He moves toward the desk, not bothering to remove his coat. “You look like her when she was angry,” he says, voice smooth and poisonous. “Beautiful and stupid. She sat in that same spot the night she died, you know. Right before I corrected her.”
“She died because she wouldn't sign your papers,” I say, keeping the same monotone, cold tempo. “Because she wouldn't sell me to your program.”
“She died because she was sentimental,” Wade hisses, settling into the guest chair across from me. He places the briefcase on the desk with a heavy thud. “Thought she could appeal to my better nature with quiet speeches and pretty jewelry.” He reaches into his coat and pulls out a small tablet. “I recorded her final monologue for posterity. Thought you should see how soft she was at the end. How weak.” He turns the screen toward me and presses play.
The screen is small, but the image is clear. My mother sat alone in this chair, the lavender dress bright against the dark leather, her pearls catching the lamplight like tiny stars. She looks directly into the lens with an expression so tender it felt like a hand reaching through time to brush my cheek. “Sunshine,” she starts with her nickname for me, her voice soft but steady. “I need you to know that I love you. That I've always loved you. No matter what happens tonight, no matter what you hear or see, you are my heart. You are the song I'll keep singing.” Her left hand raises to her throat, fingers finding the necklace. She touches the third pearl from the clasp on the left side, rolling it gently between her thumb and forefinger…a nervous gesture. Just a mother fidgeting with her jewelry while her world ended. “Be strong,” she whispers. “Be louder than the dark. And when you're ready... look for what doesn't match.” The screen cuts to black. I stare at the frozen image, throat tight. The image of her touching the left side of her necklace burns itself into my brain. Creating another permanent scar.
“Pathetic,” Wade sneers, shutting off the tablet with a sharp click. “Crying over a child who was asleep upstairs. Fidgeting with her pearls as if they mattered.” He leans forward, eyes glittering with cruel amusement. She thought if she appealed to my mercy, I'd let you both go. But mercy is expensive, and you are worth more as an asset than as a daughter.” His smile widens. “She didn't scream, you know. When I cut her throat, she just kept staring at that wall—” he points directly behind me, to the hidden peephole—“touching that damned necklace. Humming. As if the pearls would save her. As if love could stop a blade.” My hands tremble. I keep them flat on the desk, hiding them. She hadn’t screamed. She'd been looking at the wall, at the peephole, where I'd been standing. She'd known I was there. And she'd touched the necklace so I would see. “She could have signed,” Wade continues, opening his briefcase with a casual click. The Cicada files lay inside, thick and cream-colored. “One signature, and she would have lived. Instead, she chose to die with her secrets. Her pearls. Her useless love.”
I stand up slowly, eyes locked on him. "She chose me." The words come out ice-cold, sharp enough to cut glass, and every syllable dripping with years of pushed-down defiance.
"She chose to be difficult," he says, rounding the desk with slow, deliberate steps. "And now you have a choice. Sign the papers, Kiera. Give me your consent to continue the work.” He stops directly in front of me, close enough that I can smell the rain on his coat. “Or end up exactly where she did. On this floor. In this room. Forgotten."
"I don't have to choose anything," I say, my voice calm, almost gentle.
He lunges, and I meet him halfway, kicking the desk chair hard into his knees. He grunts, stumbling, and I scramble over the top of the desk. We crash to the floor together, the Persian rug bunching beneath us, right over the stain where my mother bled out. "You pathetic, broken thing," he snarls, his fist catching my jaw with a crack. "You think you're strong like her? She wasn't strong. She was stubborn. There's a difference."
I headbutt him. His nose crunches against my forehead with a wet snap. Blood sprays across my face, hot and copper-sweet. He thrashes beneath me, hands finding my throat, squeezing with a rage that had been building for sixteen years. "I should have drowned you in the bathtub," he gasps, spit and blood flecking my cheek. "Should have cut you out of her the night you were conceived."
I drive my thumb into his eye. He screams, releasing my throat, and I roll away fast. My hand closes around the heavy bronze bookend on the floor. I swing it with everything I have into his temple. The crack is wet and sickeningly solid. He goes down hard, his head bouncing off the floorboards. I stand over him, panting, knuckles split and bleeding. Wade groans, trying to push himself up onto his elbows. One eye is a ruined red mess, his nose twisted at a grotesque angle. "Files..." he wheezes, blood bubbling on his lips. "In the case... sign them..."
I drop the bookend with a heavy thud and reach under the desk, fingers closing around the Glock.
“Kiera!” Sterling's voice shouts from behind the bookshelf, sharp with urgency. The hidden latch rattles as he slams his shoulder against it, trying to force the passage open. “Status?”
Wade rolls onto his back. He looks up at me and laughs—wet, choking, and defiant. “Do it,” he rasps. “Shoot me. Prove you're mine.Prove you're a Hawthorne.” I rack the slide. He spits blood at my boots. “She died for nothing. Her secrets died with her. You'll never know why she really wouldn't sign. You'll never know what she was hiding." I pull the trigger. Three shots, center mass. His body jerks, convulses, then goes still. His grey eyes—the same shade as mine—stare up at the empty ceiling. Silence.
A crash shatters the silence. The bookshelf swings open with violent force. Sterling burst through, weapon raised, chest heaving. His eyes sweep the room in a single heartbeat: Wade's body sprawled on the rug, me standing over him with the Glock still smoking in my hand, the tablet on the desk. "Clear?" he asks, voice tight.
"Clear," I say, lowering my weapon. My hands won’t stop shaking. I walk to the desk and open the briefcase. Inside, beneath the Cicada files lie maps, locations, and photographs of children with numbers tattooed on their wrists like livestock. I picked up the tablet, staring at the frozen image of my mom's face.
"What's wrong?" Sterling asks, eyes scanning me for injuries.
"We need to find it," I say, my voice rough. My fingers rise to the pearls at my throat—her pearls—and I remember the way her hand lingered on the left side. "The Nesting House. We need to find it and burn it to the ground. Whatever they were doing there…that’s what she wouldn't sign away. It’s the only way I’ll understand what she was really protecting me from." I glance down at Wade's body, then back at the frozen image on the tablet. "That's the only way I'll know what she was trying to tell me."
I walk to the desk and snap the briefcase shut. My hands are steady, even though something inside my chest is still trembling. The Cicadafiles. The cream-colored folders with the gold cicada emblem weighed more than they should have. Inside were the maps, the ledgers, the blueprints to something I don’t yet understand. I shove the small tablet into my jacket pocket.
Sterling looks down at Wade’s body sprawled across the Persian rug, blood pooling dark and thick beneath him. “We need to clean this,” he says, reaching for his tactical bag. “I can call in a disposal team. We’ll need three hours to sanitize the room, get the body out through the tunnels…”
“Burn it down,” I cut him off.
Sterling pauses, his hand still on the bag. “Kiera…”
“I said burn it the fuck down,” I repeat, my voice flat and final. I grabbed the kerosene lamp from the sidebar and smashed it on the floor. The glass shatters. Fuel spreads across the rug, soaking into the bloodstain where Wade lies, turning the oak boards glossy and black. “No fucking disposal team. No fucking cleaning. Let the goddamn house take him. Let it fucking take everything.” Tears burn down my face—angry, conflicted, furious at him, at her, at myself for still feeling anything at all.
Sterling studies my face, choosing not to say anything. Then nods once. He moves to the drapes and yanks them down in heavy sweeps, letting moonlight flood the room. “Lila,” he spoke into his comm, voice calm and decisive, “get Mrs. Whitley to her car. Send her home. We’re torching the manor in two minutes.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lila’s voice crackles back through the comm, equal parts disbelief and reluctant admiration. “You two get more psychotic as this goes. Moving her now.”
I dragged the heavy velvet curtains over Wade’s body, covering him like a shroud. He didn’t deserve a burial, but he deserves to burn here, in the same place he made my mother bleed. I pull the silver matches from the desk drawer, engraved with the Hawthorne crest, and strike one. The flame dances, small and yellow, reflecting in Wade’s dead, open eyes.
Sterling gathers the files, the maps, and anything that looks important from the briefcase, shoving them into a fireproof bag. “Ready?”
I dropped the match onto the kerosene-soaked rug. The room erupts. Flames climbed the drapes in seconds, licking greedily up the bookshelves, devouring the mahogany desk where Wade tried to make me sign away my life. The heat shoves us backward, and black smoke billows thick toward the ceiling. “Move,” Sterling says, grabbing my arm.
The servant’s passage is narrow and dark behind the bookshelf. We move by memory and instinct, Sterling ahead with the fireproof bag, me covering our exit with the Glock drawn. The heat follows us like a living thing hungry for oxygen, chasing us through the walls. We burst out through the gardener’s shed into cold night air, gasping. Mrs. Whitley is already at her car, a silver sedan parked on the gravel driveway beyond the garden gate. Lila stands by the open driver’s door, helping the older woman into the seat and pressing the keys into her hand. Sterling throws the fireproof bag into the truck bed while I run to the car window. Mrs. Whitley looks up at me, her eyes wet and sharp, her wool shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. “Go straight to your house,” I say, leaning through the window. “Not the cottage. Your real house. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
Mrs. Whitley’s eyes glisten as she grips the steering wheel tighter, her voice cracking just slightly. “I’ll be gone before the engines arrive.”