Chapter Seven - The £250,000 Bride

Celeste

By morning I was a genre.

Not a person. A genre. There’s a kind of headline that gets its own font, and I’d earned it overnight.

THE £250,000 BRIDE.

HARTWELL’S SECRET DOUBLE LIFE

I had apparently slept with Sebastian Huxley six times, blackmailed him twice and killed him once.

Productive week.

The genre specified that escort had become fact. Some outlets had already moved on to think-pieces. One columnist I’d sat beside at three separate weddings wondered, in print, what it said about modern womanhood that a Hartwell would sell herself. She’d once begged me to get her daughter into a members’ club.

I made a note. The trouble with being a genre is that everyone assumes they’ve already read you.

Michael had moved us to a third flat, because the second was, in his words, “statistically unwise.” This one sat above a dry cleaner and smelled of steam and other people’s suits.

I sat with a laptop he swore couldn’t be traced in yesterday’s dress and one of his shirts, and watched myself trend.

The comments were a democracy of strangers, each one certain. Some wanted me jailed. Some wanted me dead. A surprising number wanted my skincare routine, which I found the most honest response of the lot.

The dangerous part wasn’t the humiliation. I know humiliation. We’re old friends. The dangerous part was the pull underneath it, warm and familiar and completely poisonous. The urge to fix it. An old Heartwell trait.

I could write the statement. I could see it. Gracious, wounded, dignified. One perfect paragraph that would make the kind editors sympathetic and the cruel ones bored. I’d spent my whole life learning to hand people the version of me that cost me the least. My hands actually itched for it.

“You’ve written it in your head,” Michael said, not looking up from his screen. He had changed clothes. Of course he had.

Somewhere between gunfire, fake dating and discovering a dead billionaire’s client code, the man had found time to put on a fresh black shirt.

I hated competence before coffee.

“Written what?”

“The statement. You’ve drafted three versions and you’re choosing between the second and the third.”

I hated that he was right. “The second is warmer.”

“The third is smarter.”

“You’ve drafted them too?”

“No. I watched your face do it. You have a tell when you’re about to be reasonable. It’s brief.”

“Anything else my face has confessed lately?”

“Several things. I’m choosing not to itemise them.”

“How restrained of you.”

“One of us has to be.”

Here’s what I decided, in the flat that smelled of steam, with my name in a bespoke font.

I wasn’t going to do it.

The statement would work. It always worked. That was the trap. Every polished paragraph I’d ever released had bought me a quieter week and a smaller life. I handed the world a Celeste it could manage, and in return the world managed me.

“I’m not making a statement,” I said.

He looked up. Something moved behind his eyes. On another man I’d have called it approval. On Michael it was probably recalculation.

“Good,” he said, and the corner of his mouth quirked up.

“Don’t look pleased.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re practically glowing.”

“I don’t glow.”

“No. You brood in high definition.”

“Do I now?” He slid his laptop across the table. “This helps you. It doesn’t save you.”

I looked at the screen.

“What am I looking at?”

“His credential was cloned,” Michael said.

“You can prove that?”

“I can prove it was accessed from two locations too close together in time for the same physical token to have been used.”

“That clears me.”

“No.”

The hope lasted exactly one second.

“The payment remains real,” he said. “And the cloned credential only proves Huxley may not have booked the room personally.”

“Wonderful.”

“It helps.”

“Put it on my gravestone. So I’m cleared of sleeping with a dead man and still guilty of being paid by one?”

“You were never sleeping with him. You’re on the hook for the money, the timing, and the fact that you photograph expensive.” He said it flat, an observation, not a compliment. “Juries convict on expensive.”

“Juries haven’t seen my overdraft.”

My phone lit with a headline alert I hadn’t set. Michael had. I’d be furious about that later.

EXCLUSIVE: HUXLEY ‘PAID HARTWELL FOR MONTHS’.

A source close to the family. A pattern of transfers, invented and specific. A photograph, because there’s always a photograph. This one from a gala eighteen months ago, Huxley mid-laugh with a glass in his hand.

“Months?”

I almost swiped past it. Then I looked at the edge of the frame.

Behind Huxley’s shoulder, half-turned, caught mid-sentence with a flute of champagne and that smooth, patient, tell-me-everything smile I would know at the bottom of the sea.

Anne.

The woman who had convinced me I was finally being brought inside Harlow’s system.

The woman who had handed me the credential now getting people shot at me.

“She’s alive,” I said.

Michael’s attention fixed on the image.

“And she was with Huxley.”