Chapter 10.

They found Richard Bennett’s phone before they found Richard Bennett — discarded in a trash can two blocks from the hospital, screen cracked, battery dead. Damian’s security team traced his last known movements to a bus station on the edge of the city, then lost him entirely.

“He’s hiding,” Mia said, sitting in the back of Damian’s car as they drove through streets she didn’t recognize, following a lead that was growing colder by the hour. “He’s not running from Marcus. He’s running from us. From having to explain the rest of it.”

“You think he knows more than he told you at the hospital.”

“I think my father has spent ten years protecting a secret he was too ashamed to say out loud, and now that it’s finally catching up to him, his first instinct isn’t to fight. It’s to disappear.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated how much that admission cost her. “That’s who he’s always been. Not a bad man. Just a man who runs from things instead of facing them.”

“Is that why you never run from anything? Because you watched him stand his ground and lose everything anyway?”

The question landed somewhere unguarded. Mia watched it happen — watched the careful architecture of Damian Cross’s composure shift, just slightly, like a door left open a crack it hadn’t meant to be.

“I don’t know how to run,” he said finally. “I only know how to win. Even when winning costs more than I planned for.”

“Has it? Cost you more than you planned for?”

He turned to look at her then, and something in his expression made the air in the car feel too thin. “Every single day since your father walked into my office and I realized the version of you I’d built in my head for ten years — the villain’s daughter, the collateral I needed — wasn’t real. That you were real instead. That’s cost me more than anything else in this entire plan.”

Mia’s breath caught. She hadn’t expected honesty. Not like that, not so plainly, not in the back of a car while they searched for a man who might already be beyond saving.

“Damian—”

His phone rang before she could finish, shattering whatever fragile thing had just opened between them. He answered immediately, and Mia watched his expression shift from tension to something sharper.

“Where?” A pause. “We’re fifteen minutes out. Don’t let him leave.”

He ended the call and looked at her. “Security found him. A motel on the east side, paid cash, used a fake name. He’s alone.”

Relief hit Mia so hard she felt dizzy with it. “Is he safe?”

“For now.” Damian leaned forward, giving the driver new directions. “But Mia — I need you to prepare yourself. Whatever he’s been hiding, whatever made him run instead of trusting either of us with the truth, we’re about to find out. And it might not be something you want to hear.”

The motel was exactly as depressing as Mia had imagined — flickering sign, thin walls, the kind of place people went when they didn’t want to be found. Her father opened the door before they’d finished knocking, his face still bruised from the attack, eyes hollow with something that looked less like fear and more like resignation.

“I knew you’d find me,” he said quietly, stepping back to let them in. “Damian always finds what he’s looking for eventually.”

“Why did you run?” Mia’s voice shook despite her effort to keep it steady. “Dad, we’ve been searching for hours. I thought—”

“You thought Marcus’s people got to me first.” Richard sat heavily on the edge of the motel bed, the springs creaking under him. “No. I ran because I couldn’t watch your face when I finally told you the truth. It’s easier to disappear than to see you look at me the way you’re about to.”

“I didn’t just help cover the money’s trail ten years ago.” His eyes lifted to meet Damian’s, and whatever he saw there seemed to steal the last of his resolve. “I was the one who found the loophole in the first place. Eleanor Vane came to me with the plan to siphon funds through the subsidiary transfer, and I’m the one who figured out how to make it invisible to auditors. I didn’t get caught in someone else’s fraud, Damian.”

He looked at Mia, and the shame in his eyes was the most honest thing she’d ever seen on his face.

“I orchestrated it. Your father didn’t lose everything because of bad luck or a rogue employee. He lost everything because I helped Eleanor Vane steal it, and when it all came apart, I let the story become about my greed instead of hers — because she promised to protect my family if I kept her name out of it entirely.”

The room went silent except for the hum of a dying air conditioner.

“You’re not just connected to what happened to my father,” Damian said slowly, his voice dangerously quiet. “You caused it.”

“Yes.” Richard’s voice broke entirely. “And when your father died eighteen months later, I told myself it was grief, not guilt, that killed me a little every day since. I told myself the debt I paid you — my daughter’s marriage — was enough to balance what I owed. But it was never enough. It was never going to be enough.”

Mia felt the floor tilt beneath her, every certainty she’d built over the last two weeks collapsing at once. She turned to look at Damian, bracing herself for fury, for the cold fallout she was sure would follow — and found him staring at her father with an expression she couldn’t read at all.

“Then it’s time,” Damian said finally, “that you tell the board exactly what you just told us. Tonight. Before Marcus Vane finds out we already know — and decides that a hospitalized man and a runaway confession aren’t loose ends he can afford to leave alive.”