Chapter 24 #2
“Grayson.” Miranda tilts her face up to look at me, and her eyes in the half-light are very steady.
“You don’t know what was in her head that day.
You don’t know who she was meeting or what she was doing.
Maybe she had a reason to be there that nobody knew about.
Maybe she made a wrong turn. Maybe somebody offered her a ride. ”
I go very still.
“Have you considered,” she continues, quieter still, “that you’ve been chasing an answer for four years because you needed there to be one? Sometimes there isn’t an answer. Sometimes a person is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no amount of looking will change that.”
I bury my face in her neck and breathe her in. Soap and laundry detergent twine together with the faint copper trace of her bandage. Underneath them lives the honest smell that’s been part of me since the night I scented her blood in her apartment.
“You might be right,” I whisper into her skin.
She goes quiet, her fingers curling against my chest. “But you don’t believe it yet.”
“I’m trying to.” My voice is muffled against her throat. “Maybe I’ve been wanting an answer so badly that I’ve been seeing a pattern that wasn’t there.”
She turns in my arms until her face is level with mine, and she kisses my chin once, softly and quickly.
“Sometimes there are no answers, Grayson. Sometimes the world is just unfair.”
My heart aches at the words, and I tighten my grip with both arms wrapping around her, holding her against my chest as though the contact alone will keep something at bay.
Her hand stays flat over my heart until she falls asleep.
I lie awake for a long time afterward, watching the ceiling, my fingers stroking the soft skin of her shoulder. If the Council didn’t kill Annie, then someone else did. Or maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe I just need to let this go.
Sighing, I wrap my arms tighter around my mate and close my eyes.
The world is truly unfair.
The week after the man at the tree line, I have cameras put in along the fence and the drive, Derek walking the property with me to mark the blind spots.
Having him back means I’m not guarding the place alone anymore.
The first hearing with the judge is set for a month out.
Seven days pass with nothing on the cameras, no scent on the wind, and I let my shoulders come down for the first time since the park.
Miranda has claimed the kitchen table.
She studies there every afternoon now, highlighters lined up, a textbook so thick she has to hold it open with both hands.
The certification she’s chasing is some nursing thing I can’t follow a word of, and I’ve quit offering to pay for the course because the third time I tried, she promised to make sure I never father another child.
So I help where she allows it. I quiz her from the back of the book and keep her coffee hot.
This afternoon I’m in the doorway with a dish towel over my shoulder, watching something I won’t have the words for later.
Ethan has dragged his chair flush against hers.
He’s got one of the picture books I bought him spread open, a fat crayon in his fist, his whole face folded down into concentration.
Each time Miranda turns a page, he turns one of his own.
When she runs her highlighter under a line, he drags orange under a row of ducks.
His tongue pokes out the corner of his mouth.
“What are you studying?” he asks, peering over her arm.
“Kidneys.” She doesn’t look up. “You?”
“Ducks.” He examines his work. “These are very important ducks.”
“I can see that. You’ve underlined them.”
“You have to underline the important parts.” He gives it back to her word for word because she told him so an hour ago, and my chest does something I’d rather it didn’t.
Miranda hums and circles a term in the margin. Ethan circles a duck. She mouths a definition to set it in her memory, and he mouths a sound back that’s mostly vowels, his whole idea of studying hard. Neither of them looks my way.
I’ve started collecting moments I’m not supposed to keep. The wolf does it with me, gone warm and low in my chest. It only goes this quiet when the house is locked and everyone inside it is safe.
“You’re staring,” Miranda says, eyes still on the page.
“There’s a wall behind you.”
“Then move, and you can stare at that instead.”
Ethan twists around to me, beaming, hoisting his book up so I can admire a page of ducks under siege from orange crayon. “Dad. Look. I studied.”
“Look at that, buddy. Good job.”
“Miranda’s going to pass her test,” he tells me, “and then she gets to be the nurse for the whole pack.” His face clouds. “Can ducks be nurses?”
“No,” Miranda answers.
“Why not?”
“No thumbs.”
He takes this in solemnly, then bends back to his ducks.
I stay in the doorway a while longer, towel on my shoulder, and let myself have all of it: the warm kitchen, the scratch of a crayon against paper, the woman who won’t take a cent from me teaching my son that the important parts get underlined.
The hearing is three weeks out. Vanessa is somewhere, sharpening something. I know all of it, and for one afternoon, I put it down to watch my family.
The peace holds for two more days. Then Tuesday morning, my phone buzzes on the kitchen counter while I’m whipping up eggs. The screen lights up with Sterling’s name, followed by a message. I’m here.
I’m already crossing the foyer when the front door swings open, Sterling first, Coach a step behind him, neither one bothering with a greeting.
“Where’s Miranda?”
“Upstairs with Ethan.” My jaw tightens. “What’s going on?”
Sterling holds out his phone.
A headline in tall red type sits above a photograph of Miranda taken at the engagement dinner.
HOCKEY FIANCéE BURIED UNDER SIX FIGURES OF GAMBLING DEBT.
The article is already going viral. The timestamp says it broke an hour ago, and the comments under it are harsh trolls.
I scroll down with my thumb, and the second photograph is worse, a still pulled from somewhere inside the hospital, Miranda in scrubs, a date stamp at the bottom that’s a year old.
My claws are through my fingertips. I retract them with a slow inhale.
“Gambling.” My voice has gone quiet. “She has never gambled a dollar in her life. The debt was her mother’s medical bills.”
“They know that.” Sterling drops his briefcase on the table by the door. “They’re spinning it anyway. The source is anonymous. The financial records they’re citing are real but cherry-picked, and the framing is built to do maximum damage in a custody hearing.”
I look at Coach. He holds my eye and doesn’t blink. “I told you. I warned you that Vanessa’s people would tear her life open the moment they figured out who she was. This is what that looks like.”
“It’s also not the only piece dropping today.
” Sterling pulls out a second device, taps through it, and turns it toward me.
“Dr. Axel Hudson and Dr. Vivian Banks of Silverpeak General have both gone on record in the last ninety minutes accusing Miranda of inappropriate workplace conduct. Vivian is alleging the affair angle. Axel is alleging that she initiated a sexual relationship with him during a date six weeks ago and then turned hostile when he refused to continue it.”
The growl that comes out of me is involuntary and not entirely human.
Coach’s hand lands flat on my shoulder, the alpha pressure of him pressing my wolf back down by half a step. “Easy.”
“Don’t tell me to take it easy. I thought I told you to sue them, Sterling!”
Sterling sighs. “A lawsuit doesn’t happen in a day. And they are spinning it to make it seem that she is using your resources to silence them.”
“Fucking assholes!” I snarl.
“Enough, Grayson! You have to be smart about this.” Coach’s grip on my shoulder doesn’t loosen. “Smart is what gets her out of this. Furious gets her splashed across another headline.”
Sterling clears his throat. “I’m already on a call with your publicist. We’ll have a statement out before five p.m. clarifying the nature of the debt and confirming it was paid in full by an undisclosed family friend prior to the engagement.
We’re framing the leak itself as a coordinated harassment campaign by parties with a vested interest in the custody outcome. ”
“And the doctors.”
“That’s where we have a problem.” Sterling’s expression doesn’t change. “Defamation suits take months. Public opinion shifts in hours. If we go after them in court, we’ll win eventually. If we go after them in the press, we’ll lose.”
Crossing the room to the drawer of the side table, I pull it open and lift out a small USB drive. I cross back and place the drive flat in Sterling’s palm.
“What is this?”
“The date Dr. Axel mentioned. The footage from their security cameras shows what happened.” I close his fingers around the drive.
“I asked their manager for a copy after I found out Miranda was fired. There’s audio as well.
Two hours of recording that includes the moment he grabs her wrist and refuses to let go, the moment he tries to negotiate sex in exchange for paying her share of the bill, plus the moment I put my hand on the back of her chair and walked her out of there. ”
Sterling looks down at the drive in his hand. “We could use this.”
“Leak it.” My voice is cold. “Dig through Miranda’s financials. Clear her name. Get patient testimonies, testimonies of the nurses she’s worked with.”
“Grayson.”