34. Maddox
MADDOX
I’ve been avoiding this conversation for days, which is some kind of personal record, because the version of me that existed before Harper doesn’t sit on anything.
I see a problem, I fix it, I don’t wait around weighing the optics of fixing it.
That’s always been the whole appeal of being me.
But somewhere in the last few months I apparently developed the ability to hold something uncomfortable without immediately detonating it, which I used to think was a character flaw in other people and now understand is just exhausting.
Eleven days of watching Harper smile half a second too late at things that used to land immediately.
Eleven days of her saying she’s fine in that bright, settled voice she uses when she’s decided fine is the answer regardless of whether it’s true, and me not pushing, because pushing means asking the question underneath it, which is why isn’t Killian here, and I genuinely don’t trust myself with whatever the answer to that turns out to be.
This morning she said it again. Standing in the kitchen in Asher’s shirt with her coffee, hair still damp, telling us she’s fine, just tired, the boutique’s been a lot. Asher let it go the way Asher lets everything go, a hand at the small of her back and a plate of eggs he didn’t ask if she wanted.
I didn’t let it go.
I watched her leave for the tasting room and felt something in my chest finally tip past the edge it’s been balanced on for almost two weeks.
I needed her gone for a few hours. Not gone-gone, just somewhere I wouldn’t have to perform calm while I went and found Killian and made him explain himself, because Harper reads me better than anyone alive at this point and the second she clocked the look on my face she’d want to know why, and I didn’t have an answer for her yet that wouldn’t make things worse before they got better.
So I did the one thing I’m apparently capable of now that I never used to be, which is plan instead of just act.
I caught her on her way out of my suite this morning and asked, casual as I could manage, whether she’d thought about spending the afternoon with Sophia.
Told her Asher had inventory at both restaurants today, a full count, hours of it, and that Lorenzo and Raphael were already heading to the tasting room anyway, and didn’t she still owe Sophia a fitting for some piece she’d been promising to model.
Fucking Raphael. Of all the men on this property I could’ve engineered into spending an afternoon with my girl, it had to be the one I still haven’t fully forgiven for existing in her orbit during those first few weeks, even though I know exactly how unfair that is, even though he’s good for her in every way that’s never once threatened the four of us.
Doesn’t matter. Some old, stupid, possessive part of me still flinches at his name, and I hate that about myself almost as much as I hate that I used him as the bait anyway because I knew it would work.
It worked.
Harper lit up at the idea, kissed me goodbye, and was gone within the hour, off to spend the afternoon getting talked into wearing something she’ll complain about and secretly love, surrounded by people who’ll keep her too busy laughing to notice her boyfriend going quietly, deliberately feral two buildings over.
I watched her walk down the corridor toward Sophia’s suite, ponytail swinging, already texting someone about lunch, and felt the smallest twinge of guilt about how easy it was to redirect her.
She trusts me. That’s the part that makes the manipulation sit wrong even when the cause is good.
Plan in motion, I head out to find my oldest friend and the single most fucked-up fuck-up currently operating this entire vineyard.
I find Killian in the east vineyard, walking the new terracing with a small, well-dressed crowd trailing behind him like he’s giving a tour to people who already own everything they’re looking at.
Jason and Rebecca Miller, dressed like they bought the outfits specifically for this, nodding along at whatever he’s saying about soil composition.
Evelyn at his side, hand tucked into the crook of his elbow like she’s been doing it for thirty years instead of just since the divorce that apparently didn’t end anything between them as far as access goes.
I stop at the top of the row and just watch for a second, because watching is the only thing keeping me from sprinting down the hill and dragging him out of this tour by his collar in front of every single one of them.
Killian’s gesturing at the new trellis lines like he’s narrating a documentary, and Jason Miller’s nodding along with the specific enthusiasm of a man calculating exactly how much access this conversation might eventually be worth.
Rebecca’s got her phone half raised, probably for a photo she’ll send to whoever she’s currently trying to impress with the idea that her daughter landed somewhere this nice.
I clock the whole tableau from fifty feet away and feel my hands curl into fists before I’ve even decided to be angry.
Eleven days of watching Harper’s smile go half a beat late, and here’s Killian Thorne giving a personal vineyard tour to the exact people who put that delay there in the first place, his ex-wife glued to his arm like decoration.
“Maddox.” Killian doesn’t stop walking. “Now isn’t—”
“I don’t believe now is the best time to discuss such matters,” Evelyn says, smooth as anything, like she’s hosting instead of trespassing.
“Matters like how much your illusions of grandeur continue to bewilder the masses?” I say, not even looking at her. “Can’t say you have a knack for shock, Evelyn.”
Her face does something complicated and furious that she recovers from in under a second, which is honestly impressive given the material she’s working with.
I don’t wait for Killian to finish whatever sentence he was building. I get a hand around his arm and pull, I’m not gentle about it.
“You and I need to talk. Now, Thorne.”
He could shake me off. He doesn’t. Whatever’s on my face is apparently enough to make the decision for him, because he says something short to the Millers about continuing in a moment and lets me walk him toward the chai without a single word of protest, which tells me more than anything he could’ve said out loud.
The chai’s cool and dim and smells like oak and fermentation, rows of barrels stacked higher than either of us, two of the cellar staff checking levels near the back wall.
The temperature drop from the heat outside hits me like a wall, and so does the silence, the kind that makes every word land louder than it would anywhere else on this property.
“Everyone out,” I say, loud enough to carry.
Nobody argues with that tone. They go, fast, and the door swings shut behind the last one, and then it’s just the two of us and a few hundred barrels of wine that are going to outlive this conversation either way.
“What the fuck is going on, Thorne?”
“None of your business.”
I take one step closer, close enough that he’d have to actually try not to look at me. Eleven days of swallowing this, eleven days of watching it eat at someone I love, and he wants to give me two words and a closed door.
“Oh yeah? Whatever the fuck it is is fucking with our vibe. Harper says she’s fine but she’s not fine, and you’d know that if you’d actually looked at her once in the last eleven days instead of routing every question about her through Mallory like she’s a line item.”
Killian’s jaw works. “I’m aware of how it looks.”
“Great. Awareness. That’s super helpful. Asher’s not going to say shit to you because Asher doesn’t do confrontation, he just absorbs things until he’s quietly furious at everyone including himself. I don’t have that problem.”
“Clearly.”
“Don’t get smart with me.” My voice comes out harder than I mean it to, but I don’t pull it back.
“You walked off arm in arm with your ex-wife on the single biggest night of Harper’s career, in front of her parents, in front of the whole estate, and then you went dark for eleven days.
You want to explain that, or you want me to keep guessing, because I’ve had eleven days to guess and none of the guesses make you look good. ”
Something flickers behind his eyes, fast, gone before I can name it.
“I’m doing this for Harper.”
I actually laugh. It’s not a kind sound.
“Sanctimonious shit doesn’t look good on you, Kil. Get off the cross, we need the wood.”
His expression doesn’t move, but something in his shoulders does, a fraction of give, like the line he’s been holding for eleven days just slipped half an inch.
“If I’d had them removed that night,” he says, finally, “they leave the property angry and humiliated in front of people who matter to this estate’s reputation, and a man like Jason Miller doesn’t absorb humiliation quietly.
He goes to a reporter. He goes to a lawyer.
He finds some version of this story where Harper’s the unstable one and we’re the predatory billionaires who isolated her from her family.
None of it would be true. None of it needs to be true to do damage. ”
“Okay. So instead you scheduled tea with them.”
“I scheduled them onto my terms. My property, my timeline, my witnesses. A controlled visit I can end the second it stops being controlled, instead of an explosive scene that ends with them as victims and Harper as the story.” He pauses.
“The tour today was the second visit. There won’t be a third. ”
“And Evelyn?”
“Evelyn is the actual problem,” he says, and for the first time his voice loses some of its control.
“She’s the one who told the Millers where Harper was.
She’s the one who put them on the midsummer guest list behind my back.
The Millers are a symptom. Evelyn’s the disease, and she still holds a board seat I can’t remove her from unilaterally, no matter how badly I want to. ”
“So you’ve been doing what, exactly, for eleven days?”
“Working the board.” He says it flatly, like it costs him nothing, which I don’t believe for a second.
“Quietly. One vote at a time. If word gets back to her that I’m building a majority to remove her before I actually have it, she finds a way to dig in or do worse.
I need the votes locked before she knows the fight’s happening. ”
“How close are you?”
“Close. Not done.”
I let that sit for a second, the anger in my chest cooling just enough to make room for something closer to disappointment, which honestly might be worse.
I came in here ready for a fight, ready to throw a few more punches if that’s what it took, and instead I’m standing in a wine cellar watching my oldest friend admit, in pieces, that he genuinely thought silence counted as protection.
It’s such a Killian mistake. Smart enough to outmaneuver an entire board and somehow still convinced that the people he loves need less honesty than the people he negotiates with.
“You know what the actual problem is, right? It’s not the plan.
The plan’s fine, the plan’s smart, the plan’s exactly the kind of thing you’d do.
The problem is you decided Harper didn’t get to know any of it.
Not the strategy, not the timeline, not even the part where you tell her ‘hey, this is hard, I’m handling something, I need a minute.
’ You just went quiet and let her sit there for eleven days thinking she did something wrong, or you stopped wanting her, or both. ”
“I was protecting her.”
“From what? Information? She’s spent her entire life being managed by people who decided she couldn’t handle the truth, Kil.
Her parents did that to her for twenty-four years.
You did it to her for eleven days. I’m not saying it’s the same thing.
I’m saying it rhymes, and she’s going to hear the rhyme whether you meant it or not. ”
Killian’s quiet for a long moment, looking at nothing in particular, somewhere past my shoulder into the rows of barrels.
“I didn’t think,” he says, finally, slower than I’ve ever heard him say anything. “I was so focused on removing the threat that I didn’t consider the cost of the silence itself.”
“Yeah. Well. Now you’re considering it.”
“The vote’s in a few days.”
“Cool. Tell her that tonight. Not the whole strategic breakdown if you don’t want to, but tell her something. She doesn’t need the vote to be finished to stop wondering if you’re done with her.”
He looks at me, and for once there’s nothing controlled about it.
“And if she’s done with me by the time I get there?”
“Then you’ll deserve every second of finding that out the hard way. But she’s not. She’s been asking Asher and me if we know what’s wrong with you, not if we know how to get rid of you. There’s a difference, and you’d know that if you’d been in the room for any of it.”
Killian exhales, long, and for a second looks fifty-one years old in a way he usually doesn’t let anyone see.
“Four days,” he says again, like he’s negotiating with himself instead of me.
“Tonight,” I say. “The vote can wait four days. She’s already waited eleven.”
He doesn’t answer that, but he doesn’t argue either, which from Killian Thorne is basically a signed contract.
I open the chai door and the cellar staff are hovering exactly where they were told to wait, and somewhere above us, out in the vineyard, Evelyn’s still got the Millers on her arm like a prize she hasn’t realized she’s about to lose.