Page 5 of Freedom’s Inferno

My body went still. Not flinching—never flinching—but still. Coiled.

“Luck runs out, Lana.”

My spine stiffened. Inside, I marked the moment I understood he hadn’t come here to pay his respects. He came to hunt. I refused to show him the unease that gripped my stomach. Never again would I allow myself to become any man’s prey.

I straightened my shoulders, my fingers smoothing the crumpled edge of the funeral program as though I hadn’t nearly torn it in two.

Let him look. Let him search for weakness in my eyes. He won’t find it. Not anymore.

Richard had already taken enough from me; I’d bled enough years and swallowed enough silence. If Charles Sterling thought he could corner me, he’d learn soon enough that I had teeth sharper than his.

I resisted the urge to watch him strut away, turning instead to the next person before me. I carried on through the rest of the service, nodding at the right moments, dabbing at my eyes when it seemed appropriate, but none of it landed. My mind kept circling back to that twisted smile, and those dark eyes boring into me like he saw far too much.

He’d rattled me, damn him, and I hated it. What did he think he knew? Nothing. He had nothing.

He was probably just bitter, watching Blackwell Sterling collapse without Richard to carry it. Clients had started pulling out almost immediately after the news broke. Learning the man responsible for your fortune had drowned drunk in a bathtub wasn’t exactly confidence-inspiring. Our so-called empire wouldn’t recover from the stain. Blackwell Sterling would never carry the same swagger, not without Richard’s grin and golden-boy charm to anchor it. Charlie was brilliant, yes, but brilliance couldn’t secure investors. He wasn’t charismatic enough to save them. He’d never been.

A gentle hand closed around my elbow.

My body locked before I registered who it was, the instinct so ingrained that heat flushed the back of my neck. Then I inhaled the scent of gardenias, the perfume that carried my entire childhood in a single whiff, and my shoulders dropped.

“Come here, darling.” My mother steered me away from the receiving line.

She led me into a side alcove, where the noise of the church dimmed and the light came through a narrow stained glass window in strips of amber and blue. Her arms folded around me and she tugged me close, her hand sweeping up and down my back.

My father stood just behind her. Silver-haired, straight-backed, the kind of stillness that came from forty years in a courtroom. He tipped his chin, his lips pulling into a concerned frown.

I blinked at him over my mother’s shoulder, tears catching on my lashes. Not for Richard. Not even close. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been enveloped in my mother’s arms, and the emotion that welled up startled me.

“You look thin,” my mother said, pulling back, her gaze assessing.

“I’m fine.”

Her eyes moved over my face the way they had since I was small, reading things I hadn’t said. “We’re flying back to Edinburgh tomorrow. Come with us.”

I inhaled a sharp breath. “Mum, I can’t—”

“You can.” Her voice was soft but her grip wasn’t. “There’s nothing keeping you here now, Lana. Nothing.”

My father placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

She shot him a look, then turned back to me. “We’ve barely seen you since the wedding. Do you know how long it’s been? Properly, I mean.”

The answer sat in my chest like a stone. Years of excuses that hadn’t felt like excuses at the time. I’d been caught too deep in Richard’s manipulative web to see the shape of it from the outside. My mother had seen it from two thousand miles away and hadn’t been able to reach me.

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Your father and I… We knew something was wrong. We just couldn’t—" Her voice caught, steadied itself. “Come home. When you’re ready. Whenever that is. But come.”

My father stepped forward then and pulled me in, brief and unceremonious. One firm hand at the back of my head, there and gone. “We love you, honey.”

He released me and stepped back, straightening his jacket.

“I’ll think about it,” I rasped.

My mother squeezed my hands once, her eyes holding mine a beat longer than necessary, saying everything she’d already said and a few things she hadn’t.

Then they moved back into the crowd, my mother’s hand finding my father’s arm, the two of them absorbed into the sea of black, and I stood alone in the alcove with the amber light falling in strips across the floor and the gardenias still faint in the air around me.