9. Lucas
— ? —
Lucas
I tell her everything.
We’re still in the green room, the chaos of the press conference fading beyond the walls. Assistants rush past the door, phones ring in distant offices, but in here it’s just us - Lily on the worn leather couch, me pacing the small space like a caged animal.
She deserves the truth. All of it. After everything she’s been through, she deserves to know exactly who’s standing beside her.
“My mother was Margot Burton - the real Burton heir, and the woman who gave both Edward and me our name and our blood. Victoria was the second wife. The social climber who married my father, ground my mother down a little more every year, and once she’d taken everything, started pretending the Burton blood had always been hers. ”
Lily’s brow furrows. “So Victoria isn’t... she’s not your mother. Not really.”
“No.” I laugh, and it tastes like ash. “Everyone thinks Victoria was born a Burton - the grande dame of the dynasty, the story she tells at every charity event. But it’s the other way around.
My mother was the one with the blood. Victoria married in, spent years grinding her down to nothing, and the day my mother finally broke, she stepped into her place and rewrote the history until the whole city believed it had always been hers. ”
I stop pacing. Force myself to look at her.
“My mother was trapped in that family until the day she died.”
The words come out harder than I intended. Sharper. Because even now, after all this time, talking about her feels like pressing on a bruise that never healed.
Even now, even while I’m spilling the worst thing I’ve ever carried, I can’t stop noticing her.
She’s curled into the corner of that couch like she’s trying to take up less space, and I want to tell her to stop. To spread out. To take up every inch of room she wants, because she’s spent three years being made small and I’m so fucking tired of watching it.
Her eyes haven’t left my face. She’s not flinching. Not pulling back. Just... holding steady while I fall apart in front of her.
God, I want to touch her.
One kiss. One kiss a few nights ago, and my hands have forgotten how to want anything else.
I’m standing here talking about my mother’s suicide, about the note Edward’s been holding over my head for eleven years, and half my brain is cataloging the way Lily’s collarbone catches the light.
The way she keeps tucking her hair behind her ear.
The way her lips are slightly parted, like she’s about to say something, and I want to know what that mouth tastes like when she’s been crying.
What the hell is wrong with me?
She shifts on the couch. Just a small movement - crossing her legs, settling deeper into the cushions - but I track it like prey.
Like she’s the only thing in this room that matters, and maybe she is, maybe she has been since the moment I watched her walk into my brother’s engagement party in a dress that didn’t fit and a smile that broke my heart.
I should keep my distance. Should finish this story and then sit on the opposite end of the couch like a gentleman, like someone who isn’t thinking about pressing her into those cushions and forgetting his own name.
But she’s looking at me like I’m not broken. Like the things I’m telling her don’t make her want to run.
And I don’t know how much longer I can keep all this space between us.
“My father ignored her - treated her like furniture, same as Edward treated you. Victoria resented her existence, saw her as competition for social standing, for control of the family image. And my mother...” I swallow hard.
“She struggled with depression her whole life. The kind that makes you disappear inside yourself. The kind no one in families like ours ever acknowledges.”
Lily’s hand finds mine. She doesn’t speak. Just holds on.
“No one helped her,” I continue, my voice cracking despite my best efforts. “No one even tried. Mental health was weakness in the Burton household. Something to be managed with pills and silence, never actually addressed. Victoria made sure of that.”
“Lucas-”
“When I was seventeen, I came home from boarding school for Christmas break.”
The memory rises like bile - vivid, visceral, as fresh as if it happened yesterday instead of over a decade ago. The taxi from the airport. The empty driveway. The house so quiet I thought everyone had gone out.
“I found her in her bedroom.”
I close my eyes, but that just makes the images clearer. My mother’s room, so carefully maintained - fresh flowers on the nightstand, silk curtains drawn against the winter light. The pill bottles lined up in a neat row, empty. Her face, peaceful in a way it never was in life.
“The official story was heart failure. A weak heart, they said, the kind of convenient lie rich families tell to avoid scandal.” I open my eyes, meet Lily’s gaze. “But she took pills. Enough to never wake up. And she left a note.”
“Oh God. Lucas-”
“Edward got to it first.”
The old fury burns in my chest, familiar and exhausting.
“He found the note before I could. Before anyone could. He was always the first one up, always the one checking for problems to leverage. And my mother’s suicide note - her final words, her explanation, her truth - became just another weapon in his arsenal.”
Lily’s grip on my hand tightens. “What did it say?”
“It blamed Victoria. Detailed years of psychological abuse - the gaslighting, the isolation, the way Victoria systematically destroyed her relationships with everyone who might have helped. Financial control that left her dependent and desperate. Evidence that would have destroyed Victoria’s carefully constructed image forever. ”
I pull my hand away, stand up, pace the small room again because I can’t be still while I’m talking about this.
“Edward kept it. He’s been using it to control me ever since.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every time I’ve tried to pull away from the family - to speak up about how they treated you, to distance myself from their schemes, to be anything other than the compliant younger brother - he reminds me he has it. That he could release it whenever he wants and spin it however he wants.”
I turn to face her, letting her see the full weight of what I’m carrying.
“He could make my mother look unstable. Delusional. He could make it look like I drove her to it by not being home enough, by choosing boarding school over her, by being a selfish teenager who didn’t notice his own mother was drowning.”
“That’s not-”
“I know it’s not true. Rationally, I know.
” I run a hand through my hair. “But he’s had that note for eleven years.
Eleven years of holding my mother’s death over my head.
Eleven years of me staying silent about every awful thing I’ve witnessed because I was terrified of what he’d do with her words. ”
The silence stretches between us.
I can’t look at Lily. Can’t bear to see the pity in her eyes - or worse, the judgment. The realization that the man she’s been trusting, the man she’s been letting close, has been complicit in his family’s crimes through his silence.
“Stop apologizing.”
I look up. She’s not pitying me. She’s not judging me.
She’s furious.
“Edward has been using your mother’s death to control you,” she says, her voice fierce enough to cut glass. “Her suicide. Her final words. And you’re standing there acting like you did something wrong?”
“I should have fought harder-”
“You were seventeen.” She stands, crosses to me, grabs my arm hard enough to leave marks. “A child. A grieving child who found his mother’s body and then had to watch his brother turn her death into a blackmail scheme. That is not your fault. None of it is your fault.”
“I stayed silent for eleven years-”
“Because you were traumatized. Because they trained you to be silent. Because that’s what this family does - they find your weaknesses and they weaponize them.” Her eyes are blazing now. “Victoria did it to your mother. Edward did it to you. They tried to do it to me. But it stops now.”
“I hated myself for staying silent,” I say, and my voice cracks on it. “Every single day.”
She crosses the room before I finish the sentence.
Her hands catch my face, forcing my eyes to hers, her palms warm against two days of stubble I haven’t bothered to shave. I should feel exposed, caught open like this. Instead something in my chest cracks that I’ve held shut by force for eleven years.
“You were seventeen,” she says, fierce. “A child. And you’re here now.”
She tips her head until her temple rests against my jaw.
Her breath shudders out warm against my throat in the dark, and my hands find her hips on their own, tentative, asking.
This is the woman the whole world thinks is my brother’s wife.
Her grief is fresh and mine is eleven years old and neither of us cares, in this second, about a single reason we shouldn’t.
“Lily-”
“I know.” She presses closer, and the heat of her bleeds through both our clothes. “I know we should be planning. I know there are a thousand things-”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“What were you going to say?”
My grip tightens. “That I don’t deserve you. That you should run from my family as far as your legs will take you. And that every time you touch me, I forget why any of that matters.”
Something in my chest cracks open. Something I’ve been holding together with sheer force of will for over a decade.
“She would have loved you,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like my own. “My mother. She would have seen what I see.”
“What do you see?”
“Someone who refuses to break. Someone who fights back. Someone who-”
I stop myself before I say something I can’t take back.
Before I tell her that watching her find her strength has been like watching the sun come up after eleven years of darkness.
Before I admit that I’ve been falling in love with her since the moment she walked into that engagement party in a borrowed dress, and that every day since has only made it worse.
“We need to find that note,” Lily says, her jaw set with determination. “Take away Edward’s leverage. If he can’t threaten you, he loses half his power.”
“It’s in a safe at the main house. Edward doesn’t think I know the combination, but I watched him open it once, years ago. He was drunk, careless. I memorized the numbers and never let on.”
“Then we go get it.”
“Lily, that’s-”
“Crazy? Probably.” She’s already moving toward the door, energy crackling off her like electricity. “But it’s the only way. Edward’s power comes from secrets. We take the secrets, we take the power. We take back what he stole from you.”
I want to argue. Want to protect her from the danger of what she’s suggesting - breaking into the Burton family manor in the middle of the night, stealing from Edward’s personal safe, risking everything on a plan that could go wrong in a thousand ways.
But I’ve been protecting her from the wrong things for three years. Protecting her by staying silent. Protecting her by not rocking the boat. Protecting her right into a cage.
Maybe it’s time to fight alongside her instead.
“The security system resets at 2 a.m.,” I hear myself say. “There’s a fifteen-minute window while the overnight protocols initialize. Service entrance on the east side - I have the code. Edward keeps the safe in his study, behind the portrait of our grandfather.”
Lily’s smile is sharp and satisfied. “Then we have a plan.”
“We have a suicide mission.”
“Same thing, in this family.” She takes my hand, and her touch anchors me in a way nothing has in years. “But we’re doing it together. And we’re going to win.”
The Burton family manor looms against the night sky like a Gothic nightmare.
It’s 2 a.m. exactly. The house is dark except for the security lights tracing the perimeter, throwing long shadows across manicured lawns that have never seen a blade of grass out of place.
I used to love this house as a kid - the hidden passages, the library that smelled like old books, the kitchen where the staff would sneak me cookies when my mother wasn’t looking.
Now it just looks like a monument to everything that’s wrong with my family.
“Ready?” Lily whispers beside me.
“No. Let’s go anyway.”
We slip through the service entrance - a door I’ve used a thousand times, back when I still pretended to be part of this family. The code hasn’t changed in fifteen years. Edward’s arrogance, assuming no one would ever dare to use it against him.
The house is silent. Sleeping. Unaware that its ghosts have come home.
Lily moves like a shadow beside me, her dark clothes blending with the darkness of the hallway.
I keep my hand on the small of her back, guiding her through corridors I know by heart - past the formal dining room where we suffered through countless silent dinners, past the conservatory where my mother used to play piano before Victoria convinced her she wasn’t good enough, past the gallery of family portraits that watch us with painted eyes.
My mother’s portrait is here, somewhere. I don’t let myself look for it.
The study is on the second floor. Edward’s domain since our father died, leather chairs and mahogany desk and the smell of scotch that’s become as much a part of him as his cruelty.
I work the combination on the safe with shaking hands.
I’ve rehearsed this moment a hundred times in my head. A thousand times. Imagined taking back what Edward stole, finally freeing myself from his control, finally being able to look in the mirror without seeing a coward staring back.
The lock clicks open.
Inside, beneath a stack of papers and the hoarded detritus of generations of Burton secrets, is a yellowed envelope in my mother’s handwriting.
For my son.
My hands are trembling as I reach for it. Eleven years. Eleven years of wondering what her final words were. Eleven years of Edward holding them hostage.
I tuck the envelope inside my jacket, against my heart where it should have been all along.
“Got it,” I whisper. “Let’s go.”
We make it to the service exit before the lights snap on.
Victoria stands in the doorway, holding a phone. Behind her, two security guards flank the exit like attack dogs waiting for a command.
“You didn’t really think I wouldn’t have motion sensors?” Her smile is poison wrapped in silk, perfect even at 2 a.m. “Now. Let’s talk about what you just stole.”
My hand finds Lily’s in the darkness. Whatever happens next, we face it together.