Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
Istand there, unable to move, the question I’ve just asked hanging between us like something heavy and irreversible.
It presses against my chest until it’s difficult to breathe, until the edges of the room begin to blur in that disorienting way that makes everything feel slightly unreal.
Whitney is in front of me—alive, impossibly alive—and instead of grounding me, her presence fractures what little certainty I have left.
“Is anything real?” The words leave me unsteady, barely formed. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to believe anymore.”
She closes the distance between us without hesitation and pulls me into her, wrapping her arms around me with a familiarity that almost undoes me.
The scent of her—something soft and floral I used to associate with safety—surrounds me, and for a moment I let myself sink into it, into the illusion that this is something simple, something explainable.
My hands clutch at her back as though I can anchor myself there, as though if I hold on tightly enough the world will stop shifting beneath my feet.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs against my hair, her voice low and steady in a way that feels practiced. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
I pull back just enough to look at her, to study her face for cracks, for proof that this is still some kind of trick my mind is playing on me.
There’s exhaustion there, and something like grief, but there’s also a hardness I don’t recognize, something sharpened by the months she’s been living without me.
“What really happened?” I ask, my voice quieter now, but no less urgent. “No more half-truths. I need all of it.”
Whitney doesn’t answer right away. Her gaze flickers past me, landing on Maverick, and something passes between them—silent, immediate, understood. When she looks back at me, there’s a shift in her expression that makes my stomach tighten.
“Your brother,” she says softly. “That’s what happened.”
The words land wrong.
I turn to Maverick, dread already pooling low and heavy in my stomach. “What did you do?”
He lets out a short, humorless breath, rubbing the back of his neck like he’s trying to ease something that won’t loosen. “What didn’t I do?” he says, the attempt at levity falling flat in the space between us.
I stare at him, at the steadiness of him, the same steadiness I used to rely on without question.
Loyal to a fault. Protective in ways that often felt suffocating.
And suddenly all I can think about is how much I told him, how often I called him in the middle of the night, unraveling everything I thought I knew about Phillip, about Whitney, about the life I had stepped into without fully understanding it.
“Is this my fault?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can stop it. “Did I tell you too much? Did you take what I said and decide to fix it yourself?”
His expression softens, something almost pained flickering there. “McCullough… God.” He exhales slowly. “There’s so much you don’t know.”
The words hollow something out in me.
Maverick studies me for a long moment, then gives a small, grim shake of his head. “You don’t remember, do you?”
A chill moves through me. “Remember what?”
“It’s probably better that you don’t,” he says. “Safer.”
“No.” The word comes sharper this time, steadier. “No more of that. I can’t do this blind anymore. I can’t keep standing here while everyone else decides what I’m allowed to know.”
Something in my voice lands, because he doesn’t push back again.
“When Whitney told me what happened on the yacht,” he says slowly, “about the policy, about the money Phillip owed, about the way everything was lining up… I knew it wasn’t going to end there. Men like him don’t stop once they’ve decided something needs to be erased.”
My pulse begins to climb again. “So what did you do?”
He looks away briefly, as if choosing his words with more care than usual.
“You don’t want to know how the club handles things like that,” he says.
“It’s not clean. It’s not quick. And it’s not something I was willing to let happen, even if Phillip deserved every second of it.
” His gaze returns to mine, steady and unflinching.
“I stepped in before it got that far. I made the call myself.”
The implication settles in slowly, like something seeping into the cracks.
My brother decided how Phillip would die.
The room tilts slightly.
“But… why wouldn’t you tell me?” I ask, the question quieter now, threaded with something more fragile than anger.
Whitney answers before he can.
Her hands twist slightly at the edge of her sleeve, a small, restless motion that betrays the tension beneath her composure. “I didn’t mean for you to find out like this,” she says, her voice low. “But I can’t keep it from you anymore. You deserve the truth.”
I swallow hard. “The truth about what?”
She takes a breath, the kind that feels like preparation rather than relief. “Phillip didn’t marry me because he loved me,” she says. “He married me because he wanted revenge.”
The word lands between us, sharp and heavy.
“For what?” I ask, though something deep in my chest is already tightening in recognition. “What are you talking about?”
Whitney looks up at me, and for the first time since she stepped out of the shadows, I see something close to fear in her eyes.
“The boy at the debutante ball,” she says quietly. “The one who tried to rape you.”
The memory hits like a physical force.
The ballroom. The heat. The way the walls seemed to close in as he cornered me, his hand too tight, his breath too close. The panic. The fight. Whitney’s voice cutting through it, her hands pulling him off me, the chaos that followed.
And then the water.
Dark. Silent. Final.
My stomach lurches.
“What does that have to do with Phillip?” I manage, though the answer is already forming, already reshaping everything I thought I understood.
Whitney’s voice breaks slightly when she says it. “He was Phillip’s son.”
The words slam into me, knocking the air from my lungs.
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head instinctively. “That’s not—no, that’s not possible.”
“It is,” she says, more firmly now, though her voice still trembles. “Phillip is an investor at The Pierre. He had access to everything that night. The security footage. The staff. He saw it all—what his son did to you, what I did to stop it, what happened after.”
My mind spins, struggling to hold onto something solid.
“Why wouldn’t he expose it?” I ask. “Why wouldn’t he—”
“Because it would have destroyed him,” Whitney cuts in, a bitter edge slipping into her tone. “His business, his reputation, everything he’d built. He couldn’t afford that kind of attention. So he buried it. He erased it like it never happened.”
“And then he married you,” I say slowly, the pieces sliding into place with sickening precision.
“Yes.” Her voice drops. “He married me.”
The implication settles over me like something suffocating.
“For revenge,” she continues. “He hated me for what I did, even knowing why I did it. He couldn’t forgive it, so he turned it into something else.
Something quieter. Something that would last longer.
” Her eyes hold mine, steady despite everything.
“He spent years pretending to love me, McCullough. But it was never real. Not for him.”
The shack feels smaller, the air thinner.
“He told me everything on the boat,” she says. “We were arguing about the policy, about everything he’d been hiding, and he slipped. Called me a murderer. Said I deserved what was coming.” Her jaw tightens. “That’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?” I ask, though I’m afraid of the answer.
“That he was going to kill me,” she says simply. “That the explosion wasn’t an accident. That it was retaliation.”
The word echoes.
Retaliation.
For something I can’t unsee now.
For something we did.
Tears slip down my face before I realize they’ve started. “Whitney… I’m so sorry.”
“No.” Her hand finds mine, gripping tightly. “You don’t get to carry this for him. You didn’t ask for any of this. Phillip made his choices. So did I.”
Silence settles again, heavy and suffocating.
Fragments of memory surface uninvited—the wreath, the noose, the knife left where I would find it. The message written without words. The threat that never needed to be spoken aloud.
“I was next,” I whisper.
Whitney doesn’t deny it.
Her expression falters, just slightly. “I think he wanted to hurt you,” she says carefully. “Maybe to get to Bennett. Maybe to finish what he started. Maybe both.”
Maverick shifts beside us, his presence suddenly heavier, more deliberate. “I didn’t tell you the details of Phillip’s dealings because I was trying to keep you out of it,” he says. “The less you knew, the safer you were.”
“Safer,” I repeat, the word hollow.
“There’s more,” he adds, his voice tightening.
A new kind of dread settles in.
“What?” I ask.
He hesitates, glancing at Whitney before looking back at me. “Chrissy is about to be arrested for Phillip’s murder.”
The words hit harder than anything else has.
“What?” My voice breaks on it. “How do you know that?”
“The club has people inside the investigation,” he says. “They’ve known where this was going from the start.”
“Chrissy?” Whitney’s voice is softer, disbelieving. “Why her?”
“Because she fits,” Maverick replies. “Young. Close to him. Easy to paint as emotional, unstable. It’s a story that makes sense to the people who need it to.”
“She didn’t do it,” I say, the words almost pleading now. “She didn’t kill him.”
Maverick exhales slowly. “It doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters what can be proven. And right now, she’s the cleanest answer they have.”
The room sways again, and I have to steady myself against the edge of a chair before sinking into it. Everything feels too big, too tangled, too far beyond anything I can fix.
“What do we do?” I ask, though the question already feels pointless.
Maverick leans back against the wall, arms crossing loosely over his chest. “We don’t do anything,” he says. “If we step in, we don’t just risk ourselves—we risk everything tied to this. The club won’t tolerate interference.”
My gaze drops, my hands curling in my lap.
“But Chrissy…” I whisper.
His expression softens, but only slightly. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “one person takes the fall so everything else doesn’t collapse.”
The finality of it settles over me like a weight I can’t lift.
I turn to Whitney, searching her face for something—an answer, a refusal, anything that suggests we’re not just going to let this happen.
“What comes next?” I ask.
She takes my hand again, her grip steady despite the tremor beneath it. “We survive,” she says. “That’s what we’ve always done.”
Survive.
The word feels different now.
Heavier.
“I don’t know how to live with this,” I admit, the truth spilling out before I can soften it. “You’re alive. Phillip is dead. And Chrissy is going to pay for something she didn’t do. What am I supposed to do with that? What am I supposed to tell Bennett?”
Whitney and Maverick exchange a look, something quiet and loaded passing between them.
A new unease coils low in my stomach.
“What?” I ask.
Maverick exhales, almost thoughtful. “Bennett,” he says slowly, “knows more than you think.”