Chapter 13: Undue Influence

RAYA

Nobody slept much that night.

By the time the sun came up, Xavier's legal team had already read through Victor's filing twice and were on their second pot of coffee in the dining room that had apparently become a war room sometime around three in the morning. I sat at the end of the table in yesterday's clothes, still not entirely sure what timeline my life was operating on anymore.

"It's thin," the lawyer with the steel-gray hair said, the same one who'd taken apart Dr. Nash's credentials in my boutique a week ago. "Undue influence claims require actual evidence of coercion. Right now he's got a fast marriage and a public breakdown. That's a narrative, not proof."

"Narratives are Victor's specialty," I said.

"Then we make sure the judge sees documents instead of narrative." She slid a folder across the table. "Financial records showing Sinclair Gems was in genuine crisis before the marriage. Timeline of the psychiatric attack, thoroughly discredited. Medical opinion, if we need it, confirming you were competent to sign a contract."

"There's one more thing." A younger associate cleared his throat, not quite meeting my eyes. "Victor's filing includes a statement from a member of the Sinclair household staff. Says you were, quote, 'hysterical and irrational' the night you left the estate. Accusing your family of an elaborate fraud conspiracy that, and this is a direct quote, 'made no sense to anyone in the room.'"

The room went quiet.

Every word of that was technically true. I had accused them of exactly that, in exactly that state, in front of exactly those witnesses. The only thing missing from the statement was the part where I'd been right.

"I want to see it," I said.

He slid the page across. I read my own words back to me, filtered through someone else's careful, damning phrasing. Accusing your family of an elaborate fraud conspiracy that made no sense to anyone in the room. It wasn't even a lie. I had said something close to that, that night, standing in the foyer with Xavier's bodyguards behind me. I just hadn't been talking about a scheme that hadn't been proven yet.

I set the page down carefully, like it might bite me if I moved too fast.

"I wasn't irrational," I said. "I was right, and none of them believed me yet."

Nobody in the room had an answer for that, because none of them knew how right.

Xavier hadn't said much of anything since we sat down. He was reading something on his own laptop, jaw tight, the particular stillness he got when he was angry in a way that wasn't going to be loud about it.

"He's not actually trying to win this," Xavier said finally, not looking up. "He knows a coercion claim against me is going to be difficult to prove in court."

"Then why file it?"

"Because it doesn't need to win. It needs to exist." He closed the laptop. "Every outlet that covered the marriage will cover the injunction. Every person who saw us at that dinner will read a headline that says I manipulated a vulnerable woman into signing away her name. The court case is almost beside the point."

I sat with that for a second, and something in it finally cracked all the way through.

"Vulnerable." I said the word like it tasted wrong in my mouth. "That's the part I can't get past. Not that they're lying about you. That they've decided the only explanation for me choosing anything is that I wasn't capable of choosing at all."

"I know."

"Do you?" I stood up, needing to move, needing somewhere to put the anger that had nowhere else to go in a room full of lawyers taking notes. "I have spent my entire life being told what a good, grateful girl I was for going along with whatever they decided for me. And the one time, the one single time I actually made a decision for myself, they're going to stand in front of a judge and say I was too broken to have made it."

"We're fighting a lawsuit designed to lose," I said, quieter now. "So we're fighting a story designed to spread." I looked at him directly. "Which means the actual danger isn't the judge. It's whoever they get to say it happened."

"Someone already has," the associate said quietly.

I turned. "Who."

DYLAN

His father found him in the study a little after nine, which was early for Richard, who usually didn't surface before ten with a hangover he pretended not to have.

"You look terrible," Richard said, not unkindly, settling into the chair across from him with the particular energy of a man who wanted something.

"I didn't sleep."

"None of us did." Richard set a folder on the desk between them, the same kind of thin legal folder Dylan had watched Victor's people carry around all week. "Victor filed this morning. Emergency injunction. Coercion and undue influence."

Dylan didn't touch it. "Against who?"

"Locke. Claiming he manipulated Raya into the marriage while she was, let's say, emotionally compromised." Richard said it like he was reading a weather report, the same flat tone Victor always used for things that mattered enormously to everyone except him. "It's a good claim. Believable, even. Locke's spent years circling this family. Everyone in this city already half-believes he wanted the Sinclairs ruined long before Raya ever called him."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"You knew her for seven years, Dylan. You watched the engagement. You'd know better than anyone whether she seemed like herself in the weeks before the wedding, whether Locke had been in contact with her, whether anything about her behavior seemed—" Richard paused, choosing the word with obvious care. "Influenced."

Dylan understood, finally, what he was actually being asked.

"You want me to testify that Xavier was already manipulating her. Before any of this happened."

"I want you to tell the truth as you remember it." Richard's eyes didn't waver. "You loved her for seven years. Doesn't part of you already believe something changed in her at the end? That she wasn't entirely herself?"

The worst part, Dylan thought, was that some small, ugly piece of him wanted that to be true. Wanted an explanation for why she'd walked away so completely, so fast, straight into another man's name, without so much as looking back at seven years of his life like it had meant nothing at all.

It would be so much easier if someone else had done this to her.

"I need to think about it," Dylan said.

Richard smiled, the kind of smile that already knew the answer. "Don't think too long. The hearing's in nine days."

RAYA

Sophie called that evening, her voice pitched low, careful.

"I probably shouldn't be telling you this," she said. "My cousin works reception at Carter & Associates. Dylan came in this afternoon. Spent two hours with Richard and a family lawyer."

"Doing what?"

"She didn't hear everything. She heard the word testimony. More than once."

I found him at the Carter estate an hour later, standing in the driveway like he'd been waiting for someone, though probably not me. He went pale the second he saw the car.

"Raya, I—"

"Did you sign anything?"

"Not yet." He wouldn't look at me directly. "My father says it's just a formality. Just answering some questions, that's all, nothing—"

"I don't care what your father calls it."

Dylan's jaw worked, but nothing came out. He'd never once, in seven years, been able to hold a line against his father, and watching him try now, failing in real time, told me everything I needed to know about how this was going to go.

"Choose whatever side you want," I said. "I stopped needing your family's opinion of me a long time ago."

I got back in the car and didn't look back to see his face.