CHAPTER EIGHT

Sophia's POV

I found out about Zane's discovery the wrong way.

I was walking past Damien's office at eight in the morning looking for coffee and the door wasn't fully closed and I heard my mother's name.

I stopped.

I shouldn't have listened. I know that. But when you hear your dead mother's name spoken in a room you weren't invited into, your feet stop moving on their own.

"The brake failure wasn't mechanical," Zane's voice. Flat and certain. "Someone cut the line. Clean cut, not wear. The original accident report buried it."

"How deep," Damien said.

"Deep enough that it took me six years of digging to find it." A pause. "The report was filed by a Vale affiliated investigator. The same firm Victoria uses for background checks."

Silence.

"She was nineteen," Damien said quietly.

"Yes."

"They killed her parents and then sent Marcus to find her."

"Yes."

I put my hand flat against the wall.

The hallway was very quiet. The estate hummed around me the way expensive buildings do, climate controlled and indifferent, and I stood there with my palm against the wall and felt the floor shift under me in a way that had nothing to do with the building.

My parents hadn't died in an accident.

My parents had been killed.

And the woman who ordered it had then spent three years having me in her house, calling me a gold digger, telling me I came from nothing.

I pushed off the wall and walked into the office.

Both of them looked up.

Damien's face did something fast and complicated when he saw me. Zane's didn't change at all which somehow made it worse.

"How much did you hear," Damien said.

"Enough," I said.

I walked to the chair across from the desk and sat down because my legs had made a decision about not holding me up much longer and I preferred to be sitting when that happened.

Zane turned the screen toward me without being asked.

The file was long. Detailed. Photographs of the accident report with sections highlighted, financial records showing payments from a Vale subsidiary to the investigative firm, a forensic analysis of the brake line that used words like deliberate and non-accidental and premeditated in clean clinical language that made it worse somehow.

I read it all.

Nobody talked while I read. Zane sat with his hands flat on the desk. Damien stood by the window doing the thing he did when he was processing, looking at the city like it owed him an answer.

When I finished I put the file down and looked at the screen for a moment.

"The trust," I said. "My parents' trust. Victoria found out about it."

"Yes," Zane said. "We think approximately eight years ago. Through a Vale connected bank."

"And instead of finding a way to access it directly she decided the cleanest option was.." I stopped.

"To remove them and insert Marcus," Zane said quietly. "The trust language specifies the assets transfer through the bloodline's spouse. With your parents gone and you married to Marcus, the Vale family would have had access through him."

"Except I didn't know about the trust," I said.

"Which kept you manageable," Damien said from the window. He was still looking at the city. "As long as you didn't know you had anything, you wouldn't fight for it."

I sat with the full shape of it.

Eight years of planning. My entire marriage a transaction. My parents' death a business decision made by a woman who had then looked me in the eye for three years across her dining table and smiled.

"Sophia," Damien said.

I looked up.

He had turned from the window and was looking at me with that expression I was still finding a name for. Not pity. Not calculation. Something in between that was entirely his own.

"Say something," he said.

"I'm thinking," I said.

"You've been thinking very quietly for four minutes."

"I think quietly," I said. "My mother was the same way."

Something moved in his face when I said that.

I looked at Zane. "Can this be used. Legally."

"Elijah thinks yes," Zane said. "It opens criminal exposure for Victoria directly. Not just civil." He paused. "But using it means going public. The Vale legal team will come back hard and they'll use everything they have. The affair story. The contract. Everything."

"And if we don't use it."

"Marcus gets the trust. Victoria gets away with it. And we spend the next year fighting a civil case we might lose."

I nodded slowly.

"Use it," I said.

Zane looked at Damien.

Damien looked at me.

"You're sure," he said.

"She sat across from me for three years," I said. "She watched me set the table and cook dinner and try to be a good wife to her son and the whole time she knew what she did to my parents." I looked at Damien steadily. "Use it."

Damien nodded at Zane. Zane picked up his phone and left the room without another word. That was Zane. Everything efficient. Nothing wasted.

And then it was just us.

Damien stayed by the window and I stayed in the chair and the office was quiet and outside the city was doing its thing, moving and loud and completely unaware.

"I need to ask you something," I said.

"Okay."

"Last night. What you said to Marcus. She's mine." I looked at him. "Did you mean it or was it for the room."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Does it matter," he said.

"Yes," I said. "It matters to me."

He looked at me for a long time. The grey blue eyes doing that thing where they gave away more than he intended if you knew where to look.

And I was starting to know where to look.

"Both," he said finally. "It was for the room." A pause. "And I meant it."

The office was very quiet.

I should have said something sensible. Something about the contract or the sister arrangement or the forty eight hours Dominic kept referencing. Something that acknowledged all the reasons that answer was a problem.

Instead I said "okay" and he said "okay" and we looked at each other across the room and neither of us moved and the silence between us was the kind that had stopped being uncomfortable somewhere in the last four days without either of us deciding that was allowed to happen.

My phone buzzed.

I looked at it. A news alert. The affair story had been picked up by two more outlets overnight. A gossip site had published a timeline, fabricated and completely convincing, of how long Damien and I had supposedly been seeing each other.

I put the phone face down.

"Dominic is going to want a meeting," I said.

"Dominic is already waiting," Damien said. "He's been in the dining room for twenty minutes."

"You knew."

"He texted me when you were reading the file."

I stood up. Straightened the sweater I was still wearing from this morning. Looked at Damien.

"Are you going to tell him about the brake line," I said.

"He already knows," Damien said. "Zane tells Dominic everything."

"So this morning was…"

"Zane wanted to tell you himself," Damien said. "Before Dominic turned it into strategy."

I looked at the door. Then back at Damien.

"That was kind," I said. "Of Zane."

"Don't tell him that," Damien said. "He'll deny it."

Something in my chest did a small, inconvenient thing.

I walked to the door. Stopped.

"Damien," I said.

"Yes."

"When this is over," I said. "When Marcus is done and Victoria is done and the trust is settled and the contract is safe and all of it is finished." I looked at him over my shoulder. "What happens to the sister arrangement."

He held my gaze.

"What do you want to happen to it," he said.

I looked at him for a moment.

Then I walked out without answering because some questions needed more than four days of knowing someone before they were ready to be answered out loud.

But in the hallway, moving toward whatever Dominic had built overnight from the ruins of the gala, I thought about both and I meant it and the way he had said it like they weren't contradictions.

And I thought that maybe the universe's sick sense of humor was not entirely without mercy.

Sometimes it dropped you at a bus stop in the rain.

And sometimes it put the right person in the kitchen when you got there.