Confused

Dahlia

The ink was faded, the blue-black cursive slightly smudged by time, but the words hit me like a physical blow to the chest.

I stared at the margin, the handwriting swimming before my eyes until the letters blurred into a jagged smear of ink. My father had written that. I couldn't believe he'd possibly put that on a paoer.

"What is this?" My voice came out as a brittle whisper, barely audible over the hum of the storm pressing against the tall glass windows. My fingers resting on the edge of the mahogany desk as if the wood were the only solid thing left in the room. "Where did you get this?"

Rafe didn't answer immediately. The playful, dangerous heat that had hummed between us just moments ago vanished, replaced by a heavy, suffocating stillness.

He stepped closer, the floorboards groaning softly beneath his weight, but he kept his distance, respecting the sudden, terrifying gulf that had opened between us.

"Your darling father left it behind," Rafe said, his voice stripped of all its earlier teasing arrogance, dropping into something low and raw. "It was supposed to be in the same vault that was cleared out the night he supposedly died in that car fire seven years ago."

My head snapped up, my gaze locking onto his dark, unreadable eyes. "That's impossible. The police report said his body was incinerated. There was nothing left to identify—"

"The police report said what my family needed it to say," Rafe interrupted quietly, the admission hanging heavily in the air. He tilted his head, studying me with a look that felt less like suspicion and more like a strange, twisted kind of grief. "You think you're the only one who has spent years trying to untangle the lies, Dahlia? For seven years, I've had that exact shit locked away, trying to figure out what my father and yours were running from before the fire took them both."

"Before what took them?" A bitter, disbelieving laugh slipped past my lips, sharp and dry. "Your father died of a heart attack in his bed five years after mine burned to death. Don't lump them together like they were victims of the same feed."

"A heart attack? You think so?" Rafe let out a dark, humorless breath, shaking his head. "Is that what they fed you? That my dad died peacefully in his sleep with a clean conscience?"

He reached down, his long fingers brushing against the edge of the manila envelope as he pulled out a second piece of paper—heavier cardstock this time, yellowed at the edges. He laid it flat beside the photograph.

It was a medical examiner's supplemental addendum, dated three days after Philius Senior’s official passing. The cause of death wasn't natural. In bold, clinical type, the toxicology screen noted a synthetic paralytic agent—the exact same chemical compound that had been detected in microscopic traces on the steering column of my father’s car.

The room tilted. I gripped the edge of the desk until my knuckles turned stark white, the oversized sleeves slipping back to expose my trembling wrists. Even my things weren't spared.

I tried to force air into my lungs, but the oxygen felt thin, poisoned by the ghosts of men who had traded in blood and ledgers before I was even old enough to understand what a secret cost. The world I thought I knew shattered into jagged pieces right in front of me, leaving nothing behind except the cold, hard edges of a conspiracy that spanned decades.

"You're lying," I whispered, though even to my own ears, the words sounded hollow, pathetic, the desperate reflex of someone drowning who refused to admit the water was too deep. "You're building a labyrinth out of garbage just to keep me off balance. It’s what you do. You hoard everything like a dragon sitting on a pile of stolen bones."

Rafe watched me unravel, his expression carved from stone, carrying the heavy, agonizing burden of the truth even before discovery.

"Look at the date on that medical report, Dahlia," he said softly, his voice cutting through my panic with surgical precision. "Look at the notary stamp at the bottom. That stamp belongs to a firm that hasn't existed since my dad's funeral. My family didn't want the truth getting out any more than yours did. The fire wasn't an accident. And the men who lit it are still on the watch."

The weight of his words settled over my shoulders like lead. Every instinct I possessed, every protective wall I had built around myself during years of quiet mourning and calculated planning—groaned under the pressure. I hadn't stumbled into Rafe’s orbit by accident. I hadn't been swept up in a game of chance or dark romance just because fate had a sick sense of humor. I had walked right into the den of the wolf because I thought I was hunting him, only to discover I had been walking toward the exact same slaughterhouse my father left behind.

"Why?" I choked out, the single syllable tearing raw and ragged from my throat as I finally looked back up at him, my vision blurring with hot, furious tears I refused to let fall. "If they knew everything, if they were so terrified of whatever was coming for me... why didn't they stop it? Why leave us in the dark?"

"Because survival in this family isn't about telling the truth," Rafe answered, his dark gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that burned straight through my defenses. He reached across the desk, his warm fingers brushing lightly against my cold knuckles, offering no comfort, only anchorage in the storm. "It's about making sure you're the one holding the knife when the lights go out."

"Your father? Tsk. You think he was innocent, Dahlia," Rafe murmured, closing the final inch between us until his breath warmed the shell of my ear, his presence a fortress and a trap all at once. "None of them were. And the second you stepped into my orbit, you painted a target on your back just like he did."

Before I could process the weight of his words....