Chapter 32 Conrad
Conrad
The shrill ring of my phone cuts through the silence. I glance at the screen, my thumb ready to kill the call, until my lawyer’s name flashes across the glass.
Fuck my life. Now what?
Storm’s knife still quivers in the doorframe.
Phoenix is curled into the corner of the couch, making herself as small as she possibly can, knees tucked to her chest and her arms locked around them.
Her eyes shine with guilt and shame. Atticus looks like he’s one hour of sleep past feral.
Maverick paces, raking his hands through his hair until it’s more mane than haircut.
I hold up a finger, telling them all to just wait…and answer, praying for something that isn’t fire or death or complete chaos. “Yes.”
“Mrs. Langford has…developments,” my lawyer says. “And you’re not going to like any of them.”
I growl.
“Hold.” I mute the call, set the phone on the table, and cross over to Phoenix. She shrinks further into the cushions and something—regret, anger, fear, I don’t know—knifes through me.
I take a gentle fistful of her hair and tilt her face up. Not cruel—just enough pressure to keep her with me. “Color?”
She blinks, breathes. Her gaze flickers as she thinks. “Yellow.”
“Good. Hold onto that. We’ll address it later.” I bend to her ear, my next sentence only for her. “You hide something like that from us again, you’ll be punished by all of us—and it will be far more brutal than the first time.”
Her throat works, and she goes pale. I don’t flinch.
She’s just a woman, I remind myself. A woman we’ve decided to bring in and hold onto for a while. Too bad I still see the girl who stole my heart.
I don’t like her scared, though, so I wrap the barbs in silk. “If you wanted to be spanked and fucked to within an inch of your life, all you had to do was ask for it. You didn’t have to be a brat and hide something like this.”
Heat blooms across her cheeks and I see the fear crack until it’s not consuming her. Good. Her hunger is stronger than her instinct for self-preservation.
I release her hair, my hand stroking over her head, and straighten. “Breathe. Don’t move. And don’t say a fucking word.”
She nods. I unmute the call and put it on speaker. “Okay, what now?”
“Mrs. Langford claims she bought products from a spa staffer—faux-tox, filler, and an offer of injectables. Since the spa doesn’t offer injectables, we had a chance of making this go away.
” He sounds as tired as I feel. “Now, however, she has produced proof that she purchased from staff in your hotel.”
“Proof meaning…?”
“A video. From your internal cameras.”
Ice hits my spine. “How? We don’t even have that footage because it was deleted.”
“I’m aware. She ‘obtained’ a copy of the footage that, by your account, no longer exists. It’s time-stamped two nights ago and shows a man meeting her near the private treatment rooms with a Titan-Wynn tote. He’s in a spa polo with a badge.”
“How did she find vanished CCTV?” Atticus demands, voice scraping. “Who handed her the drive?”
“Anonymous, naturally. She says it arrived through the concierge with no sender listed.”
“Send everything,” I order.
“It’s in your inbox. One more thing: her husband’s office has already reached out. If this isn’t ‘corrected’ and it gets louder, his committee will be forced to ask questions about your licensing.”
“Of course they will.” I swallow the heat. “I’ll call you back.”
I kill the call and drag my laptop across the table. “Sit. We watch once, then we plan.”
The screen fills with the spa corridor I know too well—the dim sconces, the idiotic water-wall my mother insisted on all familiar sights. But the angle is wrong, the camera set too high. It’s not one of ours. Another pinhole lens, like the ones Atticus pulled from vents this morning.
A man steps into frame: dark hair tucked under a cap, resort polo, badge lanyard tucked into his collar, gray tote the size of a weekend bag. His head is angled carefully down. He plants himself by a private-room door like he belongs there.
Two beats later, Mrs. Langford swans into the frame wearing sunglasses at night and another wide-brimmed hat like a shield. She gestures and opens the door, and together they vanish inside.
We fast-forward through seventeen minutes of empty hallway. No one else goes in. Eventually they emerge together, and we watch and she presses an envelope into his hand. He tucks it into his pocket and walks away.
He never once gives the camera a full profile.
I freeze on the best angle we get—a cheek, jaw, and a quick flick of the eyes. He’s not one of mine.
“Do we recognize him?” I ask the others, just in case.
“No,” Atticus grinds out.
“He’s not front-of-house,” Maverick says, leaning in.
Phoenix shakes her head. “I’ve never seen him. But I’m rarely at the spa.”
“It’s one of our uniforms,” Storm says, too calm. “Uniforms are costumes, though. He could be anyone in Savannah who stole a shirt.”
“Wait…check out his wrist,” Atticus says, rewinding frame-by-frame. “Is that a tattoo?”
I squint. There…ink… or shadow. “Maybe.”
“We finally have a face—even if it’s garbage,” I say, grabbing stills.
“I want someone at the spa before it opens. We interview everyone—managers, front desk, laundry, back-of-house, vendors. We check badge logs against laundry pulls. If a badge was stolen, I want the report. If it wasn’t, someone printed an extra.
We find him; we find who sent that video. ”
“Maverick,” Atticus says, “ask me if I’m going to lose my mind now or later.”
“Now?” Mav offers.
“Now,” Atticus snaps. “How does she have footage I don’t? I burned every piggyback I found. Which means I’m being outmaneuvered at every turn.”
“Breathe,” I tell him.
He glowers, then settles, breathing.
“Con,” Maverick says, tapping a still. “That’s a house-issue clip on the lanyard. Every badge is logged. If that clip exists, we have a line. We can track it”
“Storm,” I say, “go shake the tree. Spa desk. Laundry. Overnight maintenance. Ask nicely first. Make them honest if they lie. But if they respond to nice, give them a hefty bonus for loyalty.”
Storm smiles in a way that makes me want to take half a step back. “With pleasure.”
“Legal?” Maverick asks, careful.
“I’ll call him when we have a name. Until then, he keeps the Board boyfriend charmed and the senator busy.”
Storm walks to the door, plucks his knife from the frame, and wipes the blade on his shirt like he’s smoothing a wrinkle. “What about Mrs. Langford?”
“Handled. She can have anything on the menu and the city’s best physician on standby. If she tries to make noise before lunch, we drown her in concern. Give her everything until we’re at the bottom of this.”
“One more time,” Atticus says, and we watch until the angles rewire my optic nerve. The man moves like someone trained not to be seen. Contractors can own a room by pretending not to exist. I’ve done business with ghosts. I hate that one is nesting in my house.
I catch Phoenix watching me instead of the screen—an apology, and something new in her expression—resolve. Good. She told us. Now we fix what bleeds.
We scatter on instinct. Storm checks the edge of his knife on his way out the door. Maverick texts the day manager to hold the spa doors as he leaves. Atticus mutters about process names while returning to his lair.
I send a text to the thread without Phoenix.
Con
One hour. Get everything set. Then we teach Phoenix a lesson she won’t forget.
Storm
Punish her for not trusting us?
Con
No. Push her to her limits and see how far she’ll go to atone.
I stare at the thread a second longer than necessary, the phone suddenly heavy in my hand. “Teach her a lesson” is the old reflex—order, consequence, the clean math my father worshiped. But as the blue bubbles fade, something uglier and truer drags its nails down my soul.
This isn’t about punishment. Not really. It’s a pressure test. How far can I push her before she snaps? Before she decides I’m everything she fears, everything she hates…and walks away again?
She didn’t tell us because she doesn’t trust us enough. Because she doesn’t trust me. Either way, I need to find out if it’s me, or if it’s the fact that she doesn’t have a permanent place with us.
Neither of those two options have a reasonable solution.
The knife mark Storm left in the doorframe sticks out in the corner of my eye, counting out all the ways I mistake control for care. If she’s going to leave, I want to know now, not after I’ve rebuilt an empire around her shadow.
Do I want her to stay?
I thumb the edge of the phone, feel the ghost of my father in the lacquered grain of his desk, and name the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t there: I’m not trying to break Phoenix.
I’m trying to prove myself right. That she’ll run.
That I’m safer planning for her absence than betting on her staying.
And yet—under the calculation—another current moves. I want to see her hold. I want to see her look me in the eye when it hurts and choose not to go. Not because she’s obedient, not because she’s submissive, but because she’s ours.
Because I’m hers. I always have been.
The two truths grind against each other, throwing sparks in my chest.
So we need to push. Not to ruin her, but to find the line I’m terrified she’ll draw—the line where I end and she refuses.
And I pray to a god I don’t believe in that the line is farther away than my fear thinks it is.
I push a hand through my hair. My father’s voice—disapproval and disappointment—scrapes the inside of my skull. He’d have called this a weakness. He’d have fired half the staff by lunch and dared the board to blink.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that all of this happened on his watch. He just left before the fallout so everyone else could shovel his shit.
“Conrad,” Atticus says, low. “You good?”
“No,” I say. “But I’ve got a plan, and that’ll have to work.”
I look at Phoenix and say nothing. We’ll handle one crisis at a time. Someone has us on film; someone can put Storm and Maverick in a cell. And she hid it.
The room empties—each of us with a job to do. We’ll deal with the drugs, then the blackmail. My gut says it’s the same root system.
When it’s just the two of us, I cross back to Phoenix. Her tears are gone. She’s calmer. Focused.
“Will we find him?” she asks. “Will we stop them?”
“We will.” I take her wrist, thumb steady over the fast thrum there. “And then we’ll decide what to do with them.”
Her breath hitches. “Conrad?”
“Yes.”
“You meant it. About…” Color floods her cheeks.
“Punishment?” I finish. “Yes. We all meant every word. You lied, you kept us blind. We can’t make the best choices without the whole picture.”
She swallows and nods. “I already sent the number and everything to Atticus.”
“Good.” I lean to her ear. “Go to the bedroom. Strip. Kneel at the foot of the bed. Hands behind your back. Wait.”
Heat flushes her throat and cheeks, but her chin doesn’t tremble. “Yes, sir.”
I straighten and glance once more at the frozen frame—blurred cheek, maybe-tattoo, that gray tote we’ll tear apart by sunset. The plan coils tight in my gut.
Atticus will keep his head long enough to trap our ghost. Storm will keep his blade clean enough to frighten the truth out of liars. Maverick will make the spa smell like expensive remorse.
And me? I’ll keep the house standing. I’ll keep the people I need smiling. I’ll keep Karen pacified with wine and thinly veiled contempt.
And then I’ll take our girl apart and put her back together until the guilt shakes out like dust—and she learns to trust.
Later, we’ll go downstairs and do the work.
But first, we deliver the punishment that I think all of us need.