Chapter 5 — The Man I Was Told to Hate

I found him two doors down, in a room with dark wood shelves and a single lamp turned on low, standing at a desk with his phone pressed to his ear. He was still in his shirt from the ceremony, top button undone, his jacket gone entirely, sleeves pushed up like he'd been working at something. My dress was still half zipped up the back. I hadn't stopped to fix it. I hadn't stopped for anything.

I didn't knock.

"Who is this," I said, holding up the photograph before he'd even fully turned around.

He ended the call without saying goodbye to whoever was on the other end. His eyes went to the photograph, then to the man standing next to Adrian in it, and something happened to his face that I hadn't seen there all day. Not fear, not the careful control he'd been running on since the church. This was closer to shock, raw and unguarded, gone before he could stop it from showing.

"Where did you get that," he said.

"It was on our bed. In an envelope with my name on it. Who is that man standing next to Adrian?"

Alexander reached for the photograph. "Give it to me."

I pulled it back out of his reach. "No."

"Lucy"

"You don't get to just take this from me. Not after everything today. Tell me who he is."

He looked at me for a long second, and something behind his eyes was working through a decision I couldn't see the shape of yet.

"Victor Hale," he said finally.

The name didn't mean anything to me at first. Then it did, and my stomach turned in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.

"Victor Hale hugged me this morning," I said slowly. "He told me I was the best thing that ever happened to this family. He kissed my cheek and called me his new favorite Vale. He's been at every dinner for three years, sitting two seats down from your father like he's part of this family and not just some executive who works for it."

"He is part of this family. That's exactly the problem."

"Is he the one who took Adrian? Is he the one who did this?"

Alexander didn't answer right away, and that silence told me more than anything he could have said out loud.

"Answer me," I said. "You said no more lies. That was the deal. I married you in front of six hundred people because you asked me to trust you for ninety seconds, and now I'm asking for the truth and you're standing there deciding how much of it I get."

"Victor's connected to Adrian's investigation. That's all I can confirm right now."

"Connected how?"

"I don't know the full extent of it."

"You're lying to me again."

"I'm not lying." His voice sharpened, and for the first time since the church, I saw something underneath the control that looked almost like desperation. "I'm choosing what I say very carefully, which is different, and I need you to understand the difference matters."

I stared at him, and the worst part of the whole day settled over me at once, worse than the gunshot, worse than the vows, worse than the envelope on the bed.

"You're protecting him," I said. "You're protecting Victor."

"That's not—"

"It is. You know he's involved and you're still not telling me everything, which means you're covering for him, and I need you to explain to me right now why you would do that to Adrian."

"Because if I expose him before I know exactly where Adrian is, Adrian dies." Alexander's voice came out fast, almost angry, like the words had been sitting behind his teeth all day waiting for permission to leave. "Victor has access to him. I don't know where. I don't know who else is involved. If I move on Victor now, with what I actually have, which isn't enough, whoever's holding Adrian panics and it's over. So yes. I am protecting him. For exactly as long as it keeps my brother breathing."

"How long is that supposed to be, Alexander? A day? A week? Because I watched a man everyone at that wedding trusted stand next to my missing fiancé in a photograph somebody left on my bed, and you want me to just sit here and be polite to him at breakfast."

"I don't want you anywhere near him. That's actually the point."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now."

The room went quiet. I didn't have anything to say to that right away, because it made a horrible kind of sense, the kind that didn't leave room for the anger I wanted to feel.

"I want the truth," I said finally. "All of it, as fast as you can safely give it to me. I don't care how ugly it gets. I have spent this entire day being told what I need to know for my own protection, and I am done being protected into the dark."

"I want the same thing." He said it like it cost him something to admit out loud. "I want him alive and I want this over and I am running out of ways to do both at once."

"Then we do it together. No more of you deciding what I can handle."

He was quiet for a moment. "No more lies," he said. "I mean it."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I just did."

I believed him, or at least I wanted to, and some small part of me noticed the exact second his eyes moved away from mine when he said it, like he already knew that promise wasn't going to survive the week. I filed it away and didn't say anything about it. Not yet.

That was when I saw the blood.

It was dried along the edge of his cuff, dark against the white fabric, a smear he clearly hadn't noticed or hadn't had time to deal with.

"What happened to your hand," I asked.

"Nothing."

"Alexander."

"It's not important."

"It's blood. On your wedding day. I think it's a little important."

He didn't answer, just pulled his sleeve down slightly like that would fix it, and I reached for his wrist before I'd fully decided to, wanting to see how bad it was underneath.

His hand caught mine before I got there.

Not hard. Fast, though, and certain, the same way he'd pulled me behind him in the church when the gun went off. We stood there for a second, his hand wrapped around mine, close enough that I could see the tiredness in his face up close, the same tiredness that had been there since the altar.

Neither of us moved.

Whatever I'd been angry about a second ago went quiet, just for a moment, and I hated how easily it went quiet.

"Don't look at me like that," Alexander said, low.

"Like what?"

His grip loosened around my hand, slow, like he was making himself do it.

"Like I'm someone you could trust."

He let go and stepped back, putting real distance between us for the first time since I'd walked in, and then he turned and walked out of the room without waiting for me to say anything back.

I stood there holding my own wrist where his hand had been, and I couldn't figure out why that sentence hurt more than every lie he'd told me all day.

I sat down on the edge of the desk after he left, still holding the photograph, and I didn't move for a long time. The house had gone quiet in a way it hadn't been since I arrived, no more guests, no more cameras, just the sound of a door closing somewhere far down the hall and my own breathing evening back out. I kept thinking about the way his eyes had moved away from mine right before he promised me the truth. I told myself I'd imagined it. I didn't fully believe that.

He came back ten minutes later with a folder.

He didn't explain where he'd gone. He just set it down on the small desk near the window and stood back, arms crossed, watching me the way you watch someone about to touch something hot.

"This is part of what Adrian was working on," he said. "Not all of it. But it's real, and it's yours to see now."

I opened it.

The first few pages were dense with numbers, wire transfers between accounts I'd never heard of, dates going back almost a year, half of it flagged in a red pen that wasn't Alexander's handwriting. I didn't understand most of it. I kept turning pages anyway, looking for something I could actually hold onto.

Clipped to the front of the third section was a single sheet, a list of names typed down the center of the page. I scanned it fast. Executives I didn't recognize. A shell company or two. A set of initials that meant nothing to me.

"What is this list," I asked, not looking up.

"People Adrian flagged as connected to the accounts somehow. Board members. A couple of outside investors. He was still narrowing it down when he disappeared."

I kept reading down the page, and my mouth had gone dry before I even reached the bottom of it.

At the bottom of the list was my own name.

Lucy Bennett.

I read it twice, certain I was misreading it the first time.

"Why was Adrian investigating me?" I asked. My voice didn't sound right.

Alexander's face went pale, actually pale, in a way that told me this wasn't something he already knew, or wanted to know.

"He wasn't."

A pause stretched out long enough that I almost asked again.

"Someone was investigating you," he said.

I looked down at the page again, at my own name sitting at the bottom of a list I had no context for, and my hands weren't entirely steady when I turned to the next page to see if there was more.

There was.

Under my name was a photograph, older than the one still sitting on the desk between us, its edges gone soft and slightly yellow with age. A woman stood in it, younger than I'd ever seen her, laughing at something outside the frame, her hair down around her shoulders the way she used to wear it before I was born, before the chemo, before she got sick enough that I stopped being able to remember her any other way.

My mother.

I had gone through every box in my father's attic after she died. Every album. Every loose envelope nobody had gotten around to sorting. I knew every photograph that existed of her. I would have sworn to that in a courtroom.

I had never seen this one.

Standing beside her, close enough that his hand rested near her shoulder like he had every right to put it there, was Richard Vale.

Not Adrian's father, some stranger, some name on a list. Richard Vale, the man who'd sat in the front pew this morning watching me marry his son, the man whose grip I'd felt when he shook my hand at the reception like he was closing a deal. Twenty years younger in the photograph, but unmistakably him. Unmistakably standing close enough to my mother that it wasn't a coincidence, wasn't some stranger who happened to wander into frame.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't have if I'd tried.

I turned the photograph over slowly, like moving too fast might change what was written there.

Four words, in handwriting I didn't recognize.

“She knew the truth.”