It was one in the morning. Outside, the estate lay under a thick blanket of dark–grey clouds; a hush had settled across the grounds, as if the world itself were holding its breath. Inside Vincent's study the hush did not apply. The large mahogany table was a battlefield of paper—files, contracts, old ledgers, and dog-eared books spilled like casualties. A single desk lamp carved an island of gold light in the dark room, making the stacks of paper look like cliffs and ravines under the sun.
Vincent moved among them with a patient kind of violence—turning, scanning, folding, discarding. Names flickered up and down his mind like moths against a lamp. Edson Fords. Edson Fords. The syllables had weight. They began to arrange themselves into a shape he could nearly see.
"You mind telling me what it is exactly you are looking for?" Carlos lingered, the scrape of his shoe against the floor small and oddly human in the cavernous study. He hated feeling helpless; it showed on him in the way his fingers curled around the back of the chair. "It's one in the morning ser, this could wait for daybreak"
"Wait? Not when my enemy just gave me his guns" Vincent kept turning over papers, eyes hard and patient. His voice was a blade that didn't need to shout.
"Guns?" Carlos stepped forward, eyebrows lifting. "What are you talking about?".
Vincent finally stopped and looked at him. The look was private, intent. "I don't have proof yet, but he is behind Father Andrew's death."
Carlos let the words land, then nodded as if they belonged to an obvious map. "we've already established that ser"
"A hunch then. Now?" Vincent turned back to the files; his hands moved quickly, methodically, a craftsman's precision. "He said he could have the charges dropped. You don't say that except you're the one who brought them"
Carlos's face shifted into a mask of interest. "Interesting" he said, the single word a quiet report back.
Vincent placed his phone on the table with deliberate ceremony. "And this"
"You recorded the entire conversation. I'm as proud as teachers can be right now" Carlos beamed without the joy reaching his eyes, and drew a chair back. The two men listened while the recording played.
Voices rolled through the small room, rough and bright like gravel. The sounds of Voss—slick and casual—unspooled secrets that smelled like gasoline.
"You him at chess." the recording said; Carlos nodded, the sound like a small node of agreement in the air.
"Of course he knows about that thing we covered up."
"And we know more about him" Vincent added into the quiet in the study, as if speaking into the tape would give it shape.
As Voss listed men he had broken, a name dropped and landed with the dull clang of a coin in a slot: Edson Fords.
"Edson Fords." Carlos repeated, tasting it.
Vincent returned to the piles. The room tightened around him. "That's who I'm looking for, except there's no file here about him, and there should be."
Carlos circled the study like a man turning over a Savannah. "Tsk… old Sebastián still has skeletons in his closet" He stepped forward. "There's never been an obituary, I can try to find the man, but if he's one of the people Voss deleted, I won't be able to find much".
"We don't need much, we need just enough" Vincent paced, the lamp carving his shadow long across the floor.
"You think my father ever met this man." Vincent asked. The question cracked, brittle and uncertain—an echo of the man he'd been raised to be and the man he'd become.
"Would he lie about it, if he had met Sebastián you would have known" Carlos answered, steady.
The bubble that hung over the conversation popped. "Or he did and he's lying about it." Vincent said, a clean suspicion finding air.
When Carlos didn't connect the dots immediately, Vincent replayed the recording where Voss claimed not to have met his father and then, with the measured cruelty of someone enjoying a slow reveal, named Edson Fords. Carlos's face finally shifted—illumination, then motion.
"Edson and your father were inseparable. There's no way he'd meet Ed and not your old man."
"Exactly." The idea settled, dangerous and new, like a dark map that could lead to daylight. "That explains why none of Ed's files are here" Carlos rose with a small impatience. "I'll dig as deep as I can." He walked to the door, paused, and turned back. "You know she's still awake, in the garden." Carlos reminded him. He disappeared into the night.
***
Jennifer had spent her entire evening in the garden, a small, private rebellion against the unrest indoors. She walked barefoot on the grass—cold, alive—and touched the flowers as if they were old friends. Chocolate Cosmos, her favorite, brushed her fingers with the memory of Father Andrew: the man who smelled faintly of that blossom and held the orphanage together with gentle, stubborn hands. Those flowers lived in her mind like warm coins.
She lay on the grass and watched the stars. The sky above the estate was a distant rough cloth of blue, the wind soft as breath. A sense of small peace clung to her chest, thin and fragile as glazed sugar. When Vincent's voice reached her, it felt like a horizon moving to meet her.
"You'd have to pay if you're enjoying it this much." he said.
She sat up so quickly she startled herself and blushed as though caught stealing something. The scent that came with him—cedar and vetiver, dry warmth and a faint curl of smoke—arrived like a memory in the night.
"Good morning." he said with a quiet warmth that made the words feel like a promise.
"Good morning" she answered, the syllables soft. He sat down beside her on the grass, not touching, merely close. The night wrapped them both with its cool hush.
"Trouble sleeping?" he asked.
"Yes. I've been lying down all day" she confessed. Her voice had the tired edge of someone who had been stretched thin for too long.
He reached and felt the heat of her skin. "Hungry?" he asked.
"A meal is the last thing I want."
He laughed, a private sound, then lowered himself onto the grass. The black of his shirt drank the moonlight and he looked different somehow—less armor, more human. Slowly she lay beside him.
Silence fell between them like a second night.
"Did you take care of that thing you had earlier." she asked finally.
"I did." He said. "Then got hit by another."
"I'm sorry" she whispered, shame tasting like old coins.
He watched her with a stillness that made it hard to tell whether his face was softening or hardening. "I've been thinking about what you said, about my father." Those words weighed down the air.
She turned to look at him; the cut of his profile in the darkness took her by surprise. "You were right." he said without ceremony.
Her reply rose even before she thought it: "Absolute power corrupts" she said. "And I think my mother ran from that kind of corruption."
"But I was wrong." She shook her head. "People are supposed to fight for those they loved, at least that's how every fiction I've read goes. If we don't fight, then what's the purpose of love anyway."
"And you? I can't imagine what's been like for you, having no one fight for you?" he said.
Those words hit hard; she felt a crease of shame. He was right in a way she had not admitted out loud. "I know what you're thinking." he said, catching the turbulent flight of her mind. "I scare you, don't I"
"I'm sorry." she said. "Everything about this feels so right and yet wrong. How long before the world finally knows how unworthy I am?"
The wind sang solemnly in the silence that followed.
"You ever read The English Patient?" he said, almost to himself.
She looked up, startled. "Michael Ondaatje?"
He nodded. "Yeah. The man loved a woman who ruined him—and he still couldn't stop. Burned himself alive for it, piece by piece."
Jennifer's mouth curved in a faint, sad smile. "And she died waiting. Alone. I remember thinking that was the cruelest part—how love can keep you alive long enough to hurt you."
Vincent's eyes stayed on her, steady, unreadable. "I used to think it was a tragedy. Now I'm not so sure."
She frowned. "How do you mean?"
"Maybe it wasn't about dying for love," he said quietly. "Maybe it was about living with it. Even when it terrified them."
The silence that followed was heavy but not empty. The scent of him—woody, warm, threaded with smoke—brushed the night air between them.
Her breath hitched. "That's what scares me, Vincent. Love like that doesn't stop at the surface. It gets under your skin."
"Then let it. You don't have to run every time something feels real."
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. The world seemed to hold its breath—the night, the garden, the little space between them trembling with everything unsaid.
She had never loved, except for the man beside her—yet the way the world had stabbed her was enough to like the pain to that of all the characters she had read about. It was the same thing, love, people, family. She had never been asked to stay before without a price tacked on. Now he was asking—unvarnished.
Was what they shared ever real, or merely two broken hearts clinging to the illusion of calm before life tore them in different directions?
Vincent sat up slowly and brushed the twigs from his shirt, his mind heavy with the weight of emotions he didn't ask for. He looked up at the sky — everything had been easier back in college. Back then, love was a game, and girls were just distractions. There were no burdens, no scars, no ghosts whispering through the night. Perhaps he had always been doomed to be wounded by love.
He rose to leave and then, impulsive as a child's hand, she caught him by the arm and pressed her forehead to his chest. For a moment—one quiet, blessed moment—there was a peace that tasted of possibility.
"Are you mad at me." she asked.
He said no and yet when she leaned up to kiss him, he turned away. Her heart sank, a weight like a ship's anchor pulling her to the depths, her cheeks burned with embarrassment.
Then, like a man for whom every action was a plan, he straightened. "You should get some sleep, I have work to do." He walked away, the single practical sentence closing the space between them.
She watched him disappear up the path and the quiet pressed in; the night's pockets seemed smaller now that he moved away.
***
Across the city the dark machinery of Grim Voss moved, patient and poisonous. Sneak hovered like a twitch, a man used to waiting and acting on a signal.
"Wot would ya 'ave me do, boss?" Sneak asked.
"That brat is too confident, bluffing won't shake him, I need to send a message, perhaps pinning that murder on him wasn't enough."
"Murder ain't gonna move 'im, innit. Better we strike at 'is firm."
Voss looked up at Sneak, his expression morphing into something like a smile. "Get that whore of his ex wife, she wants to be used, we use her."
Sneak nodded and dialed his phone.
Tracy's voice soon came through.
"Boss" Sneak handed him the receiver.
"I want you to go to your father tomorrow and bring this fight to close." Voss's tone was a command, the kind that had toppled men before.
The night kept its counsel. The chessboard had been set; the pieces moved. And in the hush between one heartbeat and the next, both Vincent and his enemies prepared for the same old, terrible war.