Chapter 16

The restaurant Edmund chose was the kind that didn't put prices on the menu — a private room on the second floor of a building that had been serving Manhattan's oldest money for a hundred years, white tablecloths, low light, a waiter who vanished the moment the wine was poured and didn't return until he was summoned.

Edmund was already seated when they arrived, unhurried, a glass of scotch at his elbow, looking every bit the man who'd mentored Claire for a decade rather than the man whose name she now knew belonged on nine years of quietly devastating paperwork.

"Claire." He rose, brief and courteous, as though nothing at all had changed between them. "Weston. Thank you for coming. I wasn't certain you would."

"We're not here for pleasantries, Edmund." Weston didn't sit immediately. "You said you wanted an honest conversation. So let's have one. Explain R.C. Holdings."

Edmund's expression didn't so much as flicker. "Sit down, Weston. This conversation goes better with wine."

"Explain it."

"Sit down," Edmund said again, quieter this time, and something in his voice made even Claire feel the old, familiar pull of it — a decade of instinctively obeying that exact tone before she'd known enough to question where it came from.

They sat.

"Your father," Edmund said, turning the scotch slowly in his hand, "has been under my legal guardianship for the last three years. Power of attorney, granted by the court after his stroke, when it became clear he had no other family capable of managing his affairs and a son who was, at the time, too busy building an empire to visit more than once a month."

The silence that followed had a physical weight to it. Claire watched Weston's hands curl slowly into fists beneath the table.

"That's not possible," Weston said, low, dangerous. "I have power of attorney. I've had it since the stroke. I signed the paperwork myself."

"You signed *a* paperwork." Edmund's smile was thin, precise, utterly without warmth. "I'd suggest you have your lawyers review exactly which documents your father's court-appointed guardian filed eighteen months later, when your visits became even more infrequent and a certain judge — an old friend of mine — determined a second, more actively involved guardian might better serve his interests."

"You stole guardianship of my father."

"I *earned* guardianship of your father, the same careful, patient way I've earned everything else in this story you're all so certain I'm the villain of." Edmund's voice sharpened, the warmth finally, entirely gone from it. "Do you know what it's like, Weston, to watch the son of the man who destroyed your family build an empire on the very ruins he left behind, and do nothing about it for thirty years because you were waiting — actually waiting, with real patience, for the moment it would matter most?"

"You used him," Claire said, her voice shaking now, the grief and fury of the last two days finally boiling over in a way she couldn't hold back anymore. "You used a sick man who can't speak for himself to hide your money. You used my father's trust to bleed his company dry for nine years. And you sat across from me every single week for a decade, letting me believe you actually cared what happened to me, while you were quietly deciding exactly how useful I'd be to you eventually."

"I did care." For the first time, something in Edmund's composure genuinely cracked, and it was almost worse than his calm had been — the flicker of something real underneath thirty years of careful construction. "That's the part none of you want to believe, because it's inconvenient. I cared about you exactly as much as I've ever cared about anything since I buried my sister. That doesn't make what I did to your father forgivable. It just makes it *true*."

"Did you kill him?" Claire's voice cracked entirely on the question, years of controlled grief finally splitting wide open in the middle of a restaurant that suddenly felt very small. "My father — did you have something to do with what happened to him?"

Edmund looked at her for a long moment, and whatever answer was forming behind his eyes, Claire understood with sudden, sick clarity that she might not survive hearing it, whichever way it came.

"No," he said finally, quiet. "I didn't kill your father, Claire. But I let him walk into a confrontation I knew would end badly, because I needed him distracted from what I was doing to his company long enough to finish what I'd started. Whatever happened to him after he left my office that night — I bear the weight of it. I've carried that weight for nine years. But I did not kill him."

"Then who did?" Weston's voice was granite. "Because someone amended a hospital report from 'irregular' to 'natural causes' within forty-eight hours, Edmund, and I don't believe for a second that was a coincidence."

Edmund's gaze moved slowly between them, and for the first time all evening, something that looked almost like fear crossed his face.

"That," he said quietly, "is a question I would very much like the answer to myself. Because I've spent nine years assuming I was the most dangerous person orchestrating events around this family, Weston."

He set down his glass, and his voice, when it came again, had lost every trace of its earlier control.

"Tonight, I'm starting to think I was wrong."