Zara’s pov
It took Richard eleven minutes to blink out eight words, and every one of them terrified me.
I hadn’t planned on visiting him that night.
I’d gone up after the fight with Noah still ringing in my ears, needing somewhere quiet that wasn’t my own bedroom, somewhere I could sit with my thoughts without Ethan noticing the fresh worry on my face and asking questions I didn’t have answers for yet.
Richard’s room had become that place for me over the past weeks, strange as it sounded, the one corner of the mansion where nobody expected me to perform anything.
“Rough day,” I told him, settling into the chair beside his bed, not bothering with the legal pad yet.
“Noah and I had a fight. First real one in years.”
His eyes tracked me, steady, present, that particular alertness that still caught me off guard some nights.
“He’s mixed up in something. Money he won’t explain, a man he won’t name.” I rubbed my temple, the headache from earlier still lingering.
“I keep circling back to whether it’s connected to everything happening here. The clause, the leaks, all of it. I don’t have proof. Just a feeling I can’t shake.”
I hadn’t meant to say that much out loud, not really, talking to Richard had become half genuine conversation and half a way of thinking out loud to someone who couldn’t repeat it to anyone else, whose silence felt safer than anyone else’s advice right now.
“I keep wondering if I’m imagining connections that aren’t there,” I went on.
“Ethan does the same thing, apparently runs lists of names in his head, circles back to people he trusts and hates himself for suspecting them. Maybe it’s contagious, living in this house. Maybe everyone who spends enough time under this roof starts seeing conspiracies in the shadows.”
Richard’s eyes stayed fixed on me the whole time I talked, none of the drifting unfocus I sometimes caught in him on quieter nights.
Richard blinked.
Once, deliberate, then held my gaze the way he did when he wanted my full attention rather than my passive company.
“You want to say something?” I reached for the legal pad out of habit now, clicking my pen.
“Okay. I’m listening. Take your time.”
He started immediately, no hesitation, like whatever this was had been sitting ready in him for a while, waiting for the right opening.
One blink.
Long pause.
Two blinks.
“P,” I said, counting through row two.
He held my gaze.
Yes.
Next letter came just as fast, his eyes moving with a purpose I hadn’t seen from him in our sessions before, urgency instead of the careful, exhausted effort I’d grown used to.
Three blinks, pause, two blinks.
“R,” I wrote, my pulse already climbing though I didn’t yet know why.
“O,” came next, then “T,” then “E,” the word assembling faster than any message he’d given me before, like something in him had decided speed mattered more tonight than his usual careful rhythm.
“Protect,” I said out loud, the word landing heavy in the quiet room.
“Richard, protect what?”
He didn’t pause to acknowledge the question, just kept going, the same urgent rhythm carrying him into the next word before I’d finished processing the first.
One blink, pause, one blink again.
“A,” I said.
Then, faster still: “Y.”
“S.”
“E.” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“L.”
“F.”
“Protect yourself,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper now, the legal pad trembling slightly in my grip.
“Richard, protect yourself from what? Is someone threatening me?”
His eyes held mine, and something in them broke my heart a little, the particular helplessness of a man who understood exactly what he needed to say and couldn’t say it fast enough through the only channel his body still gave him.
“Keep going,” I said, steadying my hand.
“I’m listening. I’m not going anywhere.”
He gathered himself for the next word, and I could see the toll it was taking even this early, his breathing shallow, a fine tremor visible in the muscles around his eyes that hadn’t been there when we started five minutes ago.
One blink.
Pause, longer this time.
Two blinks.
“F,” I said, watching him carefully now, worried less about the message and more about him.
“R.”
“O.”
“M.”
“From,” I said.
“Protect yourself from. Richard, please, I need you to tell me from what. From who.”
He blinked again, starting the next letter, but the rhythm had changed now, slower, each blink costing him visibly more than the last.
I watched his jaw tighten with the effort, the strain of it radiating through the rest of his face, and something in me wanted to tell him to stop, to rest, to let this wait until tomorrow when he had more strength to give it.
But I understood, even as the thought crossed my mind, that whatever this was couldn’t wait.
He wouldn’t be pushing himself this hard, this fast, if it could.
“Take your time,” I said instead.
“However long you need.”
One blink.
A pause that stretched long enough I started counting seconds in my head, worried he’d lost the thread entirely, that exhaustion had finally caught up with whatever urgency was driving him.
Then, finally, the second blink came.
“V,” I said.
My stomach dropped.
That letter again, the same one that had cut him off completely two weeks ago, the unfinished name I’d been carrying around in the back of my mind ever since, certain but never confirmed.
“Richard, is this about Victor?”
His eyes flared with something like relief, holding my gaze steady.
Yes.
“Okay.” My hand shook harder now, adrenaline replacing the calm I’d been trying to project for his sake. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“Okay, I understand. Keep going, if you can. What about him?”
He tried.
I watched him try, his eyes straining toward the next letter, one weak blink beginning the count before his lids simply stopped answering him, sliding closed under their own weight the same way they had the last time this happened, his breathing evening out into the slow, involuntary rhythm of a body that had spent every reserve of strength it had.
“Richard.” I gripped his hand, careful, urgent.
“Richard, stay with me. Just a little more.”
Nothing.
His eyes stayed closed, his chest rising and falling in the steady, exhausted pattern of real sleep, not the alert stillness he usually held even when resting between our sessions.
I sat there a long moment, my heart hammering, the four words he’d managed to give me circling over and over in my head.
Protect yourself.
From Victor.
From Victor, doing what, planning what, threatening what, the sentence hung unfinished in the air of that quiet room, and I understood I wasn’t going to get the rest of it tonight.
Part of me wanted to run straight to Ethan with what little I had, incomplete as it was.
But Richard had asked me, weeks ago now, not to say anything until there was enough proof to act on, and four blinked letters and a first name didn’t feel like proof, not the kind that would survive a boardroom, not the kind Victor couldn’t twist into an old man’s confusion if it came out too soon and too thin.
I nearly stood to go find Marta, to explain what had happened, to ask whether this level of exertion was dangerous for him, when his eyes fluttered again, unexpected, drawing my attention back down instantly.
“Richard?” I leaned in close.
“You’re awake?”
His eyes found mine, weaker now but present, some last reserve of will keeping him tethered to the conversation a moment longer than his body wanted to allow.
“Do you want to finish?” I asked, gentle, giving him the choice.
“You don’t have to. You can rest and we’ll pick this up tomorrow.”
He blinked once.
Held it.
No hesitation this time, no wavering, whatever remained of this sentence, he intended to finish it tonight, cost be damned.
“You’re stubborn,” I said, half a laugh catching in my throat despite the fear still sitting heavy in my chest.
“Ethan gets that from somewhere. Now I know where.”
Something flickered in his eyes that might have been amusement, if a man that exhausted could manage amusement, and it steadied me more than I expected, that small flash of the person underneath all of this, still in there, still himself.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“I’m right here.”
He started again, slower now than any letter he’d given me all night, each blink arriving after a visible, trembling pause, like he was dragging the strength for it up from somewhere far beneath the surface.
One blink.
A pause long enough that I nearly spoke to fill the silence before catching myself, letting him work at whatever pace his body would allow.
“A,” I said finally, when the second blink came.
Then, achingly slow: “N.”
“D.”
“And,” I said.
“Protect yourself from Victor, and…”
“Protect yourself,” he spelled, then paused so long I thought he’d stopped before his eyes finished the sentence: “…and my grandchild.”