CHAPTER SIX
The messages didn't stop after the luncheon.
They got worse.
Old photographs arrived first, Vanessa and Adrian at some gala years ago, her hand possessive on his arm, captioned with a single word: mine.
Then voicemails, Vanessa's voice climbing from cold to unhinged across a dozen messages Camille saved and forwarded to Martin without listening to more than she had to.
Then, the following morning, Vanessa's car idling outside the Holloway gates for twenty minutes before security asked her to leave.
It wasn't, but it was something to hold onto, a reminder that even chaos she hadn't asked for could be turned into leverage if she was patient and careful about how she used it.
Camille reported all of it. She increased the house security, added a driver for anything after dark, and refused, when Grant suggested she was overreacting, to give him the satisfaction of looking rattled.
"You could just talk to her," Grant said, over breakfast, buttering toast. "Smooth it over. The last thing we need a day before the party is a police report about my wife's stalker making headlines."
"She's not my stalker, Grant. She's Adrian's. And I didn't ask her to fixate on me, so I'm not the one who owes her a conversation."
Grant's jaw clenched, but he didn't push it, and Camille understood that he wanted the Vanessa situation contained more than he wanted her comfort, which told her everything she still needed to know about where she ranked in his priorities before his fiftieth birthday.
That evening, Camille stayed late at the arena, reviewing the revised tribute footage with the documentary's junior editor, a nervous young man named Diaz who kept glancing at the door like he expected Skye to walk in and countermand whatever Camille was doing.
She didn't tell him what the footage would actually be used for. She only told him it needed to run at a specific point in the evening, uncut, on every screen simultaneously, and paid him generously enough that he stopped asking questions.
They worked through the sequence twice, trimming here, holding a shot there.
Camille caught herself giving notes with the same certainty she used to reserve for seating charts and sponsor calls.
Diaz simply nodded and made the change, no argument, no second-guessing.
She had forgotten how it felt to be listened to the first time she said something.
Adrian had offered to collect her after the threatening messages, and although Camille had insisted she could manage, he had texted ten minutes earlier to say he was waiting beside his truck on the next level.
It was nearly ten when she finally left, taking the elevator down to the underground garage alone, heels loud against the concrete in a way that felt, for the first time all week, unsettling rather than merely tired.
Vanessa's SUV was already angled across the exit ramp when Camille reached her car.
"We need to talk," Vanessa said, stepping out, her voice pitched somewhere between reasonable and unraveling, heels loud against the concrete as she closed the distance between them. "You're going to tell everyone there's nothing between you and Adrian. Tonight. Before this goes any further."
"There's nothing for me to deny that isn't already true," Camille said, keeping her keys in her hand, keeping the distance between them steady. "Adrian isn't property, Vanessa. Not yours. Not mine. You don't get to demand a statement about a man who doesn't belong to either of us."
"He was mine for six years." Vanessa's composure cracked audibly, something raw coming through underneath the practiced television voice. "I know how this works. I know bitches like you just take, take, take."
"I didn't take him," Camille said. "You lost him. There's a difference, and no amount of screaming at me in a parking garage is going to change which one happened."
Something in Vanessa's face went past reasoning entirely. She got back into the SUV. For a disorienting second Camille thought she was simply leaving.
The engine roared instead. The SUV lurched forward and clipped the rear corner of Camille's car hard enough to knock it out of gear, sending it rolling backward down the sloped level toward the concrete pillar Camille was standing directly beside.
She didn't have time to process it as a decision. Her body moved before her mind finished catching up, but not fast enough, her heel catching on a parking line as the car's bumper closed the gap between metal and pillar and the narrowing space where she stood.
A hand closed around her arm and hauled her sideways with a force that knocked the air out of her.
She hit the concrete hard, Adrian's body already turning to shield hers.
Behind them her car finished its slow, grinding collision with a security barrier in a shriek of metal that seemed to go on far longer than it should have.
Vanessa was screaming before the sound even stopped, climbing out of the SUV with mascara already running, shouting that Camille had ruined her life, that none of this would have happened if Camille had just stayed away from what wasn't hers.
Security arrived at a run, radios crackling, a guard already speaking into his shoulder mic about medical and police.
Camille sat on the cold concrete, Adrian's arms still around her, and watched two guards pull Vanessa away while a third checked the overhead cameras were still recording.
Grant arrived eleven minutes later, according to the timestamp Camille would check afterward, his hair still damp from the shower he'd interrupted to come down, but his first words were not about her.
"Do you have any idea what this is going to do to the documentary?
To the party? We have press credentialed for Saturday, Camille, and now there's a car wrapped around a barrier and Vanessa Stevens screaming on camera—" He stopped, looked at her properly for the first time, seemed to remember, almost as an afterthought, that she was supposed to matter. "Are you hurt?"
"No thanks to your concern," Camille said, standing without his help.
Grant's eyes moved to Adrian. "You know, if you hadn't been so eager to go chasing after him, none of this—"
Adrian hit him before Camille fully registered he'd moved, a single controlled blow that sent Grant stumbling into the side of a parked car.
Security surged forward, pulling the two men apart before it could become anything more.
Grant straightened, blood at his lip, staring at Adrian with contempt.
"Get him off my property," Grant said, wiping his mouth.
"He's not on your property," Camille said. "He's at the arena. Which, in case you've forgotten, I also own a piece of." She held Grant's gaze until he looked away first, something she couldn't remember him ever doing before tonight.
Later, outside, away from Grant and the flashing lights of arriving police, Camille found a first-aid kit in Adrian's truck and cleaned the blood from his knuckles in silence, his hand steady in hers despite everything.
The parking lot had emptied out around them, security still processing statements somewhere behind the barrier. For the first time in hours nobody was watching either of them.
"You didn't have to hit him," she said, dabbing at a split knuckle with more gentleness than the words carried.
"I know." Adrian watched her work, his eyes on her face instead of his hand. "I've wanted to do that for longer than I'll admit."
"Hit him, or kiss me?"
"Both. Not necessarily in that order."
Camille looked up at him, at the concern still written plainly across his face, and closed the distance herself, kissing him before either of them could talk themselves out of it.
It was not gentle, and it did not stay controlled for long, years of restraint breaking open at once—his hand in her hair, hers fisted in his shirt, the whole ugly night finally burning off into something that felt, for one unguarded minute, like the opposite of everything that had happened to her in this building.
Camille finally pulled back, breathing hard, her forehead against his.
"I want this," she said. "I want you. But not like this, not while I still legally belong to him on paper. I need it to be clean when it starts."
Adrian's hand came up to her face, gentle now. "Then I'll wait. I told you. I've had years of practice."
"One more day," Camille said, and meant it as a promise this time, not just an answer.
"One more day," he agreed, and pressed his mouth once, briefly, to her forehead instead.