Chapter 13 The Last Offer
I'm three steps into my room when my wrist gets yanked backward.
The door swings shut behind me with enough force that I feel it through my back. That's where I land, my spine hitting the wood, the impact rattling up through my shoulders.
The ceiling tilts for a second. Then Callum's face comes into focus, too close, his breath landing on my neck.
My stomach turns. I wrench my head sideways and away from it.
"Brother-in-law," I say.
"Don't." His voice is low, pressurized. "Say my name."
He shifts, opening his arms like he's going to fold me into them, and I put both hands on his chest and shove. He stumbles back half a step. Not far enough, but enough.
I point at the door. "Get out."
He doesn't leave. He takes one step toward me, then another, and puts his hand on the door beside my head.
"Don't do this just to hurt me." His voice is measured, concerned. The voice of a man who genuinely believes he is the sanest person in the room. "You don't love him."
"That's not your business." I hold his gaze without moving. "And you don't know that."
"I know exactly what that looks like." His jaw works. "I've seen you in love. I can tell the difference."
I stare at him for a long moment.
Then I laugh. It comes out genuine, which seems to be the last thing he expected.
"You loved me," I say. "You told me that for years. And I still didn't see it when you fell for Isabella." I hold his eyes. "You know love changes. So how exactly do you know I won't fall for Lachlan?"
I take his arm off the door without effort.
Something in that lands wrong for him. He goes quiet, and I watch him regroup, and I know before he opens his mouth that whatever comes next is going to be worse than what already happened.
"I know you still love me." He says it with the complete sincerity of a man reciting a fact. "And Isabella is innocent in all of this. She doesn't deserve to be hurt."
I wait.
He straightens up. Adjusts his jacket. And then he puts the careful, reasonable expression, the one that means I'm doing this for you.
"Tell your father tonight. Cancel the alliance."
He looks at me directly, earnestly, with the bright-eyed energy of someone presenting a solution they're proud of. "I'll come to the apartment. As often as I can. Isabella doesn't need to know — it's better this way, for everyone."
The room is very quiet.
I stand in it and I look at him, and what I feel is not grief and not fury. It's something simpler and more final than either of those.
The man I flew straight into loving for years — there is something rotten at the center of him. It was always there. I just needed him to say it this plainly for me to stop arguing with what I already knew.
I reach past him and grab the door handle.
"If you're not gone in the next ten seconds," I say, "I'm going to open this door and call Isabella up here. She can tell you herself whether she agrees with your plan."
His face goes to a color I don't have a name for.
He leaves.
The room settles back into silence and I stand in the middle of it and let the nausea pass. It takes forty seconds. Then I pull my largest suitcase out from under the bed and start.
This room has held twenty-some years of living in it and even taking only the things that matter, there is still too much.
I work through it methodically — the things that are mine and only mine, the things that would mean something if they were lost. The bracelet is already on my wrist. The photos I want are in a folder on my phone. The rest is objects.
By the time I drag the last case to the door, it is almost midnight.
The night air outside the gate is cooler than expected.
I watch the housekeeper load the last box and turn to my car, and then I see him.
Lachlan is standing just past the pool of the streetlight, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at me with the patience of someone who had planned on waiting.
I walk over. "How long have you been standing there?"
"A while." He looks at my cases. "You said you were moving tonight."
"I'm twenty-four," I tell him. "I can manage a move."
He looks at me for a beat. "Twenty-four-year-olds can also have help moving."
He walks around to the driver's side before I can say anything else.
I get into the passenger seat. The car is warm and quiet and smells faintly like cedar, and I put my bag between my feet and reach for the seatbelt —
He leans across.
The movement is natural — long arm coming over, hand finding the belt and pulling it across me — but then he doesn't go back. He stays there, tilted toward me, the buckle clicked home, his face angled down and stopped somewhere in the vicinity of my mouth.
He holds that position.
A breath. Two.
He straightens up, settles behind the wheel, and starts the engine with the composure of a man who was not just caught doing something extremely deliberate.
I look up. Second floor. Curtain edge. The stillness of a person trying not to be visible while being very visible.
Callum.
I look back at Lachlan.
"You can sleep if you want," he says. "It's a long drive."
His face is the same as it always is. But I have the distinct sense that he is, privately, in an excellent mood.
The headlights come on. The gate of the Silverpine manor gets smaller in the side mirror, and in the upper window, the curtain is still.
I watch it disappear.