Chapter 43
ADRIAN
Iwalked back through the empty hallways, avoiding everyone. I could hear the party in the distance. I was not about to show my face in there. I had no idea how bad it was. It felt like I was in a car without brakes rolling downhill. Everything was falling apart.
And now this.
I pushed open the door into what felt like a war room. Dash’s makeshift production office had become our hideout. Shit was hitting the fan, and just like every other time things had gotten bad, we all pulled together.
“How did Clara get this information?” Briggs asked. “Who had access to the specific terms of the arrangement?”
“Just us,” Sebastian said, leaning against the desk with his arms crossed. “The family and Annika. That’s it.”
“Then one of us talked.” I said flatly, still reeling from watching Elizabeth leave. “Someone told Clara or told someone who told Clara.”
“None of us would do that.” Dash was scrolling through social media, his lips twisting into a snarl with each swipe. “Adrian, we’re family. We’d never do that. It’s not just you and Elizabeth that are getting dragged through the mud. This will blow back on all of us. We didn’t do this. “
“Then explain it.” I was barely holding it together.
“Could it have been overheard?” Sebastian suggested, though he didn’t sound convinced. “A waiter at dinner, someone backstage.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Clara’s information is too specific. Too accurate.”
Mom put down her phone. The way she did it was just a little too controlled.
It was the kind of move she did when she was trying to look calm, but she was anything but.
Like the time Sebastian burned down the wooden playset in the backyard because he was pretending to live in a cabin and needed a fire.
She crossed her legs, folded her hands, and placed them in her lap.
We all watched her. All of us waited for her to tell us what she found out. And because the woman raised four boys, she had a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense.
“What is it?” I asked.
Mom’s expression told me everything I needed to know before she even opened her mouth. Whatever she had discovered was bad. Really bad.
“I just got off the phone with Simone at Vogue,” she said quietly. “They’re running a feature. About all of us.”
“A feature could be good,” Dash said, though his tone suggested he didn’t believe it. “Fashion of Love Week has been a success.”
“It’s not that kind of feature.” Mom’s voice was calm, but I could hear the steel underneath. “They’re planning an exposé. ‘The Real Blackwell Brothers.’ They’re going after all of you. Personal lives, past relationships, business decisions. Everything.”
The room went silent.
I felt my stomach drop. “How personal?”
“Very.” She looked at each of us in turn. “Simone wouldn’t give me specifics, but she warned me that they have sources. People willing to talk about things we’d all rather keep private.”
“Fuck.” Sebastian ran his hand through his hair. “They’re going nuclear.”
I knew what he meant. We all had things we didn’t want public.
Relationships that had ended badly. Business deals that had been messy.
Moments of poor judgment that we’d buried under years of careful reputation management.
Nothing illegal, nothing truly scandalous in the grand scheme of things, but enough to damage us.
Enough to make us look like the entitled, reckless rich boys the media loved to tear down.
We had always managed to keep a good relationship with editors in all the best magazines. They left us alone for the most part. But clearly, it was game on. They were coming for us.
“They’re using the Clara situation as the entry point,” Mom continued. “The fake engagement gives them justification to dig into everything else. If Adrian was willing to fake a relationship for publicity, what else might the Blackwell brothers be hiding?”
“This is a hit piece,” Briggs said flatly. He’d stopped pacing, his lawyer brain already working through implications. “They’re trying to destroy us. Take down the whole family while we’re vulnerable.”
“Can we stop it?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“Stop Vogue?” Briggs shook his head. “No. We can threaten legal action, but unless they print actual lies, we don’t have grounds. Opinion pieces and exposés based on factual information are protected.”
“So we’re just supposed to let them destroy us?” Dash’s voice was rising. “Let them tear apart everything Dad built because of one PR misstep?”
“It wasn’t a misstep,” I said quietly. “It was my decision. My plan. This is on me.”
“Adrian,” Sebastian started.
“No.” I cut him off. “I’m the one who brought Elizabeth into this. I’m the one who insisted we could control the narrative.” I looked around at my brothers, at my mother. “This disaster is mine.”
“We all agreed to it,” Briggs said. “We all signed off on the plan. You don’t get to take sole responsibility for a family decision.”
“It was working until someone leaked the truth,” Dash said. “That’s not on you—that’s on whoever talked to Clara.”
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is.” Mom’s voice cut through our argument. “What matters is how we respond. Simone said the piece runs next week. We have maybe forty-eight hours before advance copies start circulating. We need a strategy.”
Briggs was already on his phone again, typing rapidly. “I’m getting our PR team on an emergency call. Legal too. We need to prepare statements, anticipate what they might reveal, get ahead of whatever damage is coming. I’ll sue everyone. It might get dismissed, but it will stop things.”
“And Elizabeth?” Sebastian asked, looking at me. “What about her? She’s going to be in this piece too.”
The thought made me feel physically ill. Elizabeth, who’d already been destroyed once tonight, was about to be dragged through the mud again. Publicly. Permanently. Her name would be forever associated with scandal and deception.
“I need to talk to her,” I said. “Warn her about what’s coming. I have to help her prepare.”
“She left,” Dash reminded me gently. “She was pretty clear she didn’t want to talk to any of us right now.”
“I don’t care. She needs to know.” I called her but it went straight to voicemail. I tried again. Same result. “She turned off her phone.”
“Give her space,” Mom said. “Tonight has been traumatic for her. Let her process. Give her some time. Talk to her when emotions aren’t quite so raw.”
I wanted to argue, wanted to jump in a car and go to the villa and make sure Elizabeth was okay. But Mom was right. Elizabeth had made it clear she needed distance. Pushing now would only make things worse.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked Briggs. “How do we survive this?”
He looked up from his phone, and I saw something I rarely saw on my brother’s face: uncertainty.
“Honestly? I don’t know yet.” He set his phone down. “We’re looking at a multi-front disaster. The Clara leak has already damaged our credibility. The Vogue piece will amplify that damage exponentially. Every skeleton in every closet is about to be dragged into daylight.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Dash said. “Some way to fight back.”
“We can try to control the narrative,” Briggs said slowly, thinking out loud. “Get ahead of the story. If we know what they’re going to print, we can address it on our terms before Vogue does.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“We come clean.” He looked at each of us. “About everything. Every mistake, every bad decision, every moment we’re not proud of. We own it publicly before Vogue can use it against us.”
“That’s career suicide,” Sebastian protested. “We’d be handing them ammunition.”
“They already have the ammunition,” Briggs countered. “At least this way, we control how it’s framed. We show remorse, growth, lessons learned. We make it a story about redemption instead of scandal.”
“And Elizabeth?” I asked. “How does that help her?”
“It doesn’t.” Briggs met my eyes. “Nothing we do is going to undo the damage to her reputation. That ship has sailed. The best we can do is make sure she’s not dragged down further when the Vogue piece drops.”
“We need to think about Blackwell Couture too,” Mom said quietly. “The company. Our employees. The people who depend on us for their livelihoods. This scandal affects more than just our family.”
She was right. Blackwell Couture employed hundreds of people. Designers, seamstresses, marketing staff, retail workers. If we went down, we’d take all of them with us.
“The stock price is going to tank,” Dash said, checking his phone. “Social media sentiment has turned completely negative.”
“How bad?” I asked.
“Bad.”
“Fuck.” I sank into a chair, the weight of it all crushing down on me.
Everything we’d built this week had evaporated in a matter of hours. We were right back where we’d started. No, we were worse off than we’d started. Because now we had active hostility instead of just skepticism.
“We’ll get through this,” Mom said, but even she sounded less certain than usual. “We’ve survived scandals before. We’ll survive this one.”
“This is different,” I said. “This isn’t just one brother’s mistake that we can spin or contain. This is all of us. And it’s tied directly to the company’s reputation.”
“Then we fight harder.” Sebastian’s jaw was set. “We don’t give up. We don’t let them destroy what Dad built.”
“Sebastian’s right.” Briggs was back on his phone, already mobilizing. “We have two days to get our legal ducks in a row, prepare statements, coordinate with PR. It’s not much time, but it’s something.”
“What about the New York show?” Dash asked. “Do we cancel?”
“No.” I said. “We don’t cancel. That’s exactly what they want—for us to fold, to prove we can’t handle the pressure. We finish Fashion of Love Week. We end on our terms, not theirs.”
“Adrian, no,” Briggs started.