Chapter – 1

The library was going to close, and Elara Vance was trying to fix a printer by talking to it.

“Come on, you stupid beautiful machine,” she whispered, hitting the side gently. “Just one more day. One more day and I won’t ask anything else.”

The printer made a sad noise and spat out half a page. Outside, it was raining in Bristol, the kind of rain that never really stops in February, only pauses to breathe. The library smelled of old paper and cheap heater air.

Elara had worked here for three years. She was twenty-four, but sometimes she felt forty, and sometimes she felt twelve. Today she felt both. On the notice board behind her, someone had pinned the official letter with a shaking hand. Funding Terminated. Bristol Public Library, established 1968, would close on March 31st. Twenty-eight days left. The letter had a silver logo at the bottom: De Luca Holdings. She had stared at that logo so long that she had memorized the curve of the D.

Mrs. Jenkins had cried when she read it. Not loudly. She had just taken off her glasses and wiped them with her scarf and said, “Oh, dear.” Mrs. Jenkins came every single day, even when it snowed, because her flat was too quiet. And Sam, who was six and couldn’t read properly yet, had asked if the books would be thrown away. Elara had told him no, because she could not tell a six-year-old that yes, probably, they would be.

At five o’clock, she locked the library and walked home. Home was a flat above a kebab shop on Park Street. The whole building smelled of onions and oil. Her brother Leo was already there, his garage clothes on the floor, his motorbike parts on the kitchen table. He looked up when she came in.

“They still closing it?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What will you do?”

Elara dropped her bag and sat on the floor, because there was only one chair and it was broken. “I don’t know. Find another library that pays nine pounds an hour to let me argue with printers.”

Leo didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Someone came to garage today. Black car. Asked about you. “

Elara frowned. “About me?”

“Asked if Elara Vance lives here. I said no. I said you live in Buckingham Palace.”

She laughed, but it was a tired laugh. The kind that hurts a little. She didn’t think about the black car again. She was too busy thinking about where Mrs. Jenkins would go when it rained.

______________________________________________________

Forty minutes away by car, but a different planet entirely, Adrian De Luca was in a room with no color.

His house was on Blackwood Hill. People in Bristol called it the black house, because it was. Black gates, black stone, black roses in the hallway that were changed every morning by a housekeeper he never spoke to. Inside, it was silent. Not the comfortable silence of a library. The heavy silence of a place where no one is allowed to be loud.

Adrian was thirty-two. He had inherited his father’s company at eighteen and had tripled it by twenty-five. He owned buildings, hotels, half the new apartments in Bristol that Elara could never afford. He did not sleep much. He worked. He had a meeting at seven in the morning and another at ten at night and between those meetings, he stared out of his office window and thought about numbers.

On his desk that night was a file. It was thin. Bristol Public Library. He had signed the termination himself two weeks ago. It was a small line in a budget of millions. 2.1 million saved by closing six small libraries across the south. It was logical. It was efficient. His finance team had clapped.

His head of security, Marlon, knocked once and came in. Marlon had worked for the De Luca family since Adrian was twelve. He was the only person who could walk into Adrian’s house without being announced.

“The Bristol one is causing trouble,” Marlon said.

Adrian didn’t look up. “Which one?”