Three days after the contract talks began, Damien called Felix into his study before sunrise, before the household staff had even started their usual morning routines around the enormous house.
"I want a full investigation into her," Damien said, not bothering with any kind of proper greeting as Felix stumbled in, still half dressed. "Silveria. Everything. School records, medical history, every single address she's ever lived at in her entire life."
Felix blinked slowly, still visibly half asleep, a cup of coffee clutched loosely in one hand. "You already had Benson run a basic background check the very first night, remember. It came back entirely clean. She's exactly who she claims to be. Lilibeth's adopted younger sister, nothing more complicated than that."
"I want more than merely clean," Damien said, pacing slowly toward the window. "I want thorough. Genuinely thorough. Something about her simply doesn't properly add up, Felix, and I can't quite let it go."
"Doesn't add up how, exactly?" Felix asked, finally sitting down properly and rubbing at his tired eyes.
Damien was quiet for a long moment, trying carefully to find the right words for something he barely understood himself, even after several days of turning it over privately in his mind. "The way she carries herself," he said finally. "She doesn't move through this house like someone who grew up constantly overlooked and pushed carefully aside, the way an unwanted adopted child so often does. There's something underneath that quiet exterior. Something oddly familiar, though I genuinely can't place precisely what."
"Familiar how?" Felix pressed, leaning forward now with real interest.
"I don't know," Damien admitted, frustration creeping steadily into his controlled voice. "That's exactly why I want the proper investigation conducted. And I want you to arrange a formal meeting with the Hitlers themselves. Her parents specifically. I want to sit down with them directly and ask my own questions myself, rather than continuing to rely entirely on secondhand reports filtered through lawyers and intermediaries."
Felix studied him carefully over the rim of his coffee cup, something calculating entering his own expression now. "This seems like a remarkable amount of effort for someone you keep insisting doesn't actually matter to you in any meaningful way."
"It has absolutely nothing to do with mattering," Damien said sharply, his tone cooling instantly. "It has everything to do with basic due diligence. I married a complete stranger through a legally binding contract, Felix. I fully intend to know precisely who that stranger actually is, for both our sakes."
"Sure," Felix said, clearly not remotely convinced by the explanation, though he wisely chose not to push the particular point any further given Damien's obvious mood. "I'll get the meeting properly arranged. Give me a few days to sort out the details."
• • •
In the meantime, over the following days, Damien found himself watching Silveria considerably more closely than he probably should have, more closely, certainly, than any simple due diligence genuinely required of him.
He noticed the particular way she moved through the enormous house, like she was actively trying to take up as little physical space as humanly possible, careful and quiet, even in rooms that technically belonged entirely to her now as his wife. He noticed the way she flinched, almost imperceptibly, whenever a door closed too loudly somewhere else in the house, like some old, deeply ingrained instinct had taught her long ago to brace instinctively for trouble at the first sign of any unexpected, sudden sound.
He caught her one particular afternoon sitting quietly in the garden, sketching in a small notebook that she quickly tried to hide away the moment she noticed him watching her from the terrace above. Late afternoon light slanted low across the lawn, catching the loose strands of hair that had escaped whatever careful arrangement Rosa had helped her with that morning, and for a brief moment before she noticed him, she looked entirely at ease, the careful, guarded posture she usually carried loosened into something more natural.
"You don't have to stop on my account," he said, walking closer across the manicured lawn.
"It's nothing important," she said, closing the notebook regardless, her cheeks coloring slightly. "Just doodles, really."
"May I see them properly?" he asked, genuinely curious despite himself.
She hesitated visibly, clearly reluctant to share something so obviously personal, before finally handing the notebook carefully over to him. He flipped slowly through several pages of detailed, confident sketches, dresses and structured coats rendered in careful, assured lines, far more technically skilled than simple idle doodles would ever properly suggest.
"You drew all of these yourself?" he asked, genuine surprise coloring his voice.
"Since I was quite young," she admitted quietly. "It's really not important, in the grand scheme of things."
"It looks considerably important to me," he said, studying one particular sketch closely, a structured black coat rendered with sharp, exceptionally clean lines. "This is genuinely good work, Silveria. I mean that sincerely."
Something flickered quickly across her face at the unexpected compliment, surprise mixed with something that looked almost like careful suspicion, like she wasn't remotely accustomed to receiving unprompted praise and didn't properly know what to do with one now that it had been offered so plainly. "Thank you," she said carefully, taking the notebook back from him with visible care.
He watched her retreat slowly back toward the house a few minutes later, and the strange, nagging familiarity he couldn't quite properly place settled over him again, considerably heavier this time than before. It wasn't precisely her face, though there was something there too, something in the particular shape of her eyes that tugged persistently at a memory he genuinely couldn't fully access no matter how hard he tried. It was something else entirely. Something about the careful, deliberate way she held herself together, like a person who had learned very young in life that falling apart simply wasn't ever going to be properly allowed for her.
He'd witnessed that particular kind of careful, practiced control before, many times, in many different people. He recognized it instantly because he lived inside that exact same kind of control himself, every single day of his own life.
• • •
Felix arrived at the study two full days later carrying genuine news. "The Hitlers have agreed to the meeting," he announced. "Tomorrow afternoon, as it happens. Though I should properly warn you beforehand, they both seemed remarkably nervous about the whole prospect. Nervous in a way that felt like considerably more than simple social awkwardness or embarrassment."
"Nervous how, precisely?" Damien asked, setting down the papers he'd been reviewing.
"Evasive," Felix said. "Mathews kept deliberately changing the subject every single time I mentioned wanting to discuss Silveria's background specifically. Kassandra barely spoke at all during the entire call, if I'm being honest."
Damien's instincts sharpened considerably at that particular detail. "That's genuinely worth paying close attention to."
"I rather thought you might say exactly that." Felix dropped a thin folder onto the desk between them. "This is everything we've managed to properly dig up so far regarding her early records. It's considerably thinner than it really ought to be for someone her age. Almost nothing whatsoever exists before her official adoption paperwork technically begins."
Damien opened the folder carefully, scanning quickly through the surprisingly sparse documentation contained within. Felix was entirely right. There was essentially nothing of substance here. No hospital records anywhere. No early school enrollment forms. Just a single formal adoption certificate that seemed to begin her entire documented existence at roughly six months of age, almost as though nothing at all had ever properly happened before that particular moment in her young life.
"This isn't remotely normal," Damien said slowly, turning a page over carefully. "Even genuinely difficult, complicated adoptions usually leave behind some meaningful kind of paper trail to follow."
"That's precisely what I thought too, when I first saw it," Felix said. "Which either means the original records were simply lost somewhere along the way through neglect, or someone made absolutely certain they would never properly exist in the first place."
Damien sat back slowly in his chair, turning the thin, unsatisfying folder over carefully in his hands, the strange, persistent familiarity from the garden earlier settling considerably deeper into his chest now. Something about Silveria's conspicuously missing history felt less like a simple, unfortunate accident and more like a carefully constructed silence, deliberate and old, built by someone with real reason to keep it buried.
"Tomorrow's meeting just became a great deal more important than I originally anticipated," he said quietly, almost to himself.
Felix nodded seriously, his usual easy teasing humor entirely absent now from his expression. "I'll make certain security remains properly discreet throughout. Something tells me the Hitlers genuinely aren't going to enjoy the particular questions you're about to ask them tomorrow."
"Good," Damien said, his voice gone cold and entirely certain. "I don't particularly care whether they enjoy the experience or not, frankly. I intend to get real, honest answers this time, whatever it ultimately costs them to properly provide them to me. This family has kept quiet about enough already."
"Understood," Felix said, gathering his things to leave. "I'll confirm the time with Benson and let you know first thing in the morning."
He spent the remainder of that evening alone in his study, the thin folder open on the desk in front of him, staring at the sparse handful of documents as though sheer will alone might force additional information to somehow appear on the page. Somewhere in this house, Silveria was likely sketching again, or reading, entirely unaware of the quiet investigation now unfolding around her own carefully guarded past. He wondered, not for the first time that week, whether she knew anything at all about the gap in her own history, or whether the silence surrounding her origins had been kept from her just as completely as it had apparently been kept from everyone else.
He thought, too, about the promise he'd extracted from her only days earlier, the careful warning delivered across a breakfast table meant to keep this entire arrangement safely contained within the boundaries of a simple business transaction. Don't fall in love with me. He had meant it sincerely when he'd said it, had believed, with the same certainty he applied to every decision in his life, that keeping proper distance was the only sensible way forward for both of them.
And yet here he sat, well past midnight, poring over adoption records that had nothing whatsoever to do with Crew Enterprises or the family alliance or any of the practical concerns that were supposed to define this marriage. He was doing this, he told himself firmly, purely out of caution. A man in his position couldn't afford unknown variables living under his own roof, sharing his name, appearing beside him at public events where a single misstep could unravel years of carefully built reputation.
That was the reasoning he settled on, the one that let him close the folder eventually and finally head toward his own wing of the house for a few hours of restless sleep. But some smaller, quieter part of him, one he wasn't yet ready to properly examine, understood that caution alone didn't explain why he'd spent the better part of a week thinking about the particular way she'd looked at him in the garden, sketchbook clutched protectively to her chest, like she'd learned long ago that even small, private things could be taken from her the moment someone else decided they were worth having.