13. Lily
— ? —
Lily
Victoria’s hired men block the exits.
They’re trying to look casual, tourists enjoying the view, but their bulk and their positioning and the way their eyes track every movement we make give them away. Real tourists look at the water. These two look at me. This isn’t a conversation.
It’s an ambush, and I walked into it on my own two feet because Edward said come alone and I was arrogant enough to think I’d stopped being the kind of woman who does what Burton men tell her.
“Mother.”
Lucas’s voice cuts across the pavilion, and my whole body answers before my brain catches up.
He’s coming at us fast, jacket straining across his shoulders with every furious step, and he looks like vengeance given a face.
Murder in his eyes. Hands already curling into fists.
He shouldn’t be here. I told him to wait in the car, told him this was mine to walk into, and of course he didn’t listen, and of course the relief that floods me at the sight of him is so total it nearly takes my knees.
He plants himself between me and the nearest guard. The movement is small, nothing anyone would catch unless they were tracking exactly where he is at every second.
I catch it. Apparently I track that now.
And this is the worst possible moment to notice any of it.
Two men built like loading docks are watching me, my fraud of a husband is frozen three feet away wearing the expression of a man who set a trap and is no longer sure who it’s going to catch, and Victoria is studying me like a hawk deciding whether I’m worth the dive.
None of it stops the heat that floods through me at the sight of Lucas putting his body in front of mine.
Three years of Edward flinching when I reached for him, and here is a man who steps toward the danger without being asked.
It lands lower than fear does. It scares me more than the guards do.
Because I know what this is now. And the timing has no sense of occasion at all.
I love him. Not the careful, hedged version I admitted on a sidewalk three days ago, the one with an escape hatch built into it. The whole, ruinous, irreversible thing, arriving in the middle of an ambush like a guest who wandered into the wrong party and refuses to leave.
I tuck it away where it can’t get me killed.
“Step away from her,” Lucas says, and his voice has gone to that deadly-calm register that’s worse than shouting. “Right now.”
“Protecting this family.” Victoria’s eyes don’t leave my face. “Something you’ve never once managed to do in your life. Give me the drive, Lily, and you can both walk out of this park and go back to whatever sad little arrangement you’ve made of yourselves.”
“Or what?” I keep my voice level, pulling her attention back to me, away from him. Drawing the hawk’s eye. “You’ll have me dragged off in a public park, in front of a park full of witnesses with phones in their hands?”
“You’d be surprised what gets forgotten when the right people ask the right way.
” But her composure has a crack in it now, hairline-thin, and I’ve spent three years learning to read the weather of this woman’s face.
She’s not bluffing about wanting it. She’s bluffing about being able to take it.
“If what’s on that drive comes out, this family is finished.
Not embarrassed. Finished. Every door in this city closes.
Every name we’ve known for forty years stops returning a call.
The Burtons become a thing people whisper about at other people’s parties. ”
There it is. The only weapon she has ever respected, turned around and pointed at her own chest. Social death. Exile. The exact thing she spent three years doing to me, one garden party at a time, and she’s standing here terrified of it like it’s a loaded gun.
“I’ve read all of it,” I tell her, almost gently. “Every page. I know exactly what it costs you. That’s why I’m holding it.”
“Then you understand why I can’t let you leave with it.”
She nods.
It’s such a small gesture I almost miss it. A tip of her chin, barely a degree, aimed past my shoulder at the man behind me.
The guard moves.
I feel it more than see it, a shift in the air at my back, the weight of someone large closing the distance fast, and then Lucas is there, not subtle anymore, one arm thrown back across my body and sweeping me behind him so hard I stumble against the pavilion railing.
The river is a long gray drop below us. His other hand comes up flat against the guard’s chest, and the two of them stand locked like that, neither giving, Lucas’s whole frame vibrating with something I’ve never seen in him before.
“Touch her,” Lucas says, very quietly, “and I will end whatever’s left of your week.”
The guard glances at Victoria. Waiting for the word.
My heart is slamming so hard I taste it. One push. One push and Lucas goes over that railing, or the guard does, and either way this stops being a confrontation and becomes a crime, and Victoria has lawyers who’ve buried worse than a shoving match by the water.
“Lucas.” I get my hand flat against his spine. I can feel his heartbeat through his jacket, going as fast as mine. “Lucas, look at me. Not him. Me.”
He doesn’t turn. But his weight shifts back, just slightly, toward my hand.
“We don’t win this with our hands,” I say, low, only for him.
“If you hit him, she wins. The story becomes the Burton brother who assaulted a man in a public park, and I become the woman who drove him to it, and everything we’ve built this week burns.
That’s the only version of tonight where she walks away happy. Don’t give it to her.”
For one long second I genuinely don’t know which way he goes. His jaw is granite. The guard hasn’t moved. Behind us, somewhere, I’m dimly aware of phones lifting, of the bright awful interest of strangers who can smell a scene about to break.
Then Lucas lowers his hand.
He steps back into me, his shoulders still corded tight, and the guard exhales and retreats half a pace, and the river goes back to being scenery instead of a threat.
Victoria’s mouth thins. She knows she just lost the cheap version of this, the version where it ends in blood and headlines and a story she controls.
So she reaches for the other knife. The one she’s been keeping sharp for years.
“Your mother couldn’t handle this family either.
” She says it to Lucas, watching his face the way a person watches a fire they’ve just lit.
“Couldn’t adapt. Couldn’t keep up. Too soft for the world she married into.
” A pause, deliberate, savoring. “And look where that softness got her. In the ground before fifty, and you the one who found her.”
The thing that moves across Lucas’s face isn’t anger. Anger I could work with. This is older and deeper, an eleven-year wound she just pressed her thumb into on purpose.
I get in front of him before it can finish forming.
“Don’t,” I tell him, both hands on his chest now, pushing him back from her, from the edge, from all of it. “That’s exactly what she wants. She can’t take the drive, so she’s trying to take you instead. Don’t let her.”
“She’s standing there,” he says, and his voice cracks down the middle, “talking about my mother like she’s a punchline.”
“I know.”
“Like she didn’t spend twenty-five years grinding her down to nothing-”
“I know.” I cup his face in both hands, force his eyes off Victoria and onto me.
They’re wet, furious, devastated. “Look at me. Look at me, Lucas. Your mother doesn’t get avenged by you putting your fist through some bodyguard’s teeth.
She gets avenged when this whole family loses everything it stole.
We’re three days from that. Don’t blow it up for one good punch. ”
His breath shudders out. He leans his head down until it rests against mine, his breath ragged, and for a second we just stand there in the middle of an ambush like the eye of a storm, and Victoria can watch all she likes.
Then sirens.
Blue and red light strobing through the trees, throwing the whole pavilion into a stutter of color.
Mrs. Reid appears at the mouth of the gazebo, phone raised in one hand like a weapon she knows exactly how to use, silver hair immaculate, expression pleasant as a knife.
“I thought you might want backup,” she says.
“I’ve also taken the liberty of calling several very interested journalists.
They’re perhaps four minutes out. So I’d think carefully, Victoria, about how you’d like this particular scene to read in tomorrow’s edition.
Burton Matriarch Corners Heiress at Riverside has a certain ring, don’t you think? ”
The color drains out of Victoria’s face all at once.
The standoff comes apart in seconds. The guards melt back into the crowd of tourists like they were never anything else, and a moment later they’re just two large men walking unhurriedly toward the lot, hands in their pockets.
Edward grabs his mother’s arm and steers her after them, and she lets him, which tells me more than anything else has all afternoon. Victoria Burton has never once in her life let anyone steer her. She’s already calculating the retreat. Already two moves ahead, into whatever she does next.
I don’t have it in me to be afraid of that yet. Later. I can be afraid later.
Elena stays.
She’s watching the Burtons go, one hand spread over the curve of her belly, and when she finally turns to me, her face has come completely undone. The polished cruelty from the restaurant is gone. What’s left underneath looks a lot like a mirror.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers.
“I checked everything Lucas told me. The patterns. The other women. He’s been doing to me exactly what he did to you, the whole time.
I thought I was the one he picked. I was just the one who hadn’t found out yet.
” Her voice breaks on the word. “I don’t even know what’s real anymore. ”