Not Lucas’s friend. Not Diana’s father.
“What is it?” she whispered, her bright green gaze snagging his. “Please tell me why your expression is like that.”
He stared at her. She had already gone through so much. Lost so much. He couldn’t tell her about this niggling feeling that now took root in his chest. He refused to do that to her.
Not until he knew for sure that he was right.
“I’ve shut you out,” he said softly. “I know that hurt you.”
She folded her arms now and he saw a lonely flash of anger across her lovely features. “I do understand it on some level, even if I hate it,” she said.
“What if I didn’t shut you out?” he asked just as softly. “What if I…what if I needed your help? Would you be willing to provide it?”
She opened her mouth, and he saw the emphaticyesin her eyes even before she spoke. Still, he raised a hand to hold off her answer. “Before you reply, you must know that you’ll get details, Diana. Information that may greatly pain you.”
She lifted her chin, and that core of iron that ran through her had never been so obvious. “I have felt pain greater than you can imagine,” she whispered. “I can face it again, especially if it means finding the truth and bringing whoever did this to you, did this to my father, to justice. If you think I can help, then let me.”
He nodded slowly. “Let’s get dressed then. The full case notes are in my study. We’ll go over them together.”
Darkness had begun to flood into Lucas’s study, and Diana looked up to find him lighting lanterns and stirring the fire to make her reading easier. In his chamber back in her cottage, she hadn’t gotten to read quite so much of his materials. Now she’d read them all and her chest hurt as she shoved the papers aside and drew a ragged breath.
“I’m sorry,” Lucas said as he sat in a chair beside hers. He was studying her face closely. “Is it too much?”
“No,” she said, though in her heart she didn’t completely feel that it was true. “Yes, it’s hard to read these things. To picture my father lying dead, cut down by an assassin’s bullet, likely fired by a friend to you both. But it isn’t only that. It’s the high emotion of the past few days. It’s the time of year…”
Lucas tilted his head. “The time of year?”
She pushed to her feet and paced away. She had not meant to say that out loud. Something in him brought it out in her, though. Something that told her to whisper her darkest and most painful secrets.
Even though he gave nothing back in return.
She pushed her shoulders back at that self-reminder and faced him. “It’s nothing. Have you ever created a timeline for the events leading up to that day, the day itself and after?”
He nodded. “Certainly, but it never hurts to do it again. I can write it down if you’d like to give me your impressions.”
He pushed from the chair and moved to the desk, where he pulled out parchment and laid it out across the width of the desk. He dipped his quill into the ink and looked at her in expectation.
“When were there first suspicions that a traitor was in your midst?” she asked. “The papers were not clear on that.”
“Three years ago,” he said, scribbling down the date at the far end of the paper. “Some information went missing and our enemies had it. It was obvious it had been stolen, sold.”
“And there had been nothing before that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “A few minor incidents here and there, but nothing too suspicious. We do not think our traitor was in action for more than a month or two before the first large incident.”
“You say minor incidents. I assume it wasn’t obvious at first that you were dealing with a traitor?” she asked.
A shadow drew down over Lucas’s face. “You do ask the right questions. No. We recognized strange things were happening here and there, but it took us about six months to determine that we had a traitor in our ranks. The information stolen could have been taken by someone outside our universe. Infiltration from outside, rather than a turn from within. Even when the truth became clear, there were multiple agents working on multiple angles of the case. No one was working well together. That’s why, two years ago, I was put in charge of the entire operation and took over regarding everything to do with our traitor.”
He was adding dates to the timeline, and Diana moved to stand beside him and look at it. Her stomach turned. Here was the beginning of the end for her father. For herself. The point where a boulder had been positioned at the top of a very high hill and begun to roll out of control toward her life.
She could see it now. She could not stop it. It was horrifying to see it laid out as such, and she shivered as she paced away from Lucas. He caught her hand as she did so and drew her back. He was looking up at her from his seat, his dark eyes filled with understanding and empathy.
“Is it too much?” he asked.
She reached down and traced his cheek with her fingertip. His pupils dilated, but he didn’t draw her closer. “No,” she whispered. “Well, yes, but not too much to stop. It’s just hard to see the path of destruction that led to my father’s death. To your injuries.”
He released her hand as he looked at the growing list of dates and events. “Yes. It’s always been difficult for me to see it like this. To wonder what I could have done to stop it all.”
