharpening.

"I'm sorry about your dad," I said, because it was the thing you say, and because some traitorous percentage of it was true.

Her chin lifted. "Are you?" A pause, and then she said, "Aren't you glad he's gone?"

There she was.

Six years, and she still knew exactly where I kept everything.

“Yeah, well he’s about ten years too late.” I made a reference to something we shared, a memory from when I was fourteen, and I knew she remembered it too. Her lips curved ever so faintly, into a small smile.

When we were fourteen, Hazel wanted to sneak out of the house to go to this concert that everyone at school was crazy about. She knew her dad would never let her. So she begged me to help sneak her out.

But we didn’t even make it past the front gate when the guards caught us. Hazel was terrified when we stood in her father’s study, and he was a little drunk and angrier than usual.

I told him it was my idea to sneak out and go to the concert. He sent her up to her room, and when we were alone, he slapped me so hard, I almost lost my eyesight. He threw a few more slaps and some punches at me before he finally let me go to bed.

When Hazel found me later that night and saw my face, she cried. I didn’t like that she cried. And I remember saying it out loud that night, “I wish your father’s dead.”

I grinned at the memory.

“Good old days, huh?”

She didn’t find my sarcasm amusing. She just kept a straight face.

“So.” She said. “How have you been.”

Her tone couldn’t have been flatter. The way you'd read an ingredient off a label.

"Careful," I said. "That almost sounded like you missed me."

"Missed you." She scoffed. "You've been in this house for five minutes and you're already being insufferable. Classic Caden." She could’ve kept going, but stopped herself. Recalibrating. Ellingtons don't spill.

“What are you doing here, Caden?” She said after pulling her composure back.

“Me?” I pushed off the doorframe, hands still in my pockets, and took one step into the room. "What are you doing in my room, Hazy?"

“Your room?” She laughed. “This isn’t your room anymore. Not for six years.”

"Really? Then why’s my stuff still here?"

“I don’t know why the old man didn’t throw out your crap, but once I’m back, I’ll be sure to clean this house of your—"

"You're sure this is still your house?" I said.

I didn’t think before saying it. That was the mistake.

I watched it hit. Watched her understand exactly what I was saying — the Board downstairs, the lawyers with their sealed envelope, the whisper that had crossed the Atlantic before I did. A female can’t inherit the empire. The board will want a male heir.

I watched her run the math the same way I had at eighteen. Everything in this house can be taken from you by the person you trust most.

Something in her face closed for good. "Unbelievable," she said, more to the room than to me. "He's not even buried yet."

She came toward the door. Toward me, because I was in it, and she was going to walk straight past like I was furniture. Six years compressed into a body swerve, and every rational cell I owned said let her go. This is cleaner, you came here for the will, not for—

—But my hand moved before I finished the thought.

I caught her arm. Gently — barely — my fingers closing around her sleeve like they'd been waiting six years just inside my cuff.

"Wait."

She stopped.

She didn't pull away. That was the thing. She stopped, and she stood there, close enough that I could smell the rain and hotel soap and something under it that was just her. Unchanged, filed away in the oldest part of my brain. Her eyes came up to mine and they were impossibly blue and they were furious and wet and asking —

—And I had it all right there. Six years of it, lined up behind my teeth. I’m sorry I had to leave. I wrote you forty letters and burned them all. I heard you calling my name from the window and it took everything in me not to look up, because if I'd looked up I'd have stayed, and if I'd stayed I'd have been—

"Let me go, Caden," she said.

Quietly. Not a plea. A verdict.

And I looked at her, and I did what I have always done best where Hazel Ellington is concerned.

I let her go.

Her footsteps went down the hall, and down the stairs. I stood in my old room with my empty hand still half-open and the ghost of her skin against my fingers, and I said it to nobody, the way I'd said everything that mattered for six years.

"Welcome home, Caden."

— End of Chapter Two: To Be Continued. —