Chapter six

Lachlan Vance's POV

The rain had stopped by the time we reached the Byron Bay cottage, but nothing about the quiet felt like peace. I stood in the doorway, boots sinking into wet grass, staring at a life I didn't recognise. A child's rain boot sat by the mat small, yellow, mud-crusted. Four years of nursing this hatred, of long nights and boardroom brutality meant to burn her out of my head, and it all came apart the second I saw her face.

Kirrily hadn't changed, not really. If anything, the years away had burned off whatever softness I remembered 

she stood at the counter like she was guarding something worth dying for. Which, I would learn in the next ten minutes, she was.

And there was the boy.

He sat on the rug, a wooden block forgotten in his fist, staring up at me with eyes I knew too well. Silver-gray. Mine.

My chest caved in.

My son.

"Lachlan." Callan's voice broke through, low and careful, his hand landing on my shoulder. "Breathe. Remember why we're here. She's playing you she used the leak four years ago, and now she's using a kid to do it again." I didn't answer. I couldn't look away from Kirrily, who'd already moved between me and the boy, her whole body a wall. "Get out of my house, Lachlan." Her voice had dropped somewhere low and ugly, somewhere I'd never heard from her before. "You lost the right to be here."

"No right?" I stepped further into the room, boards groaning underfoot. "You've been quietly buying up two per cent of my logistics float through an offshore shell this morning. You've had trading bots bleeding Vance Enterprises for months. And you hid him from me." "I hid him to keep him alive." Her eyes flashed. "I hid him from the man who threw his pregnant wife out into a storm with one suitcase."

"You sold our patents!" The words tore out before I could stop them. "You handed our green energy tech to our competitors. You gutted my company." "I didn't sell anything." Tears broke through, though her jaw stayed locked. "I took the fall for my sister. If you'd spent five minutes reading the actual server logs instead of drowning in your own pride, you'd know who really signed that transfer."

The room went still.

"Kirrily, that's enough." Callan stepped between us, palms raised. "Lachlan, let's step outside. Tempers are too high we'll handle the acquisition through legal"

"Shut up, Callan."

I didn't look at him. I was watching Kirrily's face, and what I saw there wasn't guilt. It was a woman who'd been dragged through hell and was still standing. For four years I'd been certain. Kirrily the traitor. Kirrily who took the money, who wrecked the company my father built. But standing in that small cottage, surrounded by the hum of her trading screens and a terrified, silver-eyed boy gripping her knee, that certainty cracked down the middle. My phone buzzed in my coat. Once. Then again, and again, refusing to stop. I ignored it until Callan checked his own screen. "It's your mother. The private line." I answered without breaking eye contact with Kirrily. "Not now."

"You'll listen to me right now, Lachlan Vance." My mother's voice came through cold and precise the voice she used to close hostile takeovers. She wasn't at the penthouse; I could hear the particular hush of her study at the family estate. "Where are you?"

"Byron Bay. I found her."

A long pause. I could hear paper shifting on her desk, four hundred kilometres away. "I know you found her," Bronte said, and something in her voice had gone to a strange grave in a way I'd never heard. "You're going to turn around, get in the car, and touch nothing in that house." "Mother, she's running Archangel. She's making a run at our subsidiaries". "She isn't making a run at anything, you fool." Her whisper turned sharp enough to cut. "She's exercising her legal right as your primary estate beneficiary."

I froze. "The divorce was finalised four years ago. I signed the papers the morning after she left." "You signed them," Bronte said, and I could hear the weight dragging at every word. "But I never filed them with the High Court." The floor seemed to drop out from under me.

"What?"

"I put the decree under a permanent matriarchal stay," she said. "I knew the leak wasn't her, Lachlan. I knew someone inside your own circle had framed her to strip her of her voting power. If I'd processed that divorce, her legal protection would have disappeared, and whoever did this would have stripped her clean before the year was out." I stood there with the phone against my ear, watching four years of certainty come apart in real time.

Kirrily was still my wife.

Every share she'd bought under Archangel wasn't an attack on the family, it was the family, closing ranks around itself without my knowledge. "Mother." My voice cracked in a way it hadn't since I was a kid. "Who framed her?" "Look behind you, Lachlan." Her voice had never sounded so afraid. "Look at the man standing next to you."

I turned.

Callan stood by the open door, one hand tucked inside his coat. The easy, familiar smile was gone. Behind his glasses, his eyes were flat the eyes of a stranger wearing my best friend's face.

And in his hand, sliding free of his pocket, was something small, dark, and metal, aimed low, toward the rug where Toby sat.