Chapter 25 – Finn – The Price of Silence #2
Eleanor flinches away from his touch and doesn’t answer.
She takes a step back and nods. Giving Waren one last look that’s filled with disgust and regret, she turns on her heel.
The pearls flash, the heels click, and she steps into the wash of hospital light, swallowed by it as if nothing feral ever touched her.
Waren watches her go, then lets out a soft laugh, pleased with himself. “Next week,” he says to the empty air. “Sure.”
That’s when I decide to move. I start walking toward Waren and for a moment when he notices me, he squints his eyes, trying to register what’s happening. Oh, you have no idea, you bastard.
Waren steps back, guiltily. “You aren’t going to ask me questions here, are you? I’m not your confessional.”
Despite looking nervous, he says it with a smirk and a line that should be a dare.
I am furious by degrees that feel too big to carry.
He expects me to confront him here, amid concrete and moonlight, to play his little theater.
He expects bravado. I don’t want to negotiate the terms of what he knows in small talk.
I shake my head. My head moves like a weapon. “You’re not getting to explain yourself right now.” I say it softly, letting him hear the warning in my restraint. “I’m not going to be the idiot who asks you for a story you can sell to someone else tonight.”
His eyebrows hitch. “Oh? You gonna pay then? Or are you the kind who likes to hunt without giving up the meat?”
Money has always made men of Waren’s sort cooperative.
It doesn’t make them honest, but it buys time, and time is leverage.
I’m angrier than I am careful, angrier than the patient man I have trained myself to be in the boardroom.
Anger wants answers now. But answers are toxic if you open them without a plan.
So, I reach for the thing we both understand: currency.
I don’t need a damn translator for that.
I pull my phone out; the movement practiced to anonymity. “How much for the receipts? For names? For the ledger?”
He grins like a dog smelling blood. “Start with fifty thousand and we’ll see how honest I feel.”
Fucking bastard. I expected him to fight a little at least. Considering how smart Eleanor acts, she’s fucking stupid for trusting someone like him.
The numbers land like a physical blow. The fucker is asking for too much.
I could walk away… walk into the glow of the hospital, to Richard’s room, the antiseptic safety of machines and monitors.
But walking away would be theft too: theft of evidence and of the chance to give Ariane the truth she doesn’t deserve to be kept from.
Walking away is also letting a man like Waren dictate terms to me. I don’t like feeling dictated to.
“Fine.” I state it like a verdict. “But you’re going to answer when I say. Not when you think you can sell to the next desperate person who comes along.”
He cackles softly, delighted and greedy. “You’re serious. I like you. You think you can buy my conscience.”
“It’s not your conscience I’m buying,” I say. The words come fast. “It’s your cooperation. You give me names, dates, transfers. You tell me how it was done. You tell me who signed what, who moved cash through which shells. Do that and your check clears. Cross me, try to blackmail me, sell it…”
Waren laughs, but there’s a twitch now I haven’t seen before. “You won’t be the one to threaten me, Wagner. People who threaten me usually end up with a very specific problem.”
“You underestimate me,” I say. “You overestimate your safety. I’m not in the mood to play your favorite man-of-the-world tonight.”
He levels that awful stare at me, like he’s measuring whether I’m the kind of man who’ll flinch when a match is thrown. “You don’t come at me with fists. You come at me with checks, or you come at me with someone who breaks bones. I prefer checks. They’re uncomplicated.”
“I’ll pay,” I say. The number I hand him is transferred before my irritation has time to cool. The money buzzes the way currency does now, liquid and immediate. Waren’s phone buzzes, and an ugly and triumphant grin breaks across his face. He tucks my number in his pocket like a talisman.
“You’re not going to ask me anything,” he says, in that same smug voice. “You’re going to pay. You’ll call when you want to. You’ll call when you’re ready.”
He thinks he’s setting terms and that he has leverage. He hasn’t met the kind of hunger that keeps me awake.
I shake my head again, because I can’t let the man think he’s the one holding any of this. “I’ll call you when I want answers,” I say. “When I want them, they will come. You give me what I want when I ask. Not before. Not on your timetable.”
He sizes me up like a man seeing if the next animal is worth his time. Then, with a practiced motion, he punches his number into my phone. He hands the device back and gives me a smirk like he’s played his part perfectly.
“Call me when you’re ready to bleed,” he says. Then, because men like him always like a flourish, he adds with a leer, “But remember…truth has a hunger. It gets what it wants.”
What the fuck does that even mean? The man needs to stick to drinks and weed, not poetry.
He melts back into the darkness like soot, leaving the night smelling worse for his presence. I stand there for a long time, chest tight, everything in me wired for a fight I haven’t started yet.
The anger runs deep and slow now, with a hot flare of immediate violence, guilt, and regret.
I’m feeling so many emotions, I couldn’t even bottle them up if I wanted to.
I think of my mother… of her small, patient faith in a world that refused to be decent to her.
I think of Ariane and the way she’ll look when she learns the woman she calls mother, and who is supposed to have counseled her about safety and virtue, stands at the center of a conspiracy that cost someone everything.
What the hell am I gonna tell Dad? I won’t let my mind go there.
Eleanor’s fucking pretentious in ways I always found annoying.
But I never thought she was capable of turning her vanity into murder.
That realization is a new kind of betrayal, one that tears at the brittle scaffolding of family myths I relied on.
The house I live in, the rituals, the reasons I learned to measure my feelings in degrees of acceptable rage—they all start to look like a theatrical set.
I light another cigarette and draw until my lungs remember calm, which refuses to come.
The smoke is little comfort. My chest is a furnace; suspicion carved in bone.
She killed her. That’s the truth. Maybe not with her own hands, but with whispered instructions and enough money to make a man like Waren work until his conscience’s voice is rented out.
She paid. She wanted a life with my father and thought erasing a wife was a method of making a life. That is monstrous and intimate at once.
Tomorrow, I will stand by Dad’s bedside as the doctors check vitals and hand me lists of dosages and times.
I’ll be the dutiful son, and I’ll field questions and I’ll keep a face like the house needs.
But after that, after the morphine fog lifts and the surgeons go home and the nurses go off shift, I will start pulling threads.
Waren’s number is in my pocket, the first thin wire I can tug.
He will sell me what he knows because that is his nature.
He will also sell it to someone else if the price is right, so timing matters.
I need to be precise in my approach. I will want names, dates, accounts, the men who moved money.
I want receipts, not exaggerated stories.
Stories make good theatre but receipts? They hold people accountable.
I am not sentimental about exposure. My aim is not revenge for its own sake; it is correction.
If someone built her life on arranging other people’s ends, I will do what men like me do: use leverage to make systems right, or at least to ensure the record reflects reality.
For a minute, standing alone in the courtyard, I imagine Ariane’s face when the ledger is open.
Will she look at her mother and see a woman capable of murder?
Will she see a desperate lover who used the arsenal of privilege to get what she wanted?
Or will she see a story her mother told to protect her—one that unravels in ugly, unlovely ways?
My chest hurts at the thought. It’s not gentleness that makes me worry; it’s the understanding that Ariane, who has already been broken by the deceit of men, cannot afford another evisceration of trust.
I pocket my phone. Waren’s number is added there like a promise and a threat both. I step back into the hospital, the light swallowing me.
Inside, the world keeps its polite noises: monitors, whispered thanks, the hollow clink of cutlery from a vending machine. Richard sleeps and the surgeons say he’s stable. That will do for now.
For now, I am left with the taste of smoke and the knowledge of what I must do. I didn’t like Eleanor, sure. But never in a way that prepared me for this. I never imagined that the woman who has shaped my father’s midlife to be the one to write such a dirty script.
I walk down the hall to Dad’s room with slow and loaded steps of a man who knows how to plan a siege.