ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Eight: Not Pretending Anymore
I went to see Victor alone, against every piece of advice Ethan had given me, because some part of me still believed, foolishly, that if I stood in front of my uncle with the evidence in my hand, some remaining scrap of decency would make him confess before we had to drag him through a courtroom.
"Don't go without me," Ethan had said that morning, reading the determination on my face before I'd said a word about my plans. "Whatever you're thinking, Mia, don't do it alone."
"I have to talk to him myself," I'd told him. "He's my family. If there's any part of him that can still be reasoned with, it has to come from me, not from your investigators or your lawyers."
"He locked your father out of every good decision for twenty years, and you think reasoning with him is a realistic strategy?"
"I think I need to try," I'd said, and left before he could talk me out of it, telling myself the whole drive over that I was being brave rather than reckless, a distinction I would come to regret within the hour.
I found him at the old Carter Design warehouse on the waterfront, the one my father had used for overflow storage back when the company still had enough business to need it, and I should have noticed immediately that something was wrong, that Victor never went anywhere without at least one of his lawyers trailing behind him, that the warehouse door had been left unlocked in a way that felt less like carelessness and more like an invitation.
"Mia." He turned from where he'd been standing near a stack of old inventory crates, and for the first time since my father's funeral, I saw something behind his composed, pleasant mask that looked almost like fear. "You shouldn't have come here."
"I found the memo, Victor. The one with your signature. The one with Noah's consulting firm attached to it." I held up my phone, the scanned document already loaded. "You set my father up. You knew exactly what that loan would do to him before he ever signed it."
His face did something complicated, grief and calculation moving across it in quick succession. "Your father was going to hand this company to strangers, Mia. Investors from overseas who didn't care about the twenty years he'd built it over. I did what I had to do to keep it in the family."
"By destroying him."
"By ensuring it stayed a Carter company," he said, his voice rising, "which it would not have, if I hadn't intervened. You have no idea what I saved this company from."
"You didn't save anything. You bled it dry and blamed him for bleeding."
Something in his expression shifted then, hardened, and I understood, a half second too late, that I had made a serious miscalculation in coming here without telling anyone but Grace where I'd gone. He moved faster than a man his age had any right to, and before I fully registered what was happening, I was shoved backward into the small windowless storage room at the rear of the warehouse, the heavy metal door slamming shut and locking with a sound that echoed for a long time in the dark.
"Victor!" I pounded on the door until my palms ached. "This is insane, you can't just lock me in here."
"I need time to think, Mia," his voice came, muffled, through the metal. "You've made this considerably more complicated than it needed to be."
I sank down against the cold concrete wall eventually, my throat raw from shouting, and tried, with limited success, not to think about how long a person could survive in a windowless room before anyone thought to look here, in a warehouse that hadn't officially belonged to Carter Design in over a year, that existed on no current lease Ethan's people would think to check. I thought about my father, about whether he had ever stood in a room much like this one, metaphorically at least, cornered by his own brother's ambition, and I found the thought steadied me more than it frightened me, because it meant I was, in some small way, finishing something he had never gotten the chance to.
✲ ✲ ✲
I don't know how long I sat in that room, my phone dead within the first twenty minutes, the only light coming from a thin gap under the door, before I heard the distant sound of tearing metal and Victor's raised, furious voice, and then, unmistakably, Ethan's.
"Mia!" His voice, closer now, urgent in a way I had never heard it. "Mia, are you in there?"
"Here!" I pounded on the door again, my voice cracking. "Ethan, I'm here!"
There was the sound of something heavy being forced, metal groaning under pressure, and then the door gave way all at once, and Ethan was there, hauling it open with his bare hands, his knuckles split and bleeding, his shirt torn at the shoulder, looking like a man who had fought his way through something considerably worse than a locked door to reach me.
"Are you hurt?" His hands moved over my arms, my face, checking for damage with a kind of frantic thoroughness that would have embarrassed me under any other circumstances.
"I'm fine. Ethan, your hand—"
"It's fine." He pulled me against him, hard enough to knock the breath out of me, his heart pounding beneath my ear at a rate that had nothing to do with the running he'd clearly just done to get here. "God, Mia. I told you not to come here alone."
Behind him, through the warehouse's open loading door, I could see Victor being restrained by two of Ethan's security team, shouting something about lawyers and rights that no one seemed inclined to listen to.
"How did you find me?" I asked, my voice still shaking.
"Grace called me the second you stopped answering your phone. She'd made you tell her where you were going before you left, apparently anticipating exactly this outcome." He let out a breath that was half laugh, half something closer to despair. "Remind me to give that woman a raise. And possibly hazard pay."
✲ ✲ ✲
The confrontation happened outside, in a sudden downpour that had started sometime during the chaos, both of us soaked through within minutes, standing in the wreckage of a plan I had made entirely alone.
"You can't keep doing this," Ethan said, water running down his face, his voice rough with something that was equal parts fear and fury. "You can't keep deciding, on your own, to walk into danger, and expect me to simply accept whatever happens to you afterward."
"I didn't ask you to decide anything for me, Ethan. I never have. That's the entire problem." My own voice was rising now, matching his, the rain giving me a kind of cover I didn't examine too closely. "You've spent this entire marriage managing me like a variable in a strategy, moving pieces around a board, and I let it happen because I told myself it was easier than admitting how much I wanted you to actually see me instead of protect me."
"I do see you." He stepped closer, rain plastering his hair flat, his voice cracking on the words in a way I had never once heard from him. "I see you so clearly it terrifies me, Mia. That's the truth I haven't been able to say out loud. Every decision I've made since the day you set my shirt on fire has been about not losing you, and I have been so afraid of that fear that I turned it into strategy instead, because strategy doesn't feel like standing in a warehouse doorway watching security tear apart a locked door not knowing if you were even conscious on the other side of it."
"Ethan—"
"I was afraid," he said, the words breaking apart something in his voice, "for the first time in my adult life, I was afraid of losing something that wasn't money or power or the company, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I did what I always do, I managed it, and I am so sorry that managing it looked like managing you."
I stood there in the rain, soaked and shaking, and felt something in my own chest finally break open in return.
"I love you," I said, before I could stop myself, before I could measure whether it was wise or safe or in keeping with the eight pages we'd signed months ago in a cold lawyer's office. "I think I have for weeks. Since the blackout, maybe before. I didn't want to say it, because saying it made it real, and real things can be taken away."
He went very still, rain running down his face, and for one long, terrible moment I thought I had said too much, moved too fast, broken whatever fragile thing we'd built in secret over months of pretending.
Then he closed the distance between us and kissed me, in the rain, in front of his own security team and the wreckage of Victor's warehouse, without a single camera arranged to catch it, without a reporter's question forcing his hand, and I understood, with a certainty that settled deep into my chest, that this kiss belonged to no contract at all.
"I love you too," he said against my mouth, when we finally broke apart, both of us laughing now, half from relief and half from the sheer, ridiculous absurdity of confessing our feelings for each other in a thunderstorm outside a crime scene. "I have for longer than I've been willing to admit, even to myself."
"That's very inconvenient timing, Ethan Blake."
"Everything about you has been inconvenient timing," he said, "since the day I walked into your office. I've decided I don't mind."
✲ ✲ ✲
We drove home together in a silence that felt entirely different from every silence that had come before it, my hand resting in his on the seat between us, both of us still damp and disheveled, both of us smiling in the particular, foolish way of people who have just said something they can't take back and don't want to. He kept glancing over at me at red lights, like he was checking I was still there, still real, still willing to be there after everything the day had cost us both.
"What are you thinking?" I asked, somewhere around the fourth or fifth glance.
"That I should have told you three weeks ago," he said. "In the elevator, probably. I had the thought and I talked myself out of it, because telling you felt like handing you a weapon I wasn't sure I trusted you not to use."
"And now?"
"Now I think withholding it cost us three weeks we didn't have to lose," he said, "and I'd very much like to stop doing that, if you'll let me."
"I'll let you," I said, and meant it more than I had meant almost anything in my life.
The call came in just as we pulled through the mansion's gates, Ethan's phone lighting up with a number I didn't recognize, and I watched his entire body go rigid the instant he answered, watched the color drain from his face in the space of a single sentence.
"Say that again," he said, his voice gone flat and cold in a way I hadn't heard since the very first day I met him.
I couldn't hear the voice on the other end, but I watched Ethan's hand tighten around the phone until his knuckles went white, watched him close his eyes for one long, controlled breath before he spoke again.
"If you hurt her," he said, "I will burn every single thing you have ever built to the ground, Noah, and I will enjoy doing it."
He hung up, and turned to me with an expression I had never seen on his face before, not fear exactly, but something colder and more absolute, the look of a man calculating the exact price he was about to be asked to pay.
"What happened?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
"Noah has my mother," he said. "He's holding her until I sign over my shares in the company. All of them. Tonight."