Franz carried Lexx up after the others had gone, Gilbert and Audrey first, then Julian wrangling a half-asleep Kyle into the back seat, then Nate, who’d stood in the driveway for an extra minute with his phone to his ear before finally pulling out. The house had gone the particular kind of empty that came after a full one, doors that had swung all evening finally staying shut.
The crib sat against the wall on Franz’s side of the bed, close enough that he could reach it without getting up. He lowered Lexx into it inch by inch, one hand cradling the back of his head until the mattress took the weight, and waited through the small squirm and resettle before he straightened.
Arianne sat on the edge of the bed, dressed exactly as she’d been for dinner, hands folded in her lap, looking at nothing in particular on the far wall.
Franz crossed to her and sat down close enough that his knee touched hers. "How are you doing with it?"
"I don’t have a clean answer for that." She turned her hands over, studying her own palms like they might have the answer written on them. "I’m several things at once and none of them are simple. Angry. Disappointed, in a way I didn’t expect, even though I never thought better of him to begin with. Scared."
"Scared of him."
"Scared for you. For the children. For Gilbert and Audrey and Julian and Kyle and Nate, everyone who was in that room tonight because of me." She looked up at him finally. "Not scared for myself. I stopped being frightened for myself a long time ago. It’s everyone standing next to me that keeps me up at night."
Franz didn’t argue with the shape of that fear, which she’d half expected him to. He reached over and took one of her hands instead, turning it the right way up in his own. "You won’t be carrying that alone. Whatever this becomes, it becomes something the five of us carry together. That was true before tonight and it’s true now."
"I know that." She did know it. Knowing it and feeling the weight lift were two different problems.
"If Edmund Cole is Howard, we’re not chasing a shadow anymore. We have an age, a face, a fabricated childhood, a paper trail through two companies. That’s more than we’ve had in the two years since we even knew to look for him." Franz’s voice held steady, the register he used when he needed her to hear the facts before the feeling. "A man who built an entire life out of hiding doesn’t get to be perfect at it forever. I refuse to believe there’s nothing in that history you can use."
"You’re saying he has a weakness."
"I’m saying every man who spends decades disappearing does it because something in his past is worth hiding. Find that, and you have leverage. You’ve built companies out of smaller advantages than that."
"You make it sound simple."
"It’s not simple. It’s just not impossible, and for two years the family has been treating it like an unsolvable equation instead of a difficult one." Franz’s thumb moved once over her knuckles, an absent gesture he probably didn’t notice himself making. "There’s a difference. Difficult things get solved by people willing to sit with them long enough. I’ve watched you do it to companies that were supposedly beyond saving."
"Companies don’t hate me personally."
"No, but plenty of people running them have. You’ve handled worse odds than one man who’s spent thirty years hiding instead of building something that could survive daylight."
Arianne studied him for a second, something in her mouth threatening to curve despite the night behind it. "Are you calling me an opportunist, Franz Rochefort?"
"I’m calling you excellent at your job." He grinned, unrepentant. "Isn’t that most of why you’re good at it? You see the gap before anyone else does, and you don’t apologize for using it. It’s half the reason the board listens to you after everything Dominic tried to do to your name."
"That’s a generous way to describe cornering a grief-driven man who’s spent his life engineering my family’s ruin."
"It’s an accurate one. You don’t have to feel guilty about being good at the thing that’s going to save us."
She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, the tension in her shoulders dropping half an inch for the first time since the study. "I hoped tonight would end differently. I hoped Gilbert would come back with nothing, and we’d go another year not knowing, and I could keep pretending the danger was smaller than it actually is."
"You never really believed that, though."
"No." She leaned into him, her head finding the space below his shoulder like it had a hundred times before, familiar enough that neither of them needed to adjust for it. "I want this finished, Franz. Not managed. Not contained for another decade while he sits somewhere funding orphanages and building a legend out of it. Finished. One way, for good, so none of the people in that room tonight ever have to sit around a whiteboard again because of something that happened before any of us were born."
"I want that too." Franz pressed a kiss to the top of her head, unhurried, the kind of gesture that didn’t need to say anything else to mean everything it meant. "We’ll get there. Maybe not tonight. But we’ll get there."
Behind them, Lexx stirred in the crib, one small foot kicking free of the blanket, and settled again without waking. Arianne watched the rise and fall of his chest in the low light, steadier than her own breathing had been ten minutes ago, and let herself borrow some of that steadiness for herself.
"He has no idea what’s coming for him," she said, her voice dropping low, more to the room than to Franz specifically. "That’s the only part of tonight I actually enjoyed."
"Good." Franz’s arm came around her shoulders, solid and certain. "Let him keep believing that for as long as it takes us to be sure."
They sat like that for a while, neither of them in a hurry to move, the house settling into the kind of hush that only came after a day too full to process in real time. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard creaked under someone’s late walk to the bathroom, and neither of them flinched at the sound the way they might have three months ago, before folders and photographs had a name attached to them.
"You should sleep," Franz said. "Tomorrow’s going to want all of you, one way or another."
"So should you."
"I will. Once I know you actually will." He nudged her shoulder with his, gentle enough that it barely counted as a push. "You have a habit of saying yes to sleep and then staring at the ceiling for an hour instead."
"That’s slander."
"That’s Tuesday." Franz stood and held a hand out to her. "Come on. Whatever he’s planning, he’s not planning it tonight. Let the five of us have until morning before we go back to being afraid of him."
"Bed," Arianne said, and let him pull her up.