All Chapters of The Man I Should Have Hated: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"I think you have the wrong person," I said."No, Miss Voss." Harlan's voice didn't waver. Not even slightly. "We have the right person."The wind off the river moved through me again. I pressed my free hand flat against the pharmacy wall and felt the cold of it climb my palm."How do you know my name?""You're currently employed as a contract analyst at Meridian Consulting. You live at Fourteen Wren Court, apartment 3C. You've been with Elliot Caine for approximately two years." A pause. "Give or take."I said nothing."Miss Voss?""I heard you." I stood up from the wall. Somewhere down the block a car alarm started and stopped. "How do you know those things?""The family is thorough.""That's not an answer.""No," he agreed. "It isn't."I should have hung up. I know that now — the way you know things afterward, in the clean, unhelpful light of hindsight. Instead I stood on the pavement in a cream dress with the river wind in my hair and I kept listening, which probably told Harlan e

I closed the file and pushed it back across the table."I need time to think," I said.Harlan didn't reach for it. Didn't move at all, really — just sat with his hands folded and his face arranged into that same professional neutrality that was starting to feel less like composure and more like a wall someone had built specifically to keep me from knowing what was behind it."Of course," he said. Then: "You already made your decision when you walked through that door."Something tightened in my chest. "You don't know me well enough to make assumptions."He looked at me for a moment. "Neither do you."I didn't have an answer for that. Which was its own kind of answer, and he knew it, and I hated that he knew it.I looked back at the file. At my name on the first page. At the photograph of Adrian that felt too considered, too still, like something taken by someone who knew how to make surveillance look like portraiture."Why did Adrian choose me?" I said."That's a question for Mr. Ashf

I didn't sleep on it.I pulled up Dr. Reeves on my phone at eight in the morning with cold tea going stale on the nightstand and found almost nothing. A profile on the Ashford Group's medical staff page — removed, but cached. Credentials from a private medical college. One published paper, co-authored, seven years ago, on neurological recovery protocols in long-term unconscious patients.That last part sat wrong.Not because it was unusual for a coma specialist to have published on coma recovery. Because the paper was co-authored with a researcher at the Ashford Medical Research Initiative.My mother's foundation.I put the phone face-down on the bed and looked at the ceiling and counted the things I knew for certain. Nora Voss, twenty-eight, former contract analyst, currently sitting in an estate in Velmoor in the same clothes she'd worn yesterday because she hadn't planned on staying the night. Mother dead six years. Fiancé — ex-fiancé — apparently a surveillance asset. The man she'

Eleanor's name sat in the room between us for a moment that felt longer than it was.Adrian didn't explain it. Didn't expand on it. He said the name and then looked back toward the window the way a person looks at something they've been circling for a long time and have finally decided to face, and the quality of the silence that followed was the silence of someone who'd already grieved and was now on the other side of it — in the practical territory, where grief becomes a thing you work around."She has access to the medical wing's authorization protocols," he said. "She's been on the estate's medical oversight committee since my father died. No one questioned it — she's family.""How long have you suspected her?""Three months." He turned from the window. "Since I found the gap in the compound's procurement chain. The purchase orders were approved at board level, but routed through a subsidiary that Eleanor controls directly.""And Crane?""Crane handles the money. Eleanor handles t

I didn't go to Adrian that night.Not because I didn't want to — I had enough to bring him, the lab photographs alone would have justified walking down that corridor at midnight. But there was something deliberate about waiting. Something I'd learned from three years of pharmaceutical documentation, where the instinct was always to file the report immediately, and where the better move was almost always to sit with the information until you understood its full shape.What I had was pieces.Reeves in the lab at night, removing something from Eleanor's storage unit. Mara gone, room cleaned, the kind of clean that required advance preparation. An anonymous contact who'd used my name for the first time like a door opening a fraction wider.What I didn't have was the connective tissue. The reason Reeves had moved tonight specifically. The reason Mara had been removed tonight specifically. Whether those two things were related or coincidental, and in a house like this, coincidence felt like