CHAPTER 9: THE INVESTIGATOR

I found Ryker in the study again, the same room that had started collecting our worst conversations like a museum I hadn't agreed to curate. The fire was already lit, low and orange, throwing long shadows across the same desk where I'd caught him with a bottle six months ago and lost something I still hadn't found words for.

"We need to talk," I said, closing the door behind me.

"If this is about this morning…"

"It's not about this morning." I set my phone on the desk between us, the screen still lit with Julian's message, my hand not quite steady when I pulled it back. "It's about Vivian's therapist."

That got his attention. He set down his pen, slow, deliberate, the way a man moves when he's bracing for something he already suspects will hurt.

"What about her therapist?"

"Marcus met with someone from her office this morning."

The silence that followed had weight to it, thick enough that I could feel it pressing against my ribs. Ryker's jaw worked once, twice, before he spoke again.

"How do you know that?" His voice had gone quiet, careful, the way it did whenever he was bracing for a blow he couldn't yet see the shape of.

"The same person who sent me the Northgate information."

"The same person you still won't tell me the identity of."

"Because I don't know it, Ryker. I've told you that." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, frustration finally cracking through the careful calm I'd been holding onto since the coffee shop. "I'm not hiding anything from you. I'm working with what I've got, same as you."

He studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind his eyes, and for the first time since the wedding, I watched him actually decide to believe me instead of simply choosing not to argue.

"Vivian's therapy records are sealed," he said finally. "Marcus shouldn't have any legal access to them."

"Which means whatever he wants, he's not getting it through legal channels."

"No." He stood, crossing to the window, staring out at nothing, his reflection ghosted faintly against the dark glass. "Which means he's either bribing someone, or he already has a connection inside that office I don't know about."

"Does that scare you?"

"Everything about my cousin scares me right now." He said it without turning around, without the usual armor he wore around admissions like that one. "I've known him my entire life, Selene. I used to think I understood exactly what he was capable of. I'm starting to realize I understood nothing at all."

"What do we do?"

"I don't know yet." He finally turned, and the look on his face was one I hadn't seen from him before, something closer to fear than anger, closer to a man realizing the ground under him wasn't as solid as he'd always assumed. "I keep thinking about the accident. About how quickly everyone believed her version of that night, including me. What if I got that wrong too?"

"You did get it wrong," I said quietly, before I could stop myself.

He looked at me for a long moment, something unspoken passing between us that neither of us reached for out loud.

Dinner that night was its own quiet minefield. Ryker's father, freshly briefed on the auditors, spent most of the meal glancing between his son and me like he was trying to solve a math problem he didn't have all the numbers for.

"You've been spending a great deal of time in Ryker's study lately," he observed, cutting his steak with more precision than necessary.

"We've had business to discuss."

"Business." He said the word like it tasted strange in his mouth. "I do hope that's all it is. It wouldn't do for people to start talking."

"People are already talking," Elise said, setting her fork down with more force than the moment required. "There was a tabloid piece this morning I'd rather not repeat in full. Suffice it to say, they found a cruel way to compare Selene's dress size to furniture, and printed it as though it were clever."

I felt my face heat, the old familiar sting rising fast and automatic, my fingers tightening around my fork hard enough that the metal pressed a thin white line into my palm. I kept my expression level anyway, because giving them the reaction they wanted had never once made the comments stop, only made them louder.

"I read that piece," his father said. "Distasteful. Though I suppose there's truth buried somewhere in even the ugliest commentary."

"There's no truth in cruelty dressed up as observation," Elise said, sharp enough that his father actually flinched. "There's only cruelty."

I watched a muscle jump along Ryker's jaw. He didn't defend me out loud. But I noticed, the way I'd started noticing things about him lately whether I wanted to or not, that his knuckles had gone white around his own fork, and that he didn't touch his plate again for the rest of the meal, pushing food around it the same tired way I'd been pushing it around mine my whole life.

Later, alone in my room, I sat by the window and let myself feel it properly for the first time all day, the exhaustion pulling at every muscle, the fear sitting cold in my stomach, the strange aching hope I kept trying to talk myself out of every time it surfaced. My phone buzzed against the windowsill, the vibration loud in the silence.

Not the anonymous number this time. Julian.

Any update?

Told him. He's scared, Julian. Actually scared. I've never seen that on him before.

Good. Scared men make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes work in our favor.

I set the phone down and looked out at the dark garden below, thinking about Ryker's face when he'd admitted he didn't understand his own cousin anymore, thinking about the way his knuckles had gone white at dinner over a comment about my dress size that hadn't even been directed at him, and wondering, not for the first time, what exactly it would take before he stopped being careful with his heart and started being reckless with it instead.

A knock at my door pulled me out of it, sharp and sudden in the quiet room.

Ryker stood in the hallway when I opened it, still dressed from dinner, his tie loosened, his expression unreadable in the low light, one hand braced against the doorframe like he needed it to hold himself steady.

"I looked into it," he said, without preamble. "The therapist's office. Marcus wasn't there for records."

"Then what was he there for?"

"He was meeting someone. A woman. My assistant recognized her from a photo, but couldn't place the name." He hesitated, something flickering across his face that looked almost like dread, his jaw tightening the way it did whenever he was about to say something he'd rather not. "Selene, I think Vivian might have hired her own private investigator before she disappeared. And I think whoever that investigator is might know exactly what really happened the night of her accident."

The words settled between us in the dark hallway, heavy and cold, and for a moment neither of us moved, both of us standing very still on the edge of something neither of us was ready to fall into.