Chapter 50 What Next?

• The silence in the room after Damien’s words was the kind that pressed on Ivy’s chest until she could hardly draw a breath. The files scattered across the table still smelled faintly of dust and mildew from the safehouse, but it was the names written within them—the signatures, the coded messages, the trails of blood disguised as business—that clawed at her thoughts and made the air taste like metal. Damien had leaned back in his chair, his hand curled loosely around a crystal glass, though he had not lifted it to his lips in minutes. His gaze was not on her, nor on the damning papers, but somewhere past them, as if he were staring at a phantom only he could see.
• Ivy forced herself to remain still even though every instinct screamed to pace, to shatter something, to drag his attention back to her so that she could demand what exactly he was hiding behind that unreadable mask. She had seen Damien furious, had seen him controlled and sharp as a blade, but this—this strange stillness—was far worse. His silence was a wall she could not scale, and the more she stared at him, the more she realized that his calm was not peace but calculation, the kind that preceded storms that left nothing intact.
• Her fingers brushed the corner of one document almost absently, but her mind sharpened when she caught the name again: Solano. Not hers, but her father’s. Beneath it, an old order that matched the timeline of the night he had been betrayed. The bile that rose in her throat threatened to choke her, and she swallowed it down because she could not afford to lose control now. She turned her head slowly toward Damien, whose jaw flexed just slightly as if he felt her eyes on him and despised the weight of her unspoken questions.