“Thank you.” I gesture halfheartedly toward the table.
But she doesn’t move toward it. Instead, she sets the tray on my desk, studying me with the shrewd, steel-edged concern only a woman raised in an organization like this could muster.
“You look tired,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“Lucian.”
I grit my teeth.
She waits.
“Elias is still downstairs, isn’t he?” she finally asks.
My jaw tightens. “He stays there until I’m sure.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Sure of what? His innocence or your fear of being wrong?”
My eyes snap open.
She doesn’t flinch.
“I heard something,” Mara continues softly. “And you need to hear it too.”
I force myself upright, pulse ticking faster. “What is it?”
“You know Hartford was in the communications room the night the email surfaced.”
“Of course.”
“Well… I heard him talking to some of the younger guards earlier at the house. Bragging.” Her mouth hardens. “He said something about how ‘Lucian won’t last long if he can be led around by a pretty face.’”
A cold line slices down my spine.
I go still.
Mara presses on. “And I heard him mention something else—a detail he shouldn’t have known. Something Hartford told you didn’t line up with what he told the guards.”
“What detail?”
A beat passes.
“About the timestamp on the email,” she says. “He said it came in at ten p.m. But earlier, he told the guards he was the one who found it at seven.”
My heart stops.
My father’s consigliere. A man who served our family for decades. A man who stood behind me at the funeral and swore loyalty. A man who told me Elias had “clearly” been in communication with Xavier, that the evidence was “irrefutable,” that I needed to “act quickly before the boy slit your throat like his brothers would want.”
Hartford, who always believed I was too soft, too young, too disinterested in ruling with an iron fist.
Hartford, who served my father—the tyrant I swore I would never become.
My pulse pounds in my ears.
Mara rests a hand on my arm, grounding me. “Lucian, I think Hartford manipulated you. And I think you’re about to do something you’ll regret if you don’t confront him with a clear head.”
But my head is anything but clear now.
