chapter 6
Dominic's POV:
The contract sat on Vivienne's desk like an accusation, its edges crisp and white against the mahogany surface.
I signed where she'd marked with those little adhesive tabs, the pen scratching across paper in a rhythm that felt almost meditative.
Vivienne watched me from across the desk, her hands folded in that way she had—elegant, patient, utterly unreadable—and when I pushed the document back toward her, she didn't touch it immediately.
She just looked at me, her gaze steady and knowing in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
"Elara is very popular with children," she said, and there was something in her tone that suggested she wasn't merely making conversation.
The morning light slanted through the blinds behind her, striping her face with shadow and illumination in alternating bands, and I found myself studying the pattern rather than meeting her eyes.
I'd learned, over the years, that Vivienne saw too much when you looked at her directly—saw through the careful architecture of control I'd built around myself and straight into the mess beneath.
I didn't respond. Instead, I let my gaze drift to Elara's signature at the bottom of the page, all those loops and angles that seemed to lean slightly to the left, as if the letters themselves were uncertain about their direction.
There was something unstable about her handwriting, something that matched the way she'd looked at the gallery preview—paint-stained and defensive, her blue eyes sharp with a wariness.
She'd crashed into me with all the grace of a hurricane, smeared cadmium red across Tom Ford, and then had the audacity to tell me not to stand in doorways.
I should have been irritated. Instead, I'd felt something shift in my chest when I'd seen the sketch tucked into her bag, that small face rendered in charcoal, all wide eyes and careful loneliness.
Cassian's face, though she couldn't have known it. Couldn't have known him. And yet there it was, staring up at me from her careless, paint-smudged hands.
I stood, buttoning my jacket with the kind of deliberate precision that usually helped center my thoughts, and Vivienne rose with me.
"She's a stubborn one, Dominic," she said, and this time there was no mistaking the warning in her voice. "Don't treat her like a tool."
I paused at the door, my hand on the brass handle.
"If she gets along well with Cassian, the Hale family will naturally treat her as an honored guest," and let myself out before she could say anything else.
The hallway outside her office smelled faintly of lemon polish and old books, that particular scent that seemed to permeate every corner of Thornfield Academy.
I'd walked these halls a hundred times in the past three months, ever since the last therapist had quit and I'd been forced to admit that traditional methods weren't working.
Cassian needed something different, someone who wouldn't try to fix him, wouldn't try to force him into the mold of a normal four-year-old boy who laughed and played and spoke when spoken to.
He needed someone who understood that silence could be its own language, that art could say what words couldn't, and something told me—something I couldn't quite articulate even to myself—that Elara Ashford would understand.
Maybe it was the sketch itself that made me believe this, the way she'd captured Cassian's loneliness with such precision that it felt less like observation and more like memory, like she was drawing from some deep well of understanding that came from having lived in that same dark water.
Or maybe it was simpler than that—maybe it was just fate, or coincidence, or whatever I wanted to call the invisible threads that sometimes pulled people together for reasons that wouldn't make sense until much later, if they ever made sense at all.
I didn't believe in destiny, had never put much stock in the idea that the universe arranged things for a purpose, but standing in that hallway now, I found myself thinking that perhaps some connections were inevitable.
The observation room was small and dim, tucked away behind the principal's office with a one-way mirror that looked out onto the play garden.
I'd spent more time in this room than I cared to admit, standing in the half-light with my hands in my pockets and my jaw tight, watching my son sit alone while other children ran and shouted and built castles in the sandbox.
Today was no different, except for the woman who'd just settled herself on the grass near the long bench, sketchbook open on her knees and a piece of charcoal moving across the page in quick, confident strokes.
Elara didn't look at Cassian.
That was the first thing I noticed, the thing that made me reach for the cigarette in my pocket before remembering that I couldn't light it here, that the school had rules about smoking and I'd agreed to follow them even though the urge to taste nicotine and ash was a constant ache in the back of my throat.
She just sat there, her head bent over her work, her fingers leaving smudges of black on the white paper, and she hummed something low and tuneless under her breath.
A working habit, maybe. Something to fill the silence.
Cassian was crouched in his usual spot near the hedge, his shoulders hunched and his small hands wrapped around something I couldn't quite see from this angle. A leaf, probably, or a pebble—he collected things, brought them back to his room and arranged them in careful rows on the windowsill, each object a small piece of order in a world that had proven itself chaotic and cruel.
He didn't look at Elara either, not at first, but I could see the tension in his spine, the way his head tilted slightly as if he were listening to her humming, trying to decide if it was safe.
Ten minutes passed.
I counted them on my watch, each second ticking by with agonizing slowness, and my hand tightened around the unlit cigarette until the paper crumpled slightly under my thumb.
And then Cassian moved.
It was subtle at first—just a slight loosening of his shoulders, a turn of his head in her direction.
He stood slowly, his movements careful and deliberate, and I found myself holding my breath as he crossed the grass toward her with the kind of hesitant determination that broke something in my chest every time I saw it.
Elara didn't react, didn't look up or reach for him or do any of the things that would have sent him skittering back to his corner.
She just kept drawing, kept humming, and when he finally stopped in front of her and held out his hand, she simply set down her charcoal and looked at what he was offering.
A leaf. Brown and curled at the edges, probably picked up from beneath the oak tree.
