Chapter 10: JULIAN’S RETURN TO THE PICTURE

**POV: Lyra, with Julian*

He came to me three days after the interview aired, which surprised me. I'd expected him to hide, to let his lawyers issue a careful statement while he avoided any direct contact until the shock of my resurrection had settled into something manageable. Instead, he showed up at Ethan's building on a Tuesday evening, alone, no assistant, no lawyer, standing in the lobby with an expression I hadn't seen on his face since the night he proposed to me raw, unguarded, terrified.

"Five minutes," he said to the security guard who moved to intercept him. "I just need five minutes."

I could have refused. Ethan, watching the security feed from his office upstairs, texted me a single line “Say the word and he's gone” and part of me, the part that had spent two years hardening itself against exactly this kind of confrontation, wanted to say yes, wanted to let him be turned away without ever having to look at his face again.

But I had questions only he could answer, and I had spent too long building toward this moment to waste it on the satisfaction of denying him a conversation.

"Send him up," I told the guard. "Conference room. Not my office."

He looked smaller than I remembered, standing in the doorway of that glass-walled conference room, or maybe I was simply larger than I used to be harder, colder, no longer the woman who used to soften automatically in his presence out of two years of habit and love I'd genuinely believed was mutual.

"You look good," he said, which was such an absurd, inadequate thing to say to a woman who'd been declared dead because of him that I almost laughed.

"You look guilty," I said instead.

He flinched. Good.

"Lyra, I need you to know" He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture I remembered from a hundred late nights when he used to pace our old apartment worrying about a bad quarter. "I need you to know I didn't want this. Whatever you think happened, whatever you've built your revenge around I never wanted you dead."

"You wanted my board seat," I said flatly. "You wanted my inheritance folded into your company's holdings. You wanted me removed, one way or another, and somewhere along the way, I became dead. Forgive me if the difference doesn't move me."

"I didn't know," he said, and his voice cracked on the words in a way that, despite everything, despite two years of hatred I'd built brick by brick, still landed somewhere tender and unhealed in my chest. "I swear to you, Lyra, I swear on anything you want me to swear on. I didn't know what she was planning. I thought God, I thought we were just going to push you out of the company. Force your hand, make you walk away, nothing more than that. I didn't know about the car. I didn't find out until it had already happened, and by then" He stopped, his face crumpling in a way I'd never seen on him, not once in three years of engagement. "By then I was already too deep to say anything without destroying myself along with everyone else."

I stood very still, my pulse loud in my ears, trying to hold onto the anger I'd spent two years cultivating even as his words started to reshape everything I thought I understood.

"Who's she," I said carefully. "Who are you talking about?"

Julian looked at me, and for the first time since he'd walked into that room, something like genuine fear crossed his face, not fear of me, not fear of exposure, but fear of the answer he was about to give.

"Camille," he said. "Lyra, it was Camille. She's the one who" His voice dropped, unsteady. "I only found out afterwards. I only found out what she'd actually arranged after it was already too late to stop it, and by then, God help me, I was so afraid of what it would mean for both of us if the truth ever came out that I just let it stand. I let everyone believe it was an accident because the alternative was admitting I'd stayed silent about a murder."

The word landed in that glass-walled room like a physical blow.

“Murder.”

I had spent two years believing, with total certainty, that Julian and Camille had conspired together to eliminate me from both their lives and my father's fortune. I had built an entire architecture of revenge on the assumption of shared, equal guilt.

Julian was telling me now, standing in front of me with tears in his eyes and a decade of cowardice finally cracking open, that the architecture was wrong. That somewhere in the foundation of everything I believed, there was a lie I hadn't accounted for.

"Say it again," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "Say her name again. Tell me exactly what you mean."

"Camille planned it," Julian said, and his voice broke completely on the last word. "Alone. I only ever wanted you gone from the company. I swear to God, Lyra, I never wanted you gone from the *world.*"

I don't remember deciding to sit down. I remember the chair meeting me somewhere in the middle of my legs giving out, remember the room tilting slightly around the edges the way it had in the hospital when Odalys first told me my own case had been closed as an accident, remember staring at Julian's ruined, guilty face and understanding, with a devastation I hadn't prepared myself for, that the sister I'd spent two years planning to merely humiliate might actually be the person who tried to kill me.

"Get out," I said finally, my voice steadier than I felt.

"Lyra"

"*Get out,*" I said again, sharper, and he went, shame-faced and silent, leaving me alone in that glass-walled room with the wreckage of everything I thought I understood about my own family.

I don't know how long I sat there before the door opened again and Ethan stepped inside, his face carefully controlled, the way it always was when he was working hard not to show how much something had shaken him.

"I heard," he said quietly. "Security feed's audio was on. I'm sorry, I should have told you"

"It doesn't matter," I said, and I meant it, because in that moment nothing mattered except the sick, spinning realisation taking root in my chest. "Ethan, if he's telling the truth, if Camille really acted alone"

"Then we find out exactly how far alone goes," Ethan said, crouching in front of my chair, taking both my hands in his with a gentleness that undid something in me I'd spent two years keeping carefully sealed. "And we find out together."

I nodded, because I didn't trust my voice, and let him hold my hands in the quiet, shaking aftermath of the truth finally beginning to surface.

My phone buzzed on the table between us. A text, from a number I didn't recognise, three words long, sent at the exact moment Julian had walked out of that building.

“She knows now.”

I stared at the screen, ice flooding through my veins, and looked up at Ethan with a question forming on my lips that I already, somewhere in the pit of my stomach, dreaded the answer to.

"Someone's watching me," I said. "Someone in this building just watched Julian walk in and out, and they knew exactly what happened between us in that room."

Ethan's face went very still, very cold, in a way I hadn't seen since the day he ended a forty-year-old company in eleven minutes.

"Then someone's about to find out," he said quietly, "exactly what happens to people who watch what belongs to me."

I should have felt reassured by the possessiveness in his voice.

Instead, staring at those three unexplained words glowing on my screen, all I felt was the sudden, gutting certainty that whoever had sent them knew far more about what was happening inside Ethan Vance's supposedly impenetrable building than either of us could afford for them to know and that the person who tried to kill me two years ago might not be finished trying yet.