All Chapters of IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Madeline's POVThe dress was red.I chose it deliberately. No color says I am here quite like red when you are a woman who was supposed to stay gone. It was silk, floor-length, with a neckline that dipped just far enough to be interesting without being desperate. I had tried it on six times in the week before tonight, each time checking my reflection not for vanity but for confirmation. Yes. This was right. This was the armor.The car stopped in front of the Meridian Hotel at eight fifty-three.'You sure about this?' Nathan said from beside me.I turned to look at him. He was wearing charcoal, his tie the same deep navy as his eyes, looking like a man who had been born to attend galas and secretly hated every one of them. That was one of the things I liked about Nathan Cross. He was honest about the things he disliked.'I have been sure about this for four years and eleven months,' I said. 'Give or take a week.'He nodded slowly. 'Right. Stupid question.''A little.'He almost smiled.

Madeline's POVNathan's kitchen smelled like coffee and morning light and the very faint ghost of whatever his housekeeper had made for dinner the night before.He was already at the island when I arrived, his laptop open, a cup of coffee steaming beside it, reading something on the screen with the focused expression he wore when he did not want to be interrupted. I helped myself to a mug from the cabinet, because I knew where the cabinet was now, and poured my own coffee, and sat across from him without waiting to be invited.That was the thing about Nathan. You never needed to wait to be invited.'How do you think it went?' he said, without looking up.'Better than expected,' I said. 'Sandra Ng will be talking about Cross Industries to her husband before the week is out. The Cho brothers are already skeptical about the development project. And three of the board members I identified caught my name tag and registered it. That's the seed. Now we let it grow.''And Jeremy?'I wrapped b

POV: MadelineThe Whitman shareholders' lunch was held at Harlow's, which was the kind of restaurant that had no prices on the menu, required reservations three weeks in advance and served food in portions designed to make you feel like you were receiving a gift rather than a meal. I had eaten there twice. Once with Jeremy, years ago, when he was trying to impress me at a time when he did not yet know that the way to impress me was not with restaurants but with remembering things.The second time was last Thursday, alone, to make sure the staff recognized my face.Today I arrived five minutes before the lunch was scheduled to begin.Not too early. Not late. The arrival of someone who is comfortable with their own punctuality.The room held twelve people. Nine of them I had studied for months. Their investment histories, their professional grievances, their relationships with the Whitman family, their vulnerabilities and their ambitions. I walked in knowing more about most of them than

Madeline's POVI should have told Nathan about the meeting with Jeremy. I told myself I would, the next morning, over coffee, the way I told him everything.I did not get the chance, because Dara found me first, in the kitchen, with a face that meant she had not slept."We have a problem," she said."What kind?""The kind where I found out something I wish I hadn't." She sat down across from me, pushing her tablet across the island. "I was running a deeper background check on the Eleanor accounts last night. Standard work, cross-referencing every name connected to the holding companies. And I found something that doesn't have anything to do with Eleanor at all.""Dara.""Nathan's sister was engaged to Jeremy. Before you."I stared at her."Before me," I repeated.Eleven years ago. Camille Cross. The engagement lasted eight months. It ended right around the time Eleanor started making calls to a law firm that specializes in, and I'm quoting the firm's own marketing materials here, repu

Madeline's POVI did not tell Nathan about the document.I told myself it was strategy, that I needed to verify its authenticity before bringing it to anyone, and that moving carefully was the only way to ensure it could not be discredited later. Some of that was true. The rest of it was that I did not yet know whether I trusted him with it, and that not knowing scared me more than I wanted to admit.I brought it to Dara instead."It's real," she said, after running it through three different verification processes, comparing signatures, checking metadata, cross-referencing the letterhead against authenticated company documents from that period. "Or it's the best forgery I've ever seen, which would require resources neither of us has any reason to think the sender has.""So it's real.""It's real."I sat back in my chair, the weight of it settling into my chest. Five years of believing one woman's jealousy had destroyed me, and the truth was so much larger, so much colder. A financial