Chapter 22
My heart raced as I pressed myself against the wall, listening for the footsteps coming down the hallway.
Doing this was stupid, but I had to try.
The footsteps got closer, and I just knew they belonged to the evil butler. He was going to rat me out if he caught me, and then there was no telling what Lucian would do to me.
The lawyer’s words played over and over in my head, as well as the image of the healthcare proxy listed on the court documents.
If he caught me here, he really could toss me in a mental institution and throw away the key. Just because doctors no longer diagnosed women with hysteria didn’t mean they didn’t treat it.
My eyes stayed closed tight as I listened to his footsteps get closer and closer.
Maybe I did deserve to have a trustee.
Maybe I wasn’t an adult.
I couldn’t even sneak down a hallway and get into an office without being caught by the butler.
Then, in a moment of pure luck, the footsteps turned a corner and walked away from me. I hadn’t been caught, not yet, anyway.
I counted to ten silently in my head, making sure the coast was completely clear before I continued creeping down the long hallway to Manwarring’s office.
The large wooden door was thankfully unlocked, and it was easy for me to slide into the room, barely opening the door and closing it behind me. Again, I stopped and listened, making sure no one had followed me, no alarms were going to go off, and I was safe.
With an almost compulsive need, I slowly counted to ten in my head, waiting for something to happen, someone to pop out of a closet or the butler to walk in and drag me out after being alerted to my trespassing by some silent alarm. When nothing happened, I let out a breath of relief that made my lungs ache.
I had made it successfully into his office. Now, all I had to do was find something that I could take to Harrison Astrid.
His computer was the most obvious place I would find anything truly damning.
If I could find something there and take screenshots, maybe email them to myself, delete everything from his computer, or even just take photos with my phone that would give Harrison enough for some type of search warrant, then I could be free.
It did occur to me that I may not even have to go that far. Just having the information might be enough for me to blackmail my way to freedom. I just didn’t know if I was strong enough to go through with that. But from what Amelia had told me about her brother, Harrison absolutely was.
Whether or not I decided to go the legal route or the blackmail route really didn’t matter unless I could find something incriminating.
I sat in the large leather chair that was behind the massive, imposing wooden desk. There was no computer on top of the desk, so I opened drawers, trying to find something.
Thankfully, Lucian kept a tidy desk, and it only took me a moment to find the sleek silver laptop. Of course, it was Samsung and the newest model. As carefully as I could without smudging anything, I lifted the top to see the battery was full, but the screen was locked.
There wasn’t even a place to type in the passcode. It required a fingerprint ID.
Fuck.
I did not have the technical skills required to try to break into a laptop, even if it had a password as simple as one, two, three, four. There was no way I was going to be able to get into a computer that had biosecurity.
I set the laptop on the desk and dug through the drawers—but found nothing in the front middle drawer other than a few pens and pads of paper.
Carefully, I put the laptop back in that drawer and closed it. The ones on the side held more office supplies as well as a bottle of lubricant and a few condoms. I didn’t want to think about what he had done on this desk before.
Putting all of that back, I went to the other side. The smaller top drawer opened, and it looked like there were a few leather portfolios. I pulled them out, set them on top of the desk, and went through them.
He had a background check on my notes about doctor visits from over the years, including notes from my psychiatrist when I was sixteen. But these notes had been changed.
When I was fifteen, I had been riding a horse that stepped into a gopher hole and broke his leg. The fall shattered my arm, and I’d watched as a new ranch hand fresh from Wyoming or somewhere came over to my prize-winning horse and shot him in the head.
The ranch immediately fired him, against my wishes, because of the way he’d handled it. According to my father, I shouldn’t have had to witness it, but I was glad I did.
Butterscotch was my horse, and it was my job to calm her and assure her as she passed.
After that incident, I was given painkillers for my arm, and my parents insisted that I get checked out by a psychiatrist to make sure there were no lasting effects from the trauma of seeing my pony die.
I was sad, but I understood what happened. I understood that killing the pony was doing it a service because his leg would never heal right. The horse would have spent the rest of his life in excruciating pain.
It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’d learned it with the grace and poise that was expected of me.
The notes I read in front of me were something completely different. They insinuated that I had not taken the incident well and that I had coped by abusing my pain medication.
It was ridiculous, but it didn’t matter.
The doctor’s signature was at the bottom of the page, right under where it diagnosed me as having an addictive personality and a problem with impulse control. The forms were fake, but they looked real.
If the wrong judge saw this, and if this was what Lucian used, then there was no way I was going to get out of this situation.
This information was dangerous for a woman like me.
Women nowadays joked about hysteria and being medicated, lobotomized, or any number of other gruesome things that men used to do to get rid of women.
Most women didn’t realize that for the elite class, the class that had old money that came over on the Mayflower with a fortune already intact, these practices were still very much alive.
No, they no longer manually stimulated a woman in a doctor’s office to reach orgasm and cure her of impure thoughts, at least not at any of my appointments.
However, there were repeated keywords that doctors used. Hysteria had now become manic episodes, or depression, having a nervous disposition, unbearable fatigue, hormonal imbalance, anger issues, the list went on and on.
I’d thought it was a thing of the past, too, until my mother’s friend Dorothy Howard’s husband had decided to leave her, trading her in for his secretary.
He’d wanted a divorce. She’d said okay. He forgot that the vast majority of his wealth came from her. When he saw how much of the estate she would get to keep, the house in the Hamptons, the jet, and even the vacation home in the Bahamas that his mistress loved so much, instead of divorcing her, he had her committed.
My mother and I visited her a few times. The grounds were beautiful, the staff was pleasant and attentive, but she was gone. They had her on so many medications the bright, funny woman I had called Aunt Dorothy had disappeared.
Lost somewhere in a haze of drugs and red Jell-O.
She died within the year.
The official diagnosis was suicide. They said that she had been storing her medications and then took them all at once, overdosing.
That was an interesting side effect they never told you about taking antidepressants. If you weren’t depressed, or if they gave you the wrong dosage or the wrong medication, it could make you depressed.
My mother cried for a week when she died, and my father had been by her side comforting her.
I promised myself that I would never forget what happened to Dorothy, but clearly, I had if I had let myself get into this situation.
I kept flipping through the pages, stopping only when I saw another name I recognized. Doctor Sylvia Roth, OB-GYN.
Lucian actually had the results from my last pap smear and vaginal exam. Not only that, but there were extra notes, things I did not ask her to look at. There were notes talking about my fertility. Saying that I was at the perfect age and in the perfect health to carry strong healthy fetuses. There were even notes saying how symmetrical my ovaries were.
Why would he have this information? Why would anyone have this information other than my doctor herself? For how long had this man been planning on taking me?
I tore out the pages from my OB-GYN, as well as the records from my psychiatrist. No one needed these. Ever.
I slid the leather portfolio back into the drawer.
I made sure it was in exactly the same place and that the drawer looked undisturbed before I moved it back in. I was about to reach for the next drawer when I heard more footsteps just outside the door.
Immediately, I dropped to my knees, crawled under the desk, and prayed it was just the butler dropping something off, or maybe he was walking past the office on his way to somewhere else.
I hid in the cramped footwell, my heart beating against my chest and a cold sweat breaking out on my brow.
Of course, it was cold.
Everything was cold.
Even the Persian rug’s thick fibers dug into my legs, scratching my delicate skin, and felt cold, but I did not move.
Not until I heard the footsteps make their way back down the marble hallway.
I hadn’t heard the door open, and I was pretty sure I was still alone, but I still gently peeked my head out and looked around the office.
It was still completely empty, completely silent.
I stared at the bookshelf, the one that he had pressed me against the other day, kissing me, touching me, and igniting a fire inside me. I looked away and ignored the bloom of warmth in my core.
Apparently, all I needed to do was think about him, and that fought off the ever-present chill.
I reached for the last drawer on his desk, the deepest one that in my experience usually held hanging file folders. I pulled and the drawer did not budge an inch. Just under the handle, I could feel the brass keyhole.
Of course the documents that I would need would be under lock and key. Unfortunately for Lucian, I really was a bad girl when I was a child.
My father had a very similar desk, and that drawer was where he’d hidden his stash of candy. I was fairly certain my father knew I snuck into his office when he wasn’t home to steal candy, so he’d locked the drawer. Then he pretended that he didn’t know when I picked it and stole candy anyway.
Older desks were larger than their modern counterparts. They were heavier and statelier. They were also not nearly as secure.
I slid the top drawer all the way out then, laying it on the floor next to me. Then I reached in and flipped the lock on the bottom drawer.
It pulled open easily, and I was able to slide the top drawer back in place. It was heavy and awkward, but I got it in and no one would ever be the wiser.
I was right. The bottom drawer did have hanging file folders, all labeled with initials and dates. I grabbed the first one, and it was nothing but a list of first names in one column, dates in the next, and then what looked like probably bank account numbers and amounts.
The next was more of the same, but the amounts were getting bigger. I kept thumbing through files, looking for something that screamed evidence.
It would have been so much more helpful if Lucian had just labeled a file folder Evidence That Would Get Me Thrown In Jail.
Sadly, I wasn’t that lucky.
I thumbed through pages, wondering how as a college-educated woman, I didn’t understand a damn thing on here. Maybe I should have gone to business school instead of finishing school.
Pages and pages of numbers and dates and just first names. That couldn’t be normal. Surely the accounts would have to have last names attached to them. But nothing gave me any indication if these were deposits or withdrawals, money transfers, or receipts of payments for purchases.
“Well, well, well,” Lucian said.
I peeked over the desk to see him standing at the door, leaning in the door frame with his arms crossed. He didn’t look mad. It was so much worse. He looked amused.
“What exactly do you think you are doing?” he said, taking a step inside and kicking the door closed behind him.
I reached back and clicked the lock as quickly as I could. I put the papers back into the bottom drawer, keeping just a few out, tucked under my knees.
“I was just looking for a pad and paper,” I said in the sweetest voice I could manage. “Your butler wasn’t any help. So I had to go find it myself.”
I stood, picking up the pages with one hand, hiding them behind my back, pretending to straighten my suit as I slipped them under my jacket and tucked them into the waist of my skirt. They wouldn’t hold forever, but it might be long enough to get them to my room.
“I don’t believe you. Hamilton would have never let you into my office.”
“I didn’t say he let me into your office,” I said, assuming Hamilton was the butler. “I said he wasn’t helpful when I asked for a pad and paper.”
“What did he say then?”
“He said that little orphans should work in the kitchens, not sleep in the master of the house’s bed.”
Lucian tipped his head back and laughed, and I used the momentary distraction to make sure the pages were secure at my back.
“What were your rules, Stella?”
“I am to behave, at all times, call you sir in private, and accompany you to events where I will continue to behave as a grateful ward until you announce our engagement in six months.” I repeated the asinine rules he’d given me while staring at the ground.
Caving to him like this made my stomach flip in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, and I didn’t want to think about it.
“And what else?” he asked, taking a threatening step towards me.
“I’m to stay out of your business,” I said.
“And are you?”
“Yes, sir.” I hated how my core warmed when I said those words. They shouldn’t have turned me on the way they did. He should not be the only source of warmth I had.
“Then why did you try to get into my computer?” he asked, reaching over the desk to slide open the drawer.
“I didn’t, sir. I promise.”
“Oh, baby girl. That was exactly what I was hoping you were going to say.”
He opened the laptop, hit a few keys, and turned it around to show me a photo of my face taken when I opened it.
“I…” I had no idea how I was going to cover this up. “I’m sorry, sir. I just wanted a bigger allowance,” I lied.
“You lied to me, little girl.” He reached down and undid his belt buckle.