3. Reid #2
“I want to destroy him,” she says simply.
“I want to take back everything I built and leave him with nothing. Not just the money or the reputation. I want the people. I want the investors who shake his hand at parties to look at him and see exactly what he is. I want Margot to realize that the throne she stole has no kingdom left to rule.”
There’s the Scarlett I remember.
The one who, when we were sixteen and some boys at a regatta party called her father a failure to his face, spent the next three months making sure their family quietly stopped getting invited to anything that mattered.
No raised voice, no scene. She took them apart so cleanly they never knew it was her.
Vincent Kensington has no idea what’s coming for him.
“I might be able to help with that,” I say carefully.
Her gaze pins me. “How?”
“Vincent’s spent two years keeping me out of the waterfront. Connections, old favors, the kind of quiet maneuvering that stays just inside the lines. Taking him down was always going to be a pleasure. You walking into my arms in the rain just moved up the timeline.”
I pause, watching her face.
“And you know him better than anyone alive. Where he’s soft. Where he’d bleed.”
She sets down her teacup with a soft click. The firelight catches the angles of her face, and the wheels are turning behind her eyes.
“You want the waterfront development,” she says slowly. “I want Vincent ruined. Are you proposing what I think you’re proposing?”
“That depends on what you think I’m proposing.”
She stands there with the rain blurring the city behind her, holding herself against a cost that hasn’t finished landing yet.
“I need to know this isn’t charity,” she says without turning around.
“I need to know you’re not doing this because you feel sorry for me, or because of what we were to each other a long time ago.
I can’t afford...” Her voice catches, just slightly.
“I can’t afford to owe anyone anything ever again. ”
There it is. The wound underneath the armor.
I stand and move to join her at the window, close enough to see the tension in her shoulders, far enough that she doesn’t feel cornered.
“This isn’t charity,” I say quietly. “Vincent Kensington has been a thorn in my side for years. Taking him down is good business. The fact that it also helps you is...” I search for the right word, one that won’t give away too much. “A bonus.”
She turns to face me, and we’re closer than I planned. Close enough to count the freckles across her nose, the ones she always hated and I never did, the ones I used to trace with a fingertip on a dock when the future was still a thing that happened to other people.
My hand lifts on its own, halfway to her cheek before I catch it and shove it back through my own wet hair instead. A man fixing his hair. Nothing to see.
She’s an hour out from the worst night of her life. I won’t be one more man reaching for her.
“Your company wants the waterfront development,” she says, her voice dropping into a flat, professional register.
“It sits on my mother’s land. You help me strip Vincent of everything, his reputation, his relationships, the empire I built for him, and I help you take the deal.
” She holds my gaze, unflinching. “That’s it. Business.”
I look at her for a long moment. At the armor she’s built in under an hour, at the walls she’s thrown up between us, at the woman who would rather frame this as a transaction than admit she needs help.
I could push. I could tell her that I never stopped, that every woman I’ve been with in the last decade has been a pale imitation of her, that I didn’t come back for business and we both know it.
But she’s not ready to hear that. She’s standing in the ruins of her marriage with her sister’s betrayal still fresh and her whole carefully constructed life collapsing around her, and the last thing she needs is another man demanding more of her.
So I let her have it. The armor. The distance. The fiction that this is just a deal between two people who used to know each other.
“All right,” I say. “Business.”
A flicker crosses her face, relief, maybe, or disappointment, or some complicated mixture of both. She extends her hand, formal and final, and I take it.
Her skin is still cold from the rain. I run my thumb across her knuckles once, slow, and catch the small hitch in her breath she would die before admitting to. The deal is sealed. There is no reason to still be holding her hand.
I hold on a beat past the point where letting go would be the decent thing.
She doesn’t pull away.
Her phone lights up on the table between us.
Then again, then a third time and a fourth, the screen filling with alerts faster than either of us can read, and she slides her hand out of mine to pick it up. The color drops out of her face.
Without a word she turns the screen toward me.
KENSINGTON ANNOUNCES DIVORCE: “MY WIFE AND I HAVE GROWN APART”
Vincent at some press podium, somber and sympathetic, every inch the wronged man. The subheadline calls it a cold and distant marriage. He has been considering a separation for months, the article says, long before any other complications arose.
Any other complications. That is how he files a two-year affair with her sister.
“He didn’t wait for Monday.” Her voice stays steady even while her hands shake. “He went first. He made himself the victim before I could open my mouth.”
She sets the phone down, and the corner of her mouth lifts without any humor behind it.
“Look at him. The grieving husband, the cold wife, the brave little speech. He’s selling it beautifully.” Her eyes come up to mine. “He should. He spent ten years watching me sell things for real. The difference is mine were true.”
She says it to the screen, not to me, chin level, the last of the wreckage gone out of her face. The soft girl I knew on that dock would have cried tonight. This woman is already three moves ahead, and I should not be looking at her the way I am looking at her right now.
I want to tell her I have missed her.
I would be lying about which version I mean.