Chapter 45
Bliss
Harrison led us into the smaller consultation room attached to the private waiting area.
His lawyer followed. Knox came in. Dad came with me because no one in my family was stupid enough to suggest I sit through anything alone.
Ryker and Ryan followed without asking permission.
Then Lyon, Emmitt, and Kellen came too, because the Bennett brothers had never respected the concept of limited seating in a crisis.
Aura started to rise, but I shook my head once. Not because I didn’t want her. Because I didn’t know what this room was about to hold, and I needed to hear whatever was coming before I figured out how to explain it to anyone else.
Charm squeezed my shoulder before I followed the wall of mean-mugging men into a room almost identical to the one we had just left.
The room felt too small for what it held.
Harrison stood by the window with one hand resting on the back of a chair. Elenore stayed in Cade’s room, refusing to leave him again after he opened his eyes that second time and she whispered his name so softly I almost fell apart watching it.
Lansen set a folder on the table, then stepped back as another lawyer opened it.
Maren Vale had silver hair cut to her chin and eyes sharp enough to make lying feel dangerous. She had arrived sometime after the surgery and somehow looked like the kind of woman even Harrison Mercer would listen to when the world caught fire.
Knox stayed standing, and that told me enough.
Dad sat beside me. Ryker stood behind him, arms crossed, face carved out of rage. Lyon and Emmitt sat across from me. Kellen leaned against the wall, pale and silent beside Ryan.
Harrison looked at me first.
“Bliss,” he said, and the way he said my name had changed since the chapel. Softer now. Less formal. Like somewhere between his son’s surgery and the press conference, I had become something he understood belonged in the room. “Before anything else is said, Cade is the priority.”
My throat tightened. “I know.”
“No,” Harrison said quietly. “I mean all of us are aligned on that. Everyone in this room. Everyone involved who has any decency left after learning how deeply my son fought for his life and survived an attempted murder Friday night. Everything else is secondary.”
Attempted murder.
The words did not feel dramatic.
They felt obvious.
Maren opened the folder. “There will be questions. There will be press. There may be inquiries from outside agencies simply because Mr. Mercer is a public figure with professional prospects and because Mr. Dempsey died at the scene. What we are doing now is making sure the truth that matters is protected from becoming fodder for public consumption.”
“The truth that matters?” Ryker asked, voice flat and dangerous.
Maren looked at him without flinching. “Luke Dempsey stole Cade’s phone to lure him away from witnesses.
Luke Dempsey entered a restricted area armed with a knife.
Luke Dempsey attacked first. Luke Dempsey stabbed Cade Mercer twice, causing life-threatening injuries.
Cade fought for his life. That is the truth that matters. ”
My hands curled in my lap.
“And the rest?” I whispered.
Knox finally moved. Not much. Just enough that his gaze landed on mine and stayed.
“There’s video,” he said.
The room went silent as my heartbeat stumbled. “What?”
“There’s video,” Knox repeated. “Not from the angle Luke thought. The service hallway camera near the loading access was half-obstructed by an equipment cart, but it picked up more than he knew. The visual is grainy. It only shows part of the attack.”
His jaw tightened.
“But the audio tells enough.”
My stomach dropped. “Audio?”
“We heard him, Bug.”
Dad’s face turned to stone.
Ryker pushed off the wall. “Heard what?”
Knox didn’t look away from me. “Enough.”
“Knox.”
“Enough,” he said again, sharper this time, and something in his face begged Ryker not to make him say it in front of me.
But I already knew.
I knew because I had heard Luke’s voice in nightmares for years. I knew because Cade had gone into that hallway with rage in his soul and love in his blood, and Luke would have done what Luke always did.
He would have used me as a weapon.
Knox swallowed. “He admitted to taking Cade’s phone. He made it clear he planned to get Cade alone. He had the knife visible before Cade closed distance. Cade kept his hands visible. Cade very clearly tried to provoke him into showing exactly what he was.”
A strange, terrible pride cracked through my chest.
Even furious, even lethal, even standing across from the man who had ruined whole years of my life, Cade had understood the room before the fight started.
“And he did,” Knox said.
My dad’s hand found mine beneath the table.
“Luke attacked first,” Knox continued. “No question. The first cut happened when Cade turned away from a strike aimed at his chest. The second…” His voice changed. “The second one nearly killed him before the fight was over.”
Maren spoke gently. “The video makes clear that Cade was defending himself against an armed attacker.”
Kellen’s voice came small from the wall. “Then why are we talking like there’s something else?”
Nobody answered fast enough, and my skin went cold.
Knox looked down once, then back at me. “Because of what was found on Dempsey.”
The room changed then, not with noise but with a certainty that everyone understood we had reached the thing beneath the thing.
Ryker’s eyes narrowed. “What was found?”
Knox’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “There were letters carved into his chest.”
Dad’s hand tightened around mine so hard my fingers went numb.
Kellen whispered, “Letters?”
Knox looked at me.
“NO,” he said.
The word entered the room and stayed there.
No one moved or even breathed the right way.
NO.
My whole body went numb around it.
I saw Cade in my head, bleeding on concrete, hearing Luke say whatever vile thing had finally snapped the last restraint inside him. I saw his hands. His rage. His love. The word he had given back to me in the only language men like Luke ever understood.
NO.
My eyes burned, but no tears fell.
Lyon’s voice came out rough. “What does that mean?”
Emmitt looked sick. “Did Cade…?”
He didn’t finish what we all were thinking.
Did Cade carve that into his chest?
Knox’s eyes stayed on mine, and I knew he knew. Maybe not everything, but enough.
“What happened with the carving is not the focus of the investigation,” Maren said carefully.
Ryker laughed once. There was no humor in it. “That sounds like lawyer shit.”
“It is lawyer shit,” Maren said calmly. “It is also reality. The official investigative focus is the luring, the restricted access, the knife, the prior stalking behavior, and Mr. Dempsey’s deteriorating mental state.”
“In layman’s terms,” I said, looking from Ryker to Maren, “you’re burying anything that makes it look like I’m the reason Luke went nuts.”
Maren’s expression softened by the smallest amount. “We are protecting you from becoming the public explanation for a violent man’s choices.”
“That’s a yes.”
“Yes,” she said. “Because the alternative is a public battle over motive. That means reporters, attorneys, and possibly prosecutors digging through every private thing Luke Dempsey did to you in order to explain what Cade heard in that hallway. No one in this room wants that unless it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Harrison’s jaw flexed at her bluntness, but he did not correct her.
Because she was right.
I looked at him, then my dad, then Knox. “You said there’s video.”
“There is,” Knox said.
“So what does the video show?” I needed to know. It changed nothing. I would defend Cade however I needed to defend him, but I deserved the truth. “Not the press version. The real version.”
Knox’s face hardened.
“It shows a violent struggle after Cade was already severely wounded. It shows Luke with the knife. It shows Cade gaining control of the weapon during the fight. It shows the fatal injury happening while Luke is still actively fighting him.”
“And after, Knox.” Ryker’s voice came out low and vicious. “Stop sugarcoating shit and spit it out.”
Knox inhaled slowly. “The view is obstructed. Audio is distant, but enhanced. Very clear. Cade is hurt badly by then. The angle does not give a clean visual of the letters being made.”
I stared at my hands.
Knox continued, voice lower now. “By the time Ryan finds him, Cade is hypoxic, bleeding heavily, barely conscious. Luke is dead or close enough. The detectives on scene were not eager to build sympathy around a dead predator with Cade Mercer bleeding out ten feet away.”
Silence filled the room.
Then Knox looked at Dad.
“And there’s more.”
Dad’s face had gone so still it scared me. “What more?”
Knox’s throat worked. “Luke wasn’t clean.
Not even close. Kimball Falls Fire Department didn’t just let him go because he was struggling.
He was fired after an internal investigation four months ago.
There were suspected arsons. Small fires.
Controlled enough to avoid major loss, but patterned.
Places where he could get attention for response and heroics.
They couldn’t prove all of it then, but they were building a case. ”
My dad made a sound like the air had been punched out of him.
Of course the man who built terror in private wanted applause in public for putting out flames he started himself. Clout chaser, madman, monster. All those years, and he had been worse than even the version of him I feared.
Ryker turned away, both hands going to the back of his head. “We let him in the house.”
Dad’s voice cracked. “Ryker.”
“We let him in the fucking house.”
“We didn’t know.”
Ryker spun back, eyes wild. “I brought him there.”
The room went dead, and every word hit me like a fist.
Ryker’s face twisted. “He was my best man. He held my daughters. He sat beside her at dinner because I trusted him.”
“Stop,” I whispered.