CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ADRIAN’s POV

I had been carrying the question for over four years now. Four years since the night I sat in the conference room and listened to a recording from a dead man’s phone while Damien stood beside me.

Damien had said he knew the voice from the recording but he had said nothing after that.

I had asked him twice again that night and he told me he had been mistaken. That the distortion made it impossible to identify and that he had spoken too quickly.

But I watched his face while he said it and I had let it go because letting it go was the strategic decision at that time. Pressing Damien on something he had decided to withhold was like pressing water, it simply moved around you and gave you nothing.

So I just stopped pressing and waited. But tonight. I stopped waiting.

Tonight I had gone through every piece of material my security team had accumulated since the archive breach, the SUV footage, the payment records, the suppressed report fragments, the Hale connection, Ava Bennett's returning investigation and I had laid it all out across the study desk and looked at it deliberately again.

And the voice on the recording was still the one thing that connected everything and went nowhere.

*********************************************************

Damien’s apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building in the newer part of the financial district. It was expensive and modern. The kind of space that communicated success without the weight of family legacy attached to it. He had always preferred it that way. His own orbit that intersected with the Laurent name without being consumed by it.

I had called twenty minutes ahead, enough that he couldn’t reasonably claim to be unavailable.

He answered the door in a grey shirt with a glass of amber liquor in his hand, the perfect picture of a man spending a quiet evening at home. His expression registered mild surprise and then settled into the warmth it always settled into around me.

“Adrian.” He stepped back to let me in. “This is unexpected.”

“I know.” I said as I walked in.

The apartment was the same as always — clean, deliberately casual, art on the walls that cost more than it appeared to. Music playing low from somewhere in the corner, the kind of jazz that filled silence without demanding attention.

I sat on the couch without being invited to. Damien settled into the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other with the relaxed ease he brought to every room.

“Drink?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He studied me briefly. “You have that face,” he paused. “The one where you’ve decided something.” He took a slow sip. “You’ve always made that face since we were children. Father used to call it your verdict face.”

“The recording from the dead driver’s phone,” I said plainly and watched him.

The glass didn’t move, neither was his expression. His expression stayed calm.

“We were over that,” he said evenly, taking a sip from his glass again.

“You told me you were mistaken.”

“I was.”

“I think you weren’t.” I said quietly.

There was a brief silence while the jazz continued its indifferent murmur in the background.

Damien uncrossed his leg slowly and leaned forward, setting his glass on the table between us.

I had spent thirty-one years learning the specific geography of my brother’s expressions and I could read the invisible shift behind his countenance when he was deciding one.

Not whether to tell the truth. Damien rarely moved toward truth as a first option. He was deciding which version of the situation served him best going forward. Calculating the distance between what I already knew and what I could prove, and measuring whether continued denial remained viable.

“Where is this coming from?” he asked finally.

“The voice on the recording,” I said again. “You recognized it. You stood in that conference room and said it yourself with certainty, then you spent the rest of that evening pretending you hadn’t said them.” I leaned forward slightly. “I need to know whose voice it was.”

Damien looked at me for a long moment, then he stood and walked to the window.

I watched him stand there with his back to me, one hand resting on the glass, looking at the city below in the way he did when he was buying time that had already run out.

"Even if I had recognized something," he said carefully, "what would it have changed? The investigation was already going nowhere. The driver was dead. The file was being buried by people with more reach than either of us."

"It would have given me a direction." I said calmly.

"Or gotten you killed." His voice stayed calm but sharpened. "You were already exposed. The company was in free fall. Whatever you think you would have done with a name four years ago, you wouldn't have survived it."

I looked at him steadily. "So you withheld it to protect me."

"I withheld it because I wasn't certain." He held my gaze. "And because certainty about something like that carries a cost I wasn't prepared to put on you."

It was a good answer, carrying just enough of the texture of genuine concern to be believable if you weren't paying close attention but I was paying very close attention.

"Tell me the name," I said firmly.

"Adrian…"

"If you weren't certain, tell me who you thought it was. I'll verify it myself."

There was a beat of silence. Then, Damien walked back and sat in a chair opposite from me and looked at me with an expression that was almost the expression of a man deciding to trust someone.

"Gerald Fitch," he said.

I was stupefied for a moment.

"Mother's lawyer," I asked to be certain.

“The family’s private legal counsel for twenty years. The man who handles trust distributions, estate matters, anything Mother doesn’t want processed through Laurent Group’s official legal team.”

The recording played itself back inside my head rapidly with the new information sitting on top of it.

Do not lose her.

What about the child?

Take the boy first.

If she survives — handle it.

My mother’s lawyer, on a phone call coordinating the accident that killed my wife and my son still doesn’t make any sense to me.

"Why now?" I asked again.

Damien frowned slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Four years of silence and you tell me tonight." I tilted my head slightly. "Why tonight?"

"Because the situation has changed,” he said. “Selene Arden is in this city dismantling everything we built and Victor Hale is dead." His voice stayed level. "Whatever was buried four years ago is surfacing regardless. I'd rather you be ahead of it than behind it." He sounded entirely sincere.

That was the thing about Damien that had always been true, he sounded entirely sincere even when sincerity was the last thing operating in the room.

I stood from the couch. "I appreciate you telling me," I said.

He watched me stand. "Adrian. Whatever you're thinking about doing with this, please be careful. "

I looked at him for one long moment. “Thank you.” I said and walked toward the entrance door.

********************************************************

The drive home was quiet. I sat with Gerald Fitch's name and thought about it. Checking out the possibilities.

Gerald Fitch might be exactly who Damien said he was or a door Damien had opened to keep me from looking at another one. But be it what it was, I will find out.

I stared at the city moving past the window.

Four years ago Damien had recognized a voice and said nothing. Tonight he had given me a name. Neither of those things felt like the behavior of a man with nothing to hide.

My phone lit up on the seat beside me. A message from Floyd.

Martin Reeves located at Port district. He wants to meet but says he will only talk to you directly.

I stared at the screen for a long moment.

Martin Reeves, the officer who filed the suppressed report and had spent years trying to resurface it. Who had gone dark the same week Victor Hale died.

And now he had surfaced and wanted to see me discreetly.