CHAPTER FIVE

Ryder

The words never came. I felt them die in my throat the second Marcus Hart's hand closed around my arm.

He didn't drag me. He didn't have to. One look from him and the crowd around us folded backward like water breaking around a rock. Victoria grabbed my other sleeve, her nails digging in through the fabric, and together the three of us moved through the arena tunnel and into a room I'd only ever seen used for press interviews. 

Marcus shut the door himself. The click of the lock sounded louder than the whole crowd outside.

“Sit,” he said.

Nobody sat.

His voice was calm. That was the part that scared me. My own father yells when he's angry. Marcus Hart just got quiet, and quiet from a man like that was worse than any shout I'd ever heard.

“Do either of you understand what almost happened out there?” he asked. He wasn't looking at Victoria. He was looking at me.

“Marcus, I can explain—” Victoria started.

“I am not talking to you yet.” He still hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. “I am talking to the boy who just told the entire territory, on camera, that he wants to talk to a girl who isn't his girlfriend.”

My jaw tightened. “She's not just some girl.”

“I know exactly what she is,” Marcus said, and something in the way he said it made the hair on my arms stand up. He didn't explain it. He just let it sit there in the room with us, heavy and unfinished, before he kept going. “What I need you to understand is what happens if this becomes a story instead of a rumor. The Hart name does not survive a scandal like this cleanly. Neither does the Knight name. Neither, Ryder, does your future.”

“So bury it,” Victoria snapped. “That's what you do. Bury things.”

Marcus turned to her slowly. “I intend to.”

The room went cold.

“Starting tomorrow,” he said, “the two of you are exactly what everyone already believes you are. Devoted. Public. Photographed at every opportunity until this die down on its own.” He looked at me when he said the next part, and his eyes didn't blink once. 

“No calls to her. No detours past her dorm. No excuses to be alone with her, ever, for any reason. You will play the part so well that the girl standing in the stands right now starts to believe she imagined the whole thing.”

My chest went tight. “And if I don't?”

“Then I stop protecting you from what your own father will do when he hears his son nearly shifted in a public arena over a girl who scrubs floors for a living.” Marcus said it flatly, like a fact, not a threat. Somehow that made it worse. “I am doing you a favor, Ryder. I would take it.”

I didn't answer. I couldn't. Every word he'd said was true and I hated every single one of them.

Victoria straightened her dress like the conversation was already over, like she'd won something. “Fine. Devoted. I can do devoted.” She looked at me with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. “You'll get used to it.”

Marcus wasn't finished.

“There's one more thing,” he said, and for the first time since he'd pulled us into that room, his calm slipped. Just a fraction. Just enough that I saw something underneath it I couldn't name yet. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his phone, turned the screen toward us both.

It was a photograph. Old. Grainy. A hospital room, a woman I didn't recognize, and two newborns side by side in matching bassinets.

“I had my assistant pull the original birth records tonight,” Marcus said, “after everything that happened out there. Before any of this goes further, I need to know something, and I need to know it from the only person in this building who might actually be able to tell me the truth.”

He looked straight at me.

“When she was in your arms that night at the party before the wig, before any of it, did the bond feel like it was reaching for a stranger, Ryder? Or did some part of you already know her?”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, because the answer terrified me more than anything Marcus Hart had said in that entire room.