The Bullet Between Us

This House Never Wanted Me Now It Demands My Return

For twenty-eight years, the Ashcombe family acted as though Tamsin Penrose had never been born.

Two weeks before her twenty-eighth birthday, a letter arrived to remind them that she had.

Tamsin sat on the back steps of her grandmother's house in Montana, watching Rook chase a faded tennis ball across the yard. The late-afternoon sun burned gold over the mountains, and for once, the pain behind her right eye had settled into something she could ignore.

Then her lawyer's name appeared on her phone.

She opened the message.

Part of the voting rights and assets held in her mother's trust would officially become hers on her birthday. But before anything could be transferred, Tamsin had to return to Greenwich for identity verification and the final signing.

Return.

The word almost made her laugh.

A person could not return to a place that had never welcomed her.

For twenty-eight years, Alton Ashcombe had sent no birthday card, made no phone call and offered no explanation for abandoning his daughter after her mother's death.

Now there were assets involved, and suddenly the Ashcombes remembered her name.

Rook dropped the ball at her feet and nudged her knee.

Tamsin looked down at him.

"It appears my family wants me back."

Rook gave a low, unhappy sound.

"I know," she said. "I don't trust them either."

The following morning, a silver car stopped outside the house.

Mireille Ashcombe stepped out in cream trousers and heels too fine for the dusty drive. Her pale hair sat in a perfect twist, untouched by the wind. She looked over the old wooden porch, the rusted mailbox and Rook's muddy paws without letting her smile change.

"Tamsin." She held out both hands, as if they were old friends. "It has been far too long."

"We have never met."

Mireille's hands lowered. "Your father thought it would be better if I came personally."

Of course he had sent his wife to collect the daughter he had never bothered to meet.

Tamsin picked up her duffel bag. It held enough clothes for a week, her medicine and nothing she could not abandon. "Let's not make this emotional. I have a flight to catch."

Mireille spoke through most of the trip east. She explained which reporters followed the Ashcombes, which charities Cressida supported, and why certain family matters were best kept inside the family.

"Cressida has carried many responsibilities over the years," she said as their car left the airport. "She has represented the family beautifully. This situation may be difficult for her."

"My existence?"

"Your sudden return."

Tamsin watched neat stone walls and clipped hedges pass outside the window. "Then tell her not to worry. I haven't come for her dresses or her bedroom."

Mireille folded her hands over her handbag. "There are rules in a family like ours. Public attention can be unkind, especially when people begin asking about the past. Your father simply could not cope with your mother's passing back then."

Tamsin turned from the window. "Then he ought to seek therapy, not treat an infant like a crime-scene aftermath."

Silence filled the car.

At the Ashcombe estate, iron gates opened onto a drive long enough to feel like a warning. The stone house beyond it was pale, wide and cold. Staff waited beneath the front steps. So did a photographer pretending to check his camera.

Mireille's smile tightened when Rook jumped down and shook fur over the polished car.

"The dog cannot stay inside."

"Then neither can I."

Five minutes later, Rook had a bed arranged in Tamsin's room.

Fresh roses stood beside framed photographs of people she did not know. Someone had even placed an old photograph of her mother on the bedside table.

That offended her more than the empty years.

She turned the photograph facedown.

"Your father is waiting in the west sitting room," Mireille said.

Alton Ashcombe stood near the fireplace when Tamsin entered. His grey hair was cut with care, his dark suit without a wrinkle.

For one second, it held no command at all.

His gaze caught on Tamsin's eyes, then her cheekbones. The colour left his face. His fingers tightened around the head of his cane though he did not seem to need it.

"Elara," he breathed.

Her mother's name.

Something old and foolish moved in Tamsin's chest. She killed it before it could become hope.

Alton recovered quickly. His shoulders straightened. "You look very much like her."

"So I've been told."

He studied the dog at her side. "Sit down."

Tamsin remained standing.

Mireille stepped in before the silence grew sharp. "We thought we might discuss how to manage the announcement. There will be interest once the trust transfer becomes public."

"There will be no announcement from me."

Alton's mouth hardened. "Whether you like it or not, you are an Ashcombe. Now that you are home, you ought to take back our family name."

Tamsin almost laughed. "Penrose raised me for twenty-eight years. What right does Ashcombe have to claim credit at the very end?"

"Your mother chose to leave."

"And you chose not to follow. Not once."

Alton looked away first. "An image consultant will meet you tomorrow. She can help with your wardrobe, your speech and any questions from the press."

"Cancel her."

"This family has standards."

"Good. Start meeting them."

"Tamsin, no one is trying to take anything from you," Mireille said.

"Then we agree." Tamsin placed her lawyer's card on the table. "I do not want a bedroom, jewellery or the title of heiress. I want the trust handled exactly as my mother wrote it. All discussions go through my lawyer. Once I sign, I leave."

Alton stared at the card as if it were an insult. "You cannot walk into this house and dictate terms."

"I walked in because the trust requires my body in Greenwich. Do not confuse that with a desire to belong here."

She left before he could answer.

Hours later, pain drove her to her knees.

It began behind her right eye, a hard pulse that spread into the old scar near her hairline. The bedroom tilted. Tamsin gripped the edge of the bed until the worst wave passed, then locked the door with shaking fingers.

Rook pressed against her leg and whined.

"I'm fine," she whispered, though sweat already cooled along her spine.

She took two tablets from an unmarked bottle and waited on the floor. The surgeon in New York had warned her that the shrapnel lodged deep in her brain had shifted by less than a millimetre. Less than a millimetre sounded harmless until it felt like a knife twisting behind her eye.

When her hands steadied, she pulled an encrypted phone from the false lining of her bag.

Three messages waited from Keir.

The first contained a blurred photograph of a dark-haired man leaving a private clinic. The second showed searches moving through old trauma networks. The third was only one line.

The man you shot four months ago is still breathing.

Tamsin stared at the image. Even half-hidden by security, the man carried himself with the same cold control he had possessed on the Adriatic coast, bleeding beneath her hands with a bullet buried near his heart.

She typed back.

Sounds like his problem.

Keir called at once. "He is looking for Dawn."

"A lot of people look for Dawn."

"Most of them do not control ports, private intelligence teams and enough money to buy a small country."

Tamsin leaned her head against the bed. "Tough luck for him."

"That confidence would comfort me more if you were not hiding in the house of a family that puts its breakfast menu in the society pages."

"I will sign and disappear. Keep Dawn buried."

"And Zero?"

Her eyes moved to the old scars across her knuckles. "Zero died when I stopped racing."

Keir was quiet for a moment. "Dead identities have a habit of breathing again."

Across the city, Corin Dacre sat bare-chested beneath the white light of an examination room at New York Heart Centre.

Dr. Emmett Saye fixed the latest scan to the screen. A bright fragment rested dangerously close to Corin's heart.

"It has moved," Emmett said.

"How long?"

"If I could answer that, I would sleep better. We cannot rush the removal. One wrong angle and you bleed faster than my team can stop it."

Corin buttoned his shirt over the old surgical scars. "Schedule it."

His phone buzzed in Nolan's hand.

"We found a trace," Nolan said. "Dawn's latest encrypted consultation touched a server node in New York."

For four months, every lead had vanished before Corin reached it. Now, at last, the ghost had left a footprint.

At the Ashcombe estate, Tamsin's other phone lit up at almost the same moment.

The message came from the nanny's number, but the spelling belonged to a four-year-old boy.

Arcade tomorrow?