COMPLICATED.

CHAPTER 44

ASH AND RAIN

My head is exploding. It's no longer just the dull throb of a hangover from that wild night; it's an uncontrolled fire blazing behind my eyes, fueled by too many truths colliding at once. I wonder if it's the weight of the figures I've read and the disasters seen in those documents, or if it's Emerald's shadow-which last night felt like a hallucination and today is my reality, a silent executioner.
She knew me. She knew my surname before I even opened my mouth. She knew about Nick, the Colds, every warehouse and shop in Manchester, every office in Liverpool. But there's something more intimate, more disturbing in the way she watches me: she's not just looking at the friend, the girl-I don't even know how to define myself-of Nicholas Cold. She is looking at me.
"Speak, damn it!" I explode, taking a step toward her. The concrete beneath my feet seems to vibrate. "Why him? Why destroy everything his father built over decades? What did he do to you? He had nothing to do with what happened fifteen years ago!"
Emerald shifts her gaze slightly, returning to stare at the void beyond the glass. "Time doesn't erase debts, Hamilton. It only accumulates them."
"Don't speak to me in riddles!" I scream at her, heedless of the nausea rising in my throat. "Nick is suffering. His mother is threatened, his heritage is in ashes. If you orchestrated this massacre, you have to tell me why. Who are you, really?"
I move closer, filled with a fury I didn't know I possessed, ready to grab her arm to force her to look at me. But before I can touch her, she snaps. With a speed that takes my breath away, she pins my wrist and shoves me against the metal pillar of the veranda. The cold steel pierces through my cream sweater, but it's her gaze that pins me down.
"Why do you insist so much, Emma?" she hisses, and for the first time, her icy mask cracks.
I see something new in her eyes. It's no longer just that sovereign detachment. There's a spark of primordial rage, a fury that seems to want to incinerate the entire city; yet, beneath that crust, I catch a flash of fear. A fear that isn't for herself, but perhaps for what the truth might trigger.
"I want to know who I am to you!" I cry out, trying to free myself from her grip. "Why is Nick convinced he has to protect me from ghosts you seem to know all too well? Who are you? Why do you look at me as if you're seeing a ghost?"
Her breath is short, almost as short as mine. Her proximity is suffocating, charged with an electricity that makes my fingers tremble.
"Everything has its time, Hamilton," she says, her voice trembling slightly, betraying that inner tumult. "And your time hasn't come yet."
"I don't have time to waste!" I retort, feeling tears of frustration prick my eyes. "I have to protect Nick. I have to protect Elisa. I have to save that company because it's the only thing he has left!"
As I speak, a gelid thought crosses my mind, a doubt that freezes my blood more than any foreclosure in Birmingham. If she was capable of infiltrating the Colds for years, if she knows everything about them and me...
"I have to protect my family too, don't I?" I murmur, my voice dropping an octave. "My father, my parents... my brother. They have nothing to do with the Colds, right? Emerald, answer me!"
She stares at me for an instant that feels like an eternity. Then, her lips twitch into a strange, crooked, almost imperceptible smile. It's an expression I can't decode: is it pity? Is it mockery? Or is it the confirmation that the danger is much closer to home than I want to admit?
I blink, dazed by the pain in my head, and in that second, the smile vanishes. I wonder if I just imagined it, if my mind is creating monsters where there are only shadows. She releases my wrist with a brusque motion, as if my skin burned her.
"Go back to your Nicholas, Hamilton," she murmurs, turning her back to me again. "Go watch him play his music for a world that no longer exists for him. But remember: protecting someone doesn't mean saving them. Sometimes, it just means delaying the inevitable. And I know a thing or two about that; I've tried many times."
I'm left there, alone in the center of the veranda, my sweater no longer able to warm me and the atrocious suspicion that the storm that hit the Colds is about to knock on the door of my own life.
The pain in my temples turns into a rhythmic hammering, an unbearable pressure fueled by the overload of secrets and the toxic remnants of the night before. I wonder if this agony is due to the ruthless figures discovered in that folder or to Emerald's very presence.
Protect? That word echoes inside me like an insult. She claims to have done it? To have tried multiple times? She is a living enigma, a creature emitting a dark magnetism I can't resist. There is a hunger for truth in me, a desire to stop being treated like a porcelain doll, that pushes me to move.
She slips away, leaving the room with a composure that infuriates me. I can't let her go. I chase her, my footsteps echoing against hers as we cross a secondary door. We find ourselves in an infinite corridor, a gorge of concrete and filthy stairs that seem to lead into the bowels of London. I walk almost beside her, but her charisma is so overwhelming that I find myself always staying one step behind, as if her aura created an impassable border.
"Why were you there yesterday? Why was I there too?" I ask her, my voice vibrating with an urgency that turns into desperation.
She doesn't slow down. She keeps marching with her hands shoved in her pockets, her gray coat swaying like a war flag. After seconds that feel like hours, without deigning to look at me, she utters a few words that freeze my blood:
"Perhaps it's in your nature to frequent certain places, Hamilton."
My heart leaps into my throat. I have tachycardia, a feeling of suffocation given by the idea that she can read inside me better than I do myself. She doesn't know me, she can't know what hides beneath the surface, yet she speaks with the certainty of someone who has written my destiny. Flashbacks of that night return to me: me losing consciousness, the cold, the bitter high that dragged me down.
"You saw me, you saw the state I was in..." I retort, almost tripping on a greasy step. "You were there and you let it happen. You allowed that place to reduce me to that."
"You only did what everyone else does in that hole," she replies curtly, turning slightly.
Those words hit me like a slap. She's telling me I wasn't an intruder, that that rot belonged to me. Anger consumes me: I don't know who I am, how can she? I repeat it internally, trying to convince myself she's lying. But my thoughts return to my parents, to her previous silence.
"What do my father and mother have to do with this?" I insist, my voice rising. "How do you know them? Answer me!"
In that moment, Emerald freezes and turns with sudden violence. A strand of her faded green hair slips out of her messy bun, whipping the air. Her eyes narrow to two pinpoints, laden with the same rage I had seen earlier.
"Everyone knows who your parents are, Hamilton. Or do you want to keep playing the part of the anonymous girl?"
"Stop calling me that!" I scream at her, hearing my surname pronounced by her like a sentence.
But while I try to defend myself, the surname Cold explodes in my mind like an alarm signal. The images of the foreclosures in Manchester and the ruins in London mix with the suspicion that my family is not at all foreign to this massacre.
My chest burns, while the silence of this disgusting corridor eats me alive. I feel like laughing, a bitter laugh rising in my throat. It's absurd to think that until a few months ago, my only huge problem was Leo. I thought his betrayal was the end of the world. Now, compared to what I'm discovering, Leo seems like a trifle, a distant nuisance, a footnote in a life I no longer recognize.
What he did was squalid, but Nicholas... Nick is on another level. Everything with him is deeper, more dangerous, more total. And the thing that scares me most is that, despite the secrets, despite the mud I've ended up in, one thing has never changed: I want to protect him. I feel this visceral need to save him, an affection that pushes me beyond every limit, that forces me to overcome the old Emma. That version of me, that fragile girl who was afraid of her own shadow, still looms over me every single time, but I am leaving her behind. I am becoming something new, something harder, just to be able to stand beside him. I must and I want to do it.
"The Colds," I whisper, and the word comes out like a choked growl. I pronounce that surname with a rage that shakes my bones. "Why did you do this to the Colds?"
We are standing, facing each other, in this dirty twilight where the light of the rain barely enters from the high windows. If I project this scene in my mind, we look like exact opposites. Me in my white sweater, the signs of exhaustion on my face, the symbol of a purity that is vanishing; her wrapped in that metallic gray, Spartan, hard, as if she were carved from the rock of this city.
"You don't need to know anything, Hamilton. Not now," she replies, in that tone that reveals nothing.
I press my fingers against my temples to keep them from exploding. "Fifteen years ago he was just a child!" I scream, my voice bouncing off the closed doors of the corridor. "Nick had nothing to do with his father's business! He was little, innocent!"
Emerald clenches her teeth, her jaw turning to marble.
"Jacob Cold wasn't," she hisses, and the name of Nick's father sounds like a curse on her lips. "And if Nicholas followed in his footsteps, neither will he be. Blood never lies."
I feel like I can't breathe. Why tell me now? Why in London? Why drag me into this hell just when I was trying to start over?
She takes a step forward, towering over me. "Wake up, Emma! Haven't you realized that this is my job? This is my life, my only purpose. Destroying what Jacob and his friends in the little circle built is the only thing that keeps me standing. And every single person who was at that party yesterday... was part of the game. Every one of them has a role."
Confusion hits me like an avalanche. The images of the party resurface, distorted: the sweaty faces, the laughs that were too loud, the stares that followed me. If everything was a play... my heart skips a beat. An atrocious suspicion, colder than the rain, freezes my blood.
Aria. Adam.
They brought me there. They gave me drinks. They pushed me over the limit. My world collapses further; the pieces of the puzzle shatter. I wonder if they too are involved, if our friendship was just another pawn in Emerald's hands to get to the Colds.
"Them too?" I ask in a thin voice. "Aria and Adam... were they part of the plan?"
Emerald silences me immediately with a sharp gesture. "They have nothing to do with it," she says, and for the first time, her voice sounds almost human. "They are just kids playing at being adults in the wrong place. But you... you are different."
"You know nothing about me, Emerald!" I answer, my voice trembling as tears finally break through and begin to streak my face.
Yet, every time I pronounce her name, I feel a conflicting shiver run down my spine. It's as if I'm doing something profoundly wrong and at the same time the most right thing in the world. That name inspires an abysmal fear but also emits a positive, almost familiar vibration. It's an absurd, visceral feeling: it's as if I've carried it inside for an entire life, like a memory too deep to be focused.
Her green eyes scrutinize me, cold and sharp as emerald shards. But as she looks at me, I see her cheeks finally take color, a sudden flush that contrasts violently with her usually pale, almost cadaverous skin. It's a sign of life, or perhaps of a rage she can no longer contain.
"I know what I need to know, Emma," she replies, and the way she says it makes me realize my flight is over.
In that moment, reality hits me: I am trapped. I just wanted a normal life, to study singing, to escape the dramas of New York, but now I know it's impossible.
"I don't know what Jacob Cold or anyone else did to deserve this hatred..." I say, trying to wipe my face with my sweater sleeve, "but Nick has nothing to do with it. He is different. And I swear to you, Emerald, if anything happens to him, if you try to destroy him physically or if you push him over the edge... you'll have to deal with me."
She doesn't answer right away. She sketches one of her usual smiles. We remain like that, suspended in time, in the silence broken only by the rain hammering on the windows.
Then, without warning, Emerald reaches out and opens one of the rotten wooden doors. The creaking of the hinges is a sinister sound. From the threshold, I glimpse a room that looks like it came out of a nightmare: it is bare, gelid, with raw concrete walls oozing humidity.
In the center of the room, there is only a metal table, heavy and scratched. Above it, a single naked bulb hangs from an exposed wire. The light flickers, dying, and the bulb swings lazily back and forth, casting long, distorted shadows. The air inside is stale, smelling of dust and rusted iron.
Emerald steps aside and gestures for me to enter. It is not an invitation; it is a silent order. That room is the place where masks fall completely. My heart beats so hard I fear it might break, but I take a step forward.
We enter that concrete cell and the sound of the door closing behind us has the sound of a definitive sentence. I sit on a freezing metal chair that screeches against the uneven floor. I feel tiny, crushed by the weight of those bare walls.
Emerald sits across from me. With a slow, almost ritualistic gesture, she lights what looks like a cigarette, but the smell is more pungent, sharper. Within moments, a grayish, dense cloud begins to float between us. The smoke wraps around her, hiding the features of her face and leaving only her light eyes visible, glowing in the darkness like those of a predator in wait. I feel obscured, suffocated.
"I'll have to deal with you, you say?" she asks with a mocking laugh that cuts the silence like a blade.
My state of mind is an indescribable chaos. I am a tangle of screaming rage, paralyzing fear, and a shock so deep I doubt my own sanity.
"Yes," I answer. I try to make that word solid, sharp, confident, but I feel my voice is just a hollow shell.
"You were never good at lying, Hamilton. But after all, they raised you to not be a disaster. What a pity," she says, inhaling sharply.
"You know nothing about my life," I retort after a while, looking up at the stained ceiling to push back the tears. She hit the mark. I spent years trying to be the impeccable daughter, the model student. The fact that she understood that makes me feel naked.
She stares at me, then leans forward, crossing her hands on the metal table. She cancels the distance between us. This proximity scares me because I smell her scent of smoke and rain, but at the same time, it infuses me with a strange, sickly tranquility. How can this person make me feel, for an instant, safe?
"And what if instead of dealing with me, we find another agreement?" she whispers.
I feel a stab of disgust in my stomach. She leans back again with an indolent grace.
"You're a good singer, Emma. I'm sure you'll follow my instructions in the same perfect manner."
My feelings here become atrocious. I feel like a trapped animal seeing the hunter's hand approach not to kill, but to put on a collar. Music, the only clean thing I had left, is now being used by her as a weapon of blackmail.
"What the fuck kind of agreement should I ever make with you?" I snap.
Her eyes light up; she seems almost inebriated by this visceral reaction of mine. She answers immediately: "You care about Nick."
I look at her and feel my shield fall to pieces. I can't deny it.
"You don't want anything bad to happen to him. To. Anyone. You. Care. About," she paces every word with ruthless slowness.
"Speak clearly," I answer in a whisper.
She fixes her messy green hair with a distracted gesture. She looks like a fallen queen reigning over a world she has decided to set on fire. To tear apart-my world. Nick's world. Our world.
"Simple: you must follow what I tell you to do. Every single thing, without exception. Or there will be consequences."
Consequences.
I feel hunted. My instinct screams to refuse, but logic pins me to that chair: if I don't accept, the stakes will rise. I feel that if I said no, I would lose Nick forever, and maybe not just him.
In that moment, two sharp, violent knocks echo against the closed door. The wooden structure seems almost to give way under the weight of those outside-two men whose heavy shadows can be glimpsed under the crack of the door. I jump in my chair.
Those knocks have given body to my nightmares: it's a physical warning.
"So, what are we doing, Hamilton?"
I would do anything for Nick. He has become the center of gravity. I would accept hell just to keep him safe. I don't care about myself, but everyone else must be safe.
"Tell me what I have to do," I reply with a resoluteness born of desperation.
Emerald suddenly slams a hand on the table, making it jump with a metallic crash. She begins to describe her plan to me, word by word, detail by detail. Every instruction of hers is like a piece of glass tearing my heart. I feel the nausea rising, my vision blurring. Every time she describes what I will have to perform, my body has a visible jolt. I feel like I'm fainting as the world I knew disappears definitively into that cloud of smoke.