What Belongs to the Devil

My father was buried on a Thursday.

I remember thinking he would have hated that. Thursdays belonged to work. Six-thirty alarms, coffee strong enough to stain the inside of his favourite white mug, navy suits and phone calls that started before breakfast. They belonged to numbers, meetings and people with more money than sense asking Vincent Bennett to fix problems they had usually created themselves.

Mostly, Thursdays belonged to Dad promising me ten more minutes.

Ten minutes before dinner. Ten minutes before we left. Ten minutes before he finally closed the laptop and stopped being Vincent Bennett, financial strategist and professional solver of impossible problems, and became Dad again. He was almost always lying about the ten minutes. Ten meant thirty. Sometimes an hour.

Once, when I was eleven, I’d fallen asleep beneath the walnut desk in his study because he’d promised we’d watch a movie when he finished working. I’d woken in my own bed the next morning with pancakes waiting downstairs and a handwritten note beside my plate.

I’m an asshole. Rain check tonight. Dad

He’d kept that promise. Standing beside his grave fourteen years later, I found myself desperately trying to remember which movie we’d watched. I couldn’t. I remembered the pancakes and the way he’d burned the first batch because he’d answered his phone and forgotten about them. I remembered sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter while he scraped blackened batter into the bin, swearing under his breath and telling me not to repeat any of those words at school. But I couldn’t remember the movie.

Grief was cruel like that. It kept the useless things and stole the ones you suddenly decided mattered.

The cemetery stretched around me in shades of winter grey and damp green. Bare branches cut through a sky heavy with rain, and beyond the old stone walls New York continued without us. Horns sounded somewhere in the distance. Tires hissed across wet pavement. Millions of people went to work, ordered coffee, missed trains and complained about the weather as though Vincent Bennett hadn’t ceased to exist four days ago.

Cold seeped through the soles of my heels. Dad would have told me to wear boots, and the thought nearly undid me. I tightened my fingers around the white rose instead, concentrating on the pressure of the stem against my palm. Everything about today had been made tasteful. Polished coffin. White flowers. Black umbrellas. A priest Dad hadn’t seen in years saying solemn things about eternal peace. Nothing sharp enough to resemble what it actually felt like to put my father into the ground.

“Elle.”

Adrian’s voice reached me quietly through the priest’s words. His hand had been resting against the small of my back for most of the service, warm and steady through my coat.

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask.”

I glanced at him and found one dark eyebrow raised slightly. It was an expression I’d known for more than a decade, usually appearing immediately before he informed me I was full of shit.

“Your face did.”

“My face is very expressive.”

“Your face is annoying.”

“That too.”

His thumb moved once against my coat, and despite everything, the corner of my mouth almost lifted. Adrian had touched me like this for so many years that I barely noticed anymore. He guided me through crowds with that hand, moved me aside when waiters approached carrying trays and steered me toward taxis whenever I’d had too much wine and developed unreasonable confidence in my ability to walk thirty blocks in heels.

There had been a time when fourteen-year-old me had been painfully aware that Adrian Vale was an older boy and therefore inherently fascinating. Then he’d become Adrian. The person who knew I hated raisins, couldn’t sleep with wardrobe doors open and became vicious when hungry. The person I’d once driven across Manhattan at two in the morning because some girl had broken his heart and he refused to admit it.

Today I leaned a fraction closer because the wind cut through my coat and Adrian was warm.

“You haven’t eaten,” he said.

I looked at him properly. At twenty-seven, Adrian bore little resemblance to the lanky sixteen-year-old I’d first met. His charcoal suit sat neatly across broader shoulders now, and the mist had darkened the brown hair falling over his forehead. His eyes, though, were exactly the same. Brown and familiar enough that sometimes looking at him felt like looking at a room I’d lived in for years.

“I ate.”

His gaze dropped to the takeaway coffee in my hand before returning slowly to my face.

“You don’t have to say it.”

“Coffee isn’t food.”

“It had milk.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t swear in front of the priest.”

Adrian glanced toward the elderly man speaking beside Dad’s coffin. “The priest is seventy feet away.”

“God has excellent hearing.”

“So does your aunt.”

I followed his gaze and found Aunt Rachel watching us from the other side of the grave. Even through her tears, her expression managed to communicate that humour at a funeral was inappropriate. This time the corner of my mouth did lift.

Adrian caught it immediately. “There she is.”

The softness in his voice erased my smile.

“Don’t.”

His hand stilled against my back. Eleven years of knowing me meant I didn’t need to explain. Don’t look relieved because I smiled. Don’t search my face for signs I’m surviving. Most importantly, don’t pity me.

Adrian’s expression changed, the teasing disappearing without being replaced by the careful sympathy everyone else had been giving me for four days. “No pity.”

My throat tightened. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to.”

That was Adrian. He heard things I hadn’t said.

Everyone else had looked at me with pity since Dad died. The funeral director. His assistant. Neighbours I hadn’t spoken to since leaving home. Clients who shook my hand and told me Vincent had been brilliant, generous, irreplaceable. I’d discovered irreplaceable was a particularly stupid thing to say to someone at a funeral.

I knew.

That was the fucking problem.

The priest continued speaking, but my attention wandered across the gathering. I recognised most of the faces. Friends. Former colleagues. People from Bennett Advisory. Clients whose photographs I’d seen in business magazines Dad left scattered across his study.

Vincent Bennett had been good at what he did. Better than good. He’d built Bennett Advisory from a rented office with second-hand furniture into the kind of private financial firm wealthy people called when their businesses became too complicated for ordinary accountants. Corporate restructuring, asset protection, acquisitions, financial strategy. Dad could stare at a structure that made everyone else reach for aspirin and find the one number that didn’t belong.

It had given us a comfortable life. Good schools. Holidays. Nice restaurants. A beautiful house he refused to sell. But money itself had never impressed him. He’d driven the same Mercedes for nine years because, according to him, the bloody thing still worked. He’d once spent twenty minutes arguing twelve dollars off a lamp at a flea market and then quietly paid three months of my university friend’s rent when her mother became sick.

Money was a tool to Vincent.

Useful. Powerful. Sometimes dangerous.

I shifted the rose between my fingers and noticed something change at the edge of the gathering. One of Dad’s former partners stopped speaking halfway through a sentence. Another man glanced toward the cemetery path and immediately looked away. Then Samuel Klein, Dad’s attorney for as long as I could remember, went rigid.

That caught my attention.

Sam had spent the morning arranged into careful professional sympathy. Now his face had emptied, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the final row of mourners.

I followed his gaze.

A man stood beneath a black umbrella someone else was holding for him. He was tall, broad through the shoulders beneath a black overcoat, with dark hair pushed back from a face composed of hard, masculine lines. Even at a distance, he was exceptionally attractive. Strong nose, dark brows, sharp jaw and a faint scar near one side of his face. He was the kind of man people noticed before they consciously decided to look.

Under different circumstances, I probably would have looked twice.

Here, his face was the least interesting thing about him.

It was everyone else.

Nobody stood close to him. There was plenty of room, yet a strange pocket of empty space had formed around him as naturally as water parting around stone. Sam Klein, who I’d once watched reduce three attorneys to silence over a contract dispute, wouldn’t even meet his eyes.

The stranger himself did nothing to justify any of it. He wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t threatening anyone. He simply stood beneath the umbrella with one hand in the pocket of his coat, completely still while everyone else shifted against the cold.

And he was watching me.

A quiet warning travelled down my spine.

I held his gaze anyway.

There was nothing openly threatening in his expression, but something about the attention felt invasive. Not the appreciative stare of a man who found a woman attractive. He looked at me as though he were trying to reconcile me with information he already possessed.

The man beside him leaned closer and murmured something. The stranger listened without taking his eyes from me, then said a few quiet words in response. His companion nodded immediately and stepped away.

“Adrian.”

“Hm?”

“Who’s that?”

The hand at my back stopped moving. Adrian followed my gaze, and the easy warmth in his face receded behind something cooler. His shoulders settled and his attention sharpened, not frightened, but alert in the way people became when they knew exactly where the sharp edges were.

“Roman Moretti.”

The name was familiar. Moretti Holdings. Property. Hospitality. Investments. Enough buildings and businesses across New York that I’d seen the name hundreds of times without ever thinking about the man attached to it.

There were rumours too.

Those were harder to define.

“Moretti as in Salvatore Moretti?”

“Yes.”

“You know him?”

Adrian’s eyes remained on Roman. “I know Roman.”

Something in the way he said it made me look at him instead. There was no fear in his face. If anything, there was a trace of contempt buried beneath the caution.

“Do you like him?”

That earned me a sideways glance. “What are we, twelve?”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

I looked across the cemetery again.

Roman was no longer watching me.

He was watching Adrian.

Their eyes met across the mourners and held. Neither man smiled. Neither looked away. Nothing passed between them that I could name, yet the tension was unmistakable.

There was history there.

“What did he do?” I asked.

Adrian’s mouth tightened faintly. “Roman doesn’t have to do something to be worth being careful around.”

“Is he dangerous?”

That finally made Adrian look at me. He considered the question for a moment, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he was deciding how much of it to give me.

“Roman doesn’t do things accidentally.”

I frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’m giving you.”

Before I could push him, the priest said Dad’s name and everything else disappeared.

The coffin had begun to lower.

I hadn’t thought about this part. The machinery. The straps. The polished wood slowly disappearing beneath the edge of the earth. Something inside me rejected it so violently that for a second I couldn’t breathe.

Dad was claustrophobic.

It was an absurd thought. He was dead. He couldn’t care. But I remembered him refusing an MRI once because the machine was too narrow, then spending the afternoon pretending he hadn’t nearly panicked inside it.

He couldn’t go down there.

My fingers tightened around the rose until the stem bent.

Adrian didn’t tell me to breathe. He didn’t ask whether I was all right. He simply moved closer until his shoulder touched mine, giving me something solid without demanding I use it.

The pendant beneath my dress suddenly felt heavy. My fingers found it through the fabric, tracing the familiar oval Dad had given me on my twenty-first birthday.

So you’ll always have something of mine close to your heart.

I’d laughed at him for becoming sentimental.

I wasn’t laughing now.

When I finally forced myself to look up, Roman Moretti was watching me again.

His attention dropped to the hand closed around my pendant.

Then returned to my face.

A strange unease tightened beneath my ribs. He was too far away to know what I was holding, yet I released it anyway.

His gaze lingered there for another second.

Then he turned away.

The condolences afterward blurred into faces, perfume, damp wool and hands squeezing mine. By the time the crowd began thinning, my feet were numb and I’d thanked enough strangers for attending my father’s funeral to last several lifetimes.

Roman never approached me.

For some reason, that unsettled me more than if he had.

I saw him once speaking with a man I didn’t recognise and again several minutes later with Samuel Klein. That conversation was different. Sam kept glancing toward the remaining mourners while Roman stood motionless in the rain, listening. Whatever Sam was telling him appeared increasingly urgent. Roman waited until he’d finished, leaned slightly closer and replied.

Sam stopped talking.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

Adrian followed my gaze. His expression tightened slightly as he watched the two men. “I don’t know.”

I turned my head toward him.

He caught the look. “This time I actually don’t.”

“How reassuring.”

“Elle.” Adrian adjusted the umbrella as rain began blowing sideways, keeping it over me even as his own shoulder darkened. “Don’t make him interesting just because everyone else is uncomfortable around him.”

I studied his profile. “That sounded suspiciously like advice.”

“It was.”

“You know how I feel about advice.”

“Which is why your life is unnecessarily difficult.”

“Yet interesting.”

His eyes came back to mine. “That’s exactly what worries me.”

When I looked toward Sam again, Roman was gone.

I searched the path before I could stop myself. A black sedan was moving slowly toward the cemetery gates, its windows dark enough that I couldn’t see inside.

I watched until it disappeared.

Dad’s house was silent when I returned.

Not peaceful. Silent. There was a difference.

I stood inside the front door with my heels dangling from one hand and listened to the heating click somewhere inside the walls. His coat still hung beside mine. His reading glasses sat on the console table where he’d left them, one arm folded beneath the other. A stack of mail waited beside the ceramic bowl where he always dropped his keys.

For one stupid second, I expected him to walk out of his study complaining about the number of cars outside.

Instead, there was only the house.

I put my keys into the bowl and stared at his glasses.

Four days wasn’t enough time for somebody to become past tense.

My phone vibrated inside my coat.

I almost ignored it. Aunt Rachel would want to know whether I’d eaten. Adrian had watched me walk through the front door less than five minutes ago, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop him checking.

The number on the screen wasn’t saved in my phone.

There was no greeting and no name. Just a single message.

HE WATCHED YOU BURY THE WRONG VERSION OF YOUR FATHER.

For several seconds, I didn’t move.

I read it again.

The words didn’t become clearer.

Another message appeared before I could decide whether to answer.

YOU SAW WHAT HE WANTED YOU TO SEE. SO DID EVERYONE ELSE.

My pulse slowed rather than quickened, the way it always did when something frightened me enough.

I typed Who is this? but didn’t send it.

The screen changed again.

ASK THE WRONG QUESTIONS AND YOU’LL END UP BESIDE HIM.

My fingers went cold around the phone.

That wasn’t advice.

It wasn’t a warning either.

Not entirely.

It felt like a threat.

A wash of headlights moved slowly across the front windows, catching the glass of Dad’s framed photographs before sliding away.

I looked up.

A dark sedan was passing the house.

For half a second I could see nothing beyond the reflection of the room behind me. Then the car reached the end of the property and disappeared into the wet evening.

I crossed to the window anyway.

By the time I pulled the curtain aside, the road was empty.

My phone vibrated once more in my hand.

This time there were only four words.

HE KNOWS YOU EXIST.