Chapter 3 No Way Out

| •Marin• |

Weston didn't stop me when I walked out of the private suite.

Security had moved the cars to the underground garage once the story broke. I took the private elevator down alone. Somewhere around the fourth floor my knees stopped agreeing to hold me up. I put my hand on the wall and stayed there until the doors opened.

The garage was empty. My footsteps sounded too loud against the concrete. I still had the folder's words running behind my eyes, over and over, like they'd rewritten themselves into the part of my brain that plays things back.

My driver was already waiting.

I got in, closed the door, and let myself stop pretending I was holding it together. My hands hadn't stopped shaking since the folder. I pressed them flat against my knees.

"My parents," I said.

He pulled away without a word. I hadn't planned to go there. My mouth had said it before the rest of me caught up, some old instinct reaching for the one place that had felt safe before it got complicated.

Did he even remember that dinner was supposed to be about my birthday? Or had it only been another chance to stand in front of everyone and announce the child he'd had with another woman? Had I crossed his mind even once before he called me up there?

Those questions had no answer, and no one to ask.

I blinked back the tears threatening to spill.

I wasn't going to cry.

I wasn't going to stand there and watch him make another decision for me.

I was done. Done being just "Mrs. Vane" for him.

The gates of the Alessi estate opened before the car reached them. The house came into view floodlit and enormous, every window lit at once, like someone had wanted it visible from the street before it was fully dark. The hedges along the drive were still thin. Nothing here had had time to grow into itself yet.

A maid opened the front door before I reached it.

My mother was waiting inside. She didn't ask what happened. Her eyes went to my face, then to my hands.

"Oh, Marin."

She pulled me in, and for one unguarded second I let her. I breathed in the same perfume she'd worn my whole life. It was the only thing that hadn't changed tonight.

"I'm fine," I said, though we both knew it wasn't true.

"Come inside. Let me get you something warm."

For a moment I almost let this be the version of tonight where someone simply took care of me.

Then I heard my father's voice down the hall, low and urgent, my name in it twice in a few seconds.

My mother's face changed.

"He's been on that call for an hour."

"With who?"

"I don't know. He won't say." She hesitated, then finished it anyway. "Probably the board. Or Alfred's people. Someone always calls him first when it's this bad."

That should have settled it. It almost did. But she'd said probably like a guess she wanted to be true, not one she was sure of. I let it go, because I had nothing left in me to chase it.

I found my feet moving toward the study before I thought about it.

He was already looking at the door when I opened it. The phone sat face down on his desk. A glass of scotch sat untouched beside it. His eyes were wet. I'd never seen that, not once in twenty-seven years.

"Sit down, Marin."

"I'd rather stand."

"Please."

That word undid me more than any command could have. I sat.

"I've spent the last hour trying to find a version of what happened that I can live with.” His voice was quiet, unsteady. "I keep failing."

"Then don't ask me to fix it for you."

"I have to."

He looked at his hands instead of me.

"When our families agreed to this marriage, I thought I was protecting both of them. Alfred wanted to honor a promise made long before the both of you had a say in it. By then our families had built too much together for me to believe walking away was an option."

"Then let it end. Let me be free of it."

His eyes closed for a second.

"I can't. Not because I don't love you enough to want that for you." His voice shook. "If this alliance collapses now, in the middle of this scandal, the damage won't stop at the marriage. It reaches the companies. The people who trusted both families. Every agreement built on that trust."

"You're asking me to stay married because it protects everyone else."

His face crumpled for a moment before he caught himself.

"I'm asking you to keep carrying something I put on your shoulders. I know exactly what that makes me. I'm asking anyway, because I don't know how else to protect what our families built."

I had no answer for that. I'd wanted him wrong. He'd never once claimed to be right.

The door opened without a knock.

Weston stood in the frame, one hand still on it.

My father went still.

"You have some nerve," he said, low, "coming into this house after what you've done to my daughter."

"She came here because she needed her family." Weston stepped inside and shut the door behind him. "I wasn't going to leave her to face the rest of this alone."

Weston looked at me then. His eyes moved over my face, lingering for a second before he turned back to my father.

“She hasn't eaten. She hasn't slept. Reporters have been following her since she left the hotel. You can be angry with me later. Right now, don't put more on her.”

"You've spent years making sure she faced everything alone. Don't pretend otherwise in my house."

Weston's jaw clenched, the same small tell I'd seen from him before, right before he tried to look like nothing had happened. "I know what I've done."

"Do you?" My father's voice turned bitter. "From where I'm standing, you took what you wanted from this family. You humiliated her in front of half the city."

I sat between them. Both of them had spent so long deciding what was best for me without once asking what I wanted. My chest clenched. The reason sat somewhere between their words. Whatever was underneath it, they both knew. I didn't.

“Don't turn this into what you and I never settled,” Weston said.

“Then what do you want me to talk about?”

"Marin."

The room went quiet at my name.

“She made her choice. Whatever it costs her, you don't get to make her pay for an arrangement you made with my family.”

My father's eyes didn't move off him. "And you? What have you made her?"

Weston said nothing.

"Four years," my father said, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than shouting. "Four years of watching my daughter wait for something you never intended to give her. And after everything that happened, you still expect her to stand beside you.”

"I don't expect anything from her tonight."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because she shouldn't have to face this family alone."

"Your family?"

Something shifted behind Weston's eyes. The first crack I'd seen in him since the podium.

"Don't confuse my reasons with yours."

I couldn't read what passed between them. My father looked away first. Something in his face closed, like a door he'd decided not to open in front of me.

I sat there, too tired to ask either of them what they weren't saying.

Weston looked at me again.

"Whatever you choose from here, Marin, don't let anyone make you believe you're responsible for what happened."

For one second there, I thought he was finally giving me the freedom I'd been asking for all night.

Then I remembered the folder he'd pulled from his briefcase, and what its words actually said his answer was.

I looked him straight in the eye. "You keep saying 'whatever I choose' as though I still have a choice."

"I didn't say you were the only one who gets a say."

I struggled to find an answer.

"Grandfather wants the whole family at the estate tomorrow."

"For what?"

"To discuss what happens to us."

He walked to the door and opened it.

"Be there, Marin. The family expects the CEO's wife."