Chapter 10 #2
"Someone saved me. Don't confuse the two. Though I understand. After the version of events your family gave the news, the words 'save' and 'remove' must seem interchangeable."
He stood abruptly. The camera wobbled; Kyle must have been holding the phone.
Adrian came closer to the screen, and for a second I truly believed he was about to step through it like a mirror, enter this room, rip away my blanket, and say, "You're coming home.
" Once, I would have gone. Even after the screaming, the cheating, the humiliation, perhaps I would have gone, because the girl who had once been chosen was buried that deep inside me.
But now that girl lay somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson in a dark blue dress.
I stared at the man who did not know he was no longer speaking to her.
"I'll find you," he said.
"Of course. You've always been very good at finding things you considered yours."
"You're my wife."
I smiled. Slowly. Almost calmly.
"Really? Yesterday, it wasn't your child unless you knew for sure. Today I'm your wife again? Do you keep a schedule of our status, or does Vivian hand it out every morning?"
"Don't you dare talk about my mother."
"She dared talk about my body. My documents. My parents. She and I have a mutual right to unpleasant subjects."
Suddenly, he became very quiet.
"What do you know about your parents?"
There it was.
Not "you're alive." Not "the baby." Not "I'm sorry." My parents.
Graham leaned forward almost imperceptibly. I caught the movement at the edge of my vision and knew I had struck the heart of their fear. Not love. A secret. Adrian, who had not flinched at the word "life jacket," changed at the mention of my parents. Something inside me smiled coldly.
"Less than I'm about to learn," I said. "But already enough to understand that the Hale crash was filed away in your house more carefully than their memory was preserved in me."
His face became unreadable. Too quickly. Which meant the wound went deeper.
"You don't understand what you're getting into."
"I love it when a man who left his wife in the water thoughtfully warns her about the depth."
"Lana."
"No, Adrian. Now you listen. If anything happens to Kyle, if Chisholm disappears, if Gordon signs one more piece of paper declaring me unstable, if your mother tries to touch the Hale archive, I won't wait for the right moment anymore.
I'll come out in public. In any condition.
Hooked to an IV, wearing a hospital gown, covered in bruises, but I'll come out and tell everyone how you fastened my life jacket around another woman. "
He looked at me, and finally, the thing appeared in his eyes that may have made the entire conversation worth surviving.
Fear.
Not great. Not obvious. But real.
"You think they'll believe you?"
"No. At first, they won't. Then they'll see the documents. Then they'll find the witnesses. Then they'll hear the recording. And then you'll stand in front of the cameras and, for the first time in your life, fail to find the perfect dramatic pause."
Kyle seemed to stop breathing.
Adrian slowly turned toward him.
"Recording?"
I realized I had said too much. Or exactly enough. In moments like that, the difference did not emerge until later, in the consequences.
Kyle went even paler.
"I didn't..."
Adrian hit him.
Not hard? No. The screen jerked, the phone nearly fell, the image blurred, and I heard the dull sound of the blow followed by Kyle's short, muffled groan. I lunged forward, forgetting the IV, my abdomen, everything, but Graham caught my arm. Not painfully. Firmly. He held me back.
"Don't move."
"He'll kill him!"
"If you lose control, Mercer wins both of you."
On the screen, Adrian picked up the phone again.
His breathing was even. Too even. Kyle was no longer visible.
Only the edge of the rug and a dark table leg, then the camera rose, and I saw my husband's face in close-up, stripped of every mask.
This must have been how people saw him just before they signed disastrous deals without understanding why their hands were shaking.
"Have you grown braver with Lawson beside you?" he asked. "Be careful, Lana. He isn't a hero. He likes other people's wars because he lost his own."
Graham did not move. But something in the room changed. The temperature, the air, the density of the silence. I felt it in my body.
"And you like other people's lives because you don't have one of your own," I said. "Only assets."
Adrian looked at me for one more second. Then he said quietly:
"I'm coming."
The connection went dead.
Silence hung in the room, a silence in which even the IV seemed too loud.
I sat half-upright, Graham's hand around my wrist, my heart pounding wildly and a second, smaller heart inside me that I hoped could not hear its father's voice.
Irene moved first, checking the IV line and forcing me to lie back, but I barely felt her hands.
There was only one thought in my head: he was coming.
"How much time do we have?" I asked.
Graham released my wrist.
"Not much."
"Where are you taking me?"
"To the lower level of the guesthouse. It's more secure."
"I'm not hiding in a basement while he tries to break down the doors."
"You are."
"No."
"Yes."
"Graham, I've already been a woman led wherever men decided she should go. I finished that part. I didn't enjoy it."
He wheeled closer, and for the first time, his voice was not merely hard but almost angry.
"Are you going to live, or make a beautiful demonstration of your character?"
"I'm going to live, but not as luggage."
"Your child won't survive your pride."
The blow landed perfectly. Low. No better than the one I had dealt him when I compared him to Adrian.
We both knew how to strike a wound. Graham simply did it to keep me alive, while Adrian did it to make me submit.
The difference was enormous. Pain was still pain.
I turned away, clenched my teeth, and forced myself to breathe.
"All right," I said. "But Kyle?"
"Andrew will handle it."
"How?"
"In a way you are better off not knowing about until your blood pressure stabilizes."
"You have a terrible habit of making decisions for me."
"I have an excellent habit of not discussing tactical operations with someone at risk of miscarriage."
Irene said sharply:
"Thank you. At least someone remembers the medical part of this."
Ten minutes later, the house came alive.
Not loudly. Quite the opposite, with frightening quiet.
Graham's people moved without rushing, locked doors, checked cameras, and took me through a short corridor deeper into the guesthouse.
Andrew had already disappeared. Irene walked beside me, holding the IV pole and hissing at me not to make any sudden movements, though I was being pushed in a wheelchair and given little opportunity to move at all.
I hated that chair. I hated my weakness.
I hated that my body, betrayed by everyone around me, now had to be protected like the last fortress standing.
Graham traveled beside me, and the silence between us was pulled taut.
"He mentioned your war," I said.
"I heard him."
"Was it true? Did you lose?"
He looked at me in a way that told me the question was rude. I did not take it back. We had long since stopped speaking through politeness and begun speaking through wounds.
"I'm alive," he said. "So no."
"And your legs?"
"My legs haven't gotten the message yet."
The answer was almost sarcastic, but such dark pain lay beneath it that I felt ashamed.
"I'm sorry," I said quietly.
"Don't waste it. None of us has time for pretty manners today."
The guesthouse's lower level was not a basement in the usual sense.
It was more like an old safe room: thick walls, a low ceiling, an exam table, cabinets filled with equipment, a secondary exit, and a small security monitor.
They laid me on the table and covered me with a blanket.
The screen showed the gates, the dark drive, the main house, and part of the garden.
I watched it the way people watched a stage before an execution, except this time, I was not the one about to be executed.
I did not know what was. Hope? Fear? The last of Adrian's power over me?
Twenty minutes later, headlights appeared at the gate.
One vehicle at first. Then a second. Then a third.
Black SUVs came to a smooth, elegant stop as if they had arrived for a business meeting, except this was not a deal.
It was the past. Adrian climbed out of the first vehicle.
He wore a dark overcoat and no hat, his face exposed.
Two security men followed him. Uniformed officers emerged from the second. Vivian Mercer stepped out of the third.
Everything inside me contracted.
She had come herself.
She had not sent attorneys or hidden behind her son. She had come because she understood that the girl from the group home had not drowned, and now she needed to watch them finish her off properly.
Graham wheeled closer to the screen. His face was calm, but I could see the tension in his shoulders.
"It's begun."
On the gate camera, Adrian lifted his head as if he knew where the lens was hidden. He looked directly into it. And smiled.
Not for the reporters.
For me.
Then he took out his phone.
A second later, Graham's device vibrated. A message had arrived from an unknown number.
*Lana, come out. Otherwise Kyle won't live to see morning.*
Beneath the message was a photograph.
Kyle sat bound on the floor of the same office, blood staining his shirt. Beside him, an open file lay on the desk.
*Hale Fatal Crash. Closed.*
I stared at the screen, and the whole world turned to water again.
Only now, I knew which way was up.