Chapter 319:
Mary shook her head frantically, tears leaking from her eyes. “No! They told me you died in the ambulance! They said if I stayed, I would be next! They gave me the money to run, to save myself from the curse that killed Edward!”
Aurora felt a chill. So Mary wasn’t complicit in the cover-up—she was a victim of a false narrative designed to clear the board.
“Who told you that?” Aurora demanded, stepping into the doorway. “Who paid you?”
Mary looked past Aurora, scanning the trees as if she expected a monster to jump out.
“The Shadow,” Mary whispered. “The man in the shadow. He said… he said if I ever spoke to anyone, he would finish the job.”
Aurora’s blood ran cold. “What man, Mary? Was it Sterling? Was it my uncle?”
Mary shook her head frantically. “No. Not them. Older. Darker.” She leaned forward, her voice a ghostly rattle.
“He’s still here,” Mary hissed. “He never left the house. He watches. He waits.”
“Who?” Aurora demanded.
“The one who prunes the roses,” she said. “The Gardener.”
Before Aurora could ask another question, Mary slammed the door and bolted it.
Aurora stood on the porch, the word echoing in her mind.
The Gardener.
She turned back to the car. Elias was waiting, his eyes alert.
“What did she say?” Elias asked as Aurora climbed in.
“She said I’m supposed to be dead,” Aurora said, staring at the cottage. “And she mentioned a Gardener.”
Elias frowned. “The estate has a dozen gardeners.”
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“No,” Aurora said. “She didn’t mean a job title. She meant a description. Someone who cuts away the parts of the family they don’t like.” She looked at Elias.
“We have a new target.”
The rain in New York didn’t wash things clean—it just made the grime slicker, turning the city into a watercolor painting left out in a storm. Aurora watched the droplets race down the tinted window of the SUV. They were leaving the wooded sanctuary behind, but the chill of Mary’s cottage—the smell of damp wool and old fear—still clung to her skin.
“The Gardener,” Elias repeated the name, testing the weight of it on his tongue. He sat beside her, his laptop closed, his attention entirely on the side of her face. “It’s a code name. Or a title.”
“It’s a function,” Aurora corrected, her voice hollow. She rubbed her thumb over the platinum cuff on her wrist, grounding herself in the cold metal. “A gardener prunes. He weeds. He decides what grows and what gets cut.” She turned to him, her eyes dark. “My father was a weed to someone, Elias. And Julian… Julian was just a sapling that grew too close to the sun.”
The car slowed as it approached the gates of her apartment complex, The Obsidian Tower. The press had thinned out, bored by the lack of fresh scandals, but a solitary figure stood by the curb, soaked to the bone.
It was Bella. The girl with the acne scars from the party, the one Aurora had given the balm to. But she wasn’t looking at her skin today. She was looking at the ground, her shoulders shaking.
“Stop the car,” Aurora ordered.
.
.
.