Epilogue #2
I take another sip of champagne, letting the bitterness of it ground me.
The night Phillip died, I already knew there would never be another opportunity like it.
Bennett was busy trying to orchestrate his own solution from a safe distance, all whispered implications and plausible deniability.
Maverick was circling his own decisions.
The club was preparing to move in whatever brutal, inevitable direction men like them always move. It was all noise to me by then. Static.
I had already made up my mind.
Phillip thought he had written the ending. He thought he had built the perfect death for Whitney. No body. No crime. No loose ends. But he forgot the one thing men like him always forget.
He forgot me.
That night I walked to his house alone under cover of darkness, the gun wrapped in silk inside my purse.
Madam LaRoux had pressed it into my hands without explanation, and I had taken it without asking for one.
Some gifts know their purpose long before you do.
It was heavier than I expected, cold and final, and once I touched it I understood that justice has a texture.
Phillip’s house was quiet when I slipped inside. Moonlight stretched across the floors in pale strips, and the security system was almost insultingly easy to bypass. I could have disabled it completely. Instead, I tripped it just enough to make him curious. Just enough to pull him toward me.
I waited for him in the dark of his study, standing very still with the gun in my hands while his footsteps moved through the house. Slow at first. Then quicker. Annoyed. Confident. He thought he was the predator right until the last second.
When he stepped into the room, he barely had time to see me.
The silencer softened the shot to something almost intimate, a quiet pop swallowed by the house.
He stumbled backward, surprise widening his features just before gravity took him over the balcony rail.
He hit the patio below like something already lifeless, a puppet with the strings cut too suddenly.
I remember standing over him and feeling no hesitation at all.
No guilt.
No fear.
Only a cold, exquisite satisfaction.
He deserved it. For Whitney. For the yacht. For the noose and the wreath and the blood in my yard. For the years he spent wearing love like a costume while revenge sharpened itself behind his teeth. He had turned my best friend into an asset, a target, a payout waiting to happen.
So I ended him.
When it was done, I moved carefully, methodically, every motion precise.
No fingerprints. No trace. The gun went back into the scarf.
I left the way I came, slipping through the night with the kind of calm I imagine only killers truly understand.
Phillip’s greatest weakness was the same one most men of his kind suffer from.
Arrogance.
He never imagined anyone would come for him.
He certainly never imagined it would be me.
I drove north afterward, farther than I needed to, until I found a quiet stretch of pier over dark water. The bay was black and still, the stars overhead indifferent. I walked to the edge and dropped the gun into the water without ceremony. The splash was small. Insignificant.
Just like Phillip, in the end.
By the time I got home, the adrenaline had burned itself clean away and left only stillness behind.
I slid into bed beside Bennett, who stirred once and then settled again, never knowing that his wife had just solved the problem more cleanly than he ever could.
I lay there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling with my heartbeat perfectly steady, and knew I had done exactly what needed to be done.
And now here I sit, sipping expensive champagne in the warm afternoon light while the world congratulates itself on solving a mystery it never even came close to understanding.
Whitney would laugh if she knew the full truth.
But I’ll never tell her.
She saved me once.
All I did was return the favor.
I look at her now, at the woman across from me who has no idea that the last move in this game was mine, and I feel a strange, almost serene satisfaction.
Everyone played their part. Bennett with his silence.
Maverick with his loyalty. Whitney with her courage.
And me with the one thing no one thought I had in me.
The will to finish it.
“I guess I finally returned the favor,” I say softly.
Whitney frowns. “What do you mean?”
I smile into my glass. “The debutante ball. You saved me that night. You took a life to protect mine.”
Her expression gentles immediately, her confusion melting into tenderness. She reaches across the table and touches my hand. “We’ve always been there for each other. That’s what sisters do.”
“Soul sisters,” I murmur.
“Forever,” she says, and the certainty in her voice lands somewhere deep.
We let the conversation drift after that, back to houses and moving boxes and all the ordinary things women discuss when they are trying not to look too closely at the blood beneath their manicures.
But there is an understanding between us now that words no longer need to carry.
We have crossed lines that cannot be uncrossed.
We have buried truths that will never survive the light.
We will carry them the way women always carry unbearable things, elegantly, silently, and with just enough lipstick to make it look effortless.
As we finish our champagne and prepare to leave La Madeleine for the last time, I feel something close to peace settle over me.
Not innocence. Never that.
But peace.
Because no matter where we go next, what happened here belongs to us alone.
We are soul sisters, bound by loyalty and blood and the choices we made in paradise.
And nothing will undo that.
’Til death do us part.
The End.