Chapter 2 The Estate

Sofia

The estate appeared out of the dark like something from a dream I hadn't consented to having.

We had been driving for what felt like an hour long enough for the fire to disappear completely from the mirror, long enough for the city lights to thin out and give way to open road, long enough for the silence inside the car to settle into something almost textured. I had stopped trying to fill it. Draco clearly had no interest in conversation, and I had no interest in giving him the satisfaction of knowing how badly I wanted to demand answers.

So I watched the dark roll past the window instead, and I thought about Kara's face when they took her, and I thought about Lilly walking out with her hands folded like she was going to church, and I thought about the fire.

I thought about the fire a lot.

They were already gone before it started. That's what I told myself. That Xavier, the man with the apologetic eyes had done something before he lit the match. That there was a reason Draco had given that specific instruction in that specific tone, unhurried and certain, like a man who had already accounted for every variable.

I told myself that. I almost believed it.

Then the gates appeared enormous iron things flanked by stone pillars, swinging open without anyone touching them as the car approached and whatever I'd been about to think dissolved entirely.

Beyond the gates, a driveway curved through grounds so vast I couldn't see where they ended. Fountains caught the moonlight. Manicured gardens stretched in every direction, broken up by paths and hedgerows and structures I couldn't identify in the dark. And at the centre of it all, set back from everything else like it was keeping its distance on principle.

I had grown up in the Beta's house, which was large by any ordinary standard. I had spent four years in cells and slave quarters where the ceiling was low enough to touch. I was not, in other words, easily impressed by architecture.

But this, it rose against the night sky like something medieval and impossible turrets and towers and a stone facade that seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it. Every window was lit from within, warm gold bleeding through the glass, and the sheer scale of it pressed against something in my chest that I refused to identify as awe.

I was not going to be impressed by his house. That felt important.

Draco parked, got out, and opened my door before I'd finished deciding whether to open it myself. He offered his hand. I ignored it and stepped out on my own.

He didn't react. Just closed the door behind me and walked toward the entrance, apparently trusting that I would follow.

I followed. Not because I trusted him. Because I had nowhere else to go.

The doors opened before we reached them.

Two women stood in the entrance both in black dresses with white aprons, both with their heads slightly bowed. The one on the left had dark bobbed hair and a smile that reached her eyes. The one on the right was blonde, pretty in a sharp-edged way, and wearing an expression she was working very hard to make look neutral.

It wasn't neutral. I had spent four years reading people's faces for survival. That expression said why is he bringing her here and who does she think she is and several other things she had the good sense not to say out loud.

"Welcome back, Alpha," they said together.

Draco didn't acknowledge it. He was looking at me again that steady, assessing look that I was already beginning to find deeply aggravating, like being studied by something that hadn't decided yet whether you were interesting or inconvenient.

"Gracie," he said, to the dark-haired one. "Make sure she's comfortable. Whatever she needs."

"Of course, Alpha." Gracie's smile was genuine. I filed that away.

"Susan." His attention moved to the blonde. "Show her to her room."

Susan's smile didn't move. Her eyes did a quick, involuntary flick to me, then back to him. "Of course."

Draco looked at me one more time. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't read, and then he turned and walked deeper into the house, and just like that, I was standing in the entrance hall of a stranger's mansion with two women I'd never met and the particular hollow feeling of a person who has run out of things to fight against for the moment.

I looked around.

The entrance hall was well. It was something. A chandelier the size of a small car hung overhead, refracting light into a thousand tiny prisms across the walls. The floors were dark hardwood, covered in rugs that probably cost more than most people's houses. Artwork I didn't recognise but suspected was expensive. Curved staircases on either side, sweeping upward to a landing that overlooked the whole space.

"This way, please," Susan said, in a tone that made please sound like a formality she resented.

I followed her up the stairs.

The room was ridiculous.

I stood in the doorway and took it in the four-poster bed draped in silk the colour of blush roses, the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the moonlit grounds, the chandelier overhead casting everything in soft gold, the walls painted a deep, soothing shade of blue that should have felt cold but somehow didn't.

There was a dressing table with crystal perfume bottles arranged on it. An armchair by the window. A phone on the bedside table. Fresh flowers in a vase I was fairly certain was antique.

It was the most beautiful room I had ever been in.

I hated how much I noticed that.

"This is your room," Susan said, and left before I could respond which was fine, because I hadn't been planning to.

Gracie lingered. "Is there anything you need? Food, or.."

"No." I stepped into the room and turned to face her. "Thank you. You can go."

She hesitated, kindness and professionalism warring visibly on her face. "There's a phone on the table if you need anything. Just dial one."

"I won't need anything."

Another hesitation. Then she nodded, smiled with genuine warmth that I didn't know what to do with, and closed the door softly behind her.

I stood in the centre of the room and listened to the silence.

Then I sat down on the floor not the bed, the floor, because the floor felt honest in a way the silk and the chandelier and the crystal perfume bottles did not and I pulled my knees to my chest, and I let myself feel it.

All of it.

The grief hit first. Kara's brave, crumpling face. Lilly's careful hands. The fire in the mirror, orange and enormous against the black sky, consuming the building where they had been, where we had been, where the only family I had built in four years of captivity had existed until an hour ago.

I had survived so much. I was still surviving. But surviving and being okay were two entirely different things, and I was so tired, so profoundly, bone-deep tired of the distance between them.

I didn't make a sound. I had cried silently for so long that even alone in a room, my grief was quiet. Just the pressure of it, behind my eyes and in my throat and sitting heavy on my sternum.

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there when the knock came.

I didn't answer.

A second knock. Then his voice, low through the door. "Are you alright?"

I said nothing. I pressed my lips together and stared at the far wall and waited for him to leave.

The door opened anyway.

His footsteps crossed the room slowly. I didn't look up. I wasn't going to let him see my face like this blotched and raw and stripped of every defence I had. I raised my hands to wipe my eyes, but they stopped halfway.

He was crouching in front of me.

I looked up before I could stop myself, and found those blue eyes closer than I expected, level with mine, and something in them that I had not anticipated.

Concern, genuine, unperformed concern.

"Are you alright?" he asked again, quieter this time.

"Don't." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Look at me like that. Act like you care." I held his gaze even though everything in me wanted to look away. "You took me from that building against my will. Whatever you told yourself to justify that, it doesn't make you different from any of them."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offense something more complicated.

"Lobita.."

"Don't call me that." The word whatever it meant felt too intimate in his mouth, too certain. Like he had already decided something about me that I hadn't agreed to. "My name is Sofia."

He was quiet for a moment. The candle on the bedside table threw warm light across his face, softening the sharp angles of it, and I wished it wouldn't.

"Sofia," he said. Testing it. Like he was deciding whether to allow it.

"My friends were in that building," I said. "You had your man burn it. That's what I know about you."

He opened his mouth. His phone rang.

He glanced at it. Something crossed his face not irritation, exactly. More like the controlled patience of a man who was used to being interrupted by things that demanded his immediate attention. He stood, answered it in a voice too low for me to catch, said something brief, and then looked back at me.

"This isn't finished," he said.

"You're right," I said. "It isn't."

He left.

I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall, and then I dropped my head back against the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out how I was going to survive a man who looked at me like that like I was something he had been searching for, like my defiance was not an obstacle but a confirmation without losing what was left of myself in the process.

I was still working on it when the knock came again.

"I told you I don't want,"

"It's Kara."

A beat of silence.

"And Lilly."

I was on my feet before I'd decided to move.

I don't have words for what it felt like to open that door.

They were both there, Kara with her eyes red-rimmed but her chin up, Lilly with her small notebook clutched to her chest and tears running silently down her face, and for a moment I just stood there, because my mind couldn't reconcile the fire in the mirror with the two people standing in front of me.

Kara grabbed me first. Her arms came around me hard and certain, and she said into my shoulder, "We're okay. We're here, we're okay" the same thing, over and over, and I realised after a moment that she was saying it as much for herself as for me.

Lilly pressed in from the other side, smaller and quieter, her hand finding mine and holding on.

I stood between them and breathed.

When we finally pulled apart, I held them both at arm's length and looked at them cataloguing damage, force of habit and found them shaken but whole. Tired, and rightened. But here.

"Xavier," Kara said, answering the question I hadn't asked yet. "He got us out before before the fire. All of us. The women from the building."

"Draco told him to," I said slowly.

"Apparently." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "His words were take care of that. Xavier told me later."

Take care of that. Standing in the dark outside the auction house, Draco's voice flat and certain, and me hearing it as a sentence and not understanding it was two.

Take care of that. Get them out. All of them.

I thought about the car ride. The fire in the mirror. The way I had sat beside him in furious silence, believing the worst, and he had said nothing to correct me.

He hadn't explained himself. He hadn't defended himself. He had just driven.

I didn't know what to do with that.

"Sofia." Kara was watching my face with the particular attention of someone who had spent four years learning to read it. "What's going on in there?"

"Nothing," I said.

She gave me the look that meant she didn't believe me, but she let it go.

Lilly held up her notebook. In her neat, careful handwriting: Are you alright?

I looked at her. At both of them. At the ridiculous beautiful room with its silk drapes and chandelier, and the window looking out over grounds that went on forever, and the door that led to a hallway that led to a house that belonged to a man I didn't understand and wasn't sure I wanted to.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly.

Lilly wrote: That's okay. Neither do we.

Kara laughed a short, wet sound that was closer to a sob than anything else and pulled us both in again, and I let her, and for a little while the three of us just stood there in the doorway of a stranger's room, alive and bewildered and together.

It wasn't alright. Not yet, but it was something.