The Billionaire I Was Meant To Hate

Chapter 22: Torn Pages

POV: Damian

I sat with the notebook in my lap for a long time after we got back to my office, running my thumb along the ragged

edges where the pages had been removed — not cut cleanly, but torn, fast and careless, the way you'd tear something

out if you were in a hurry or in a rage.

"They could have been removed years ago," Aria said gently, watching me from across the desk. "Before Vance ever put

the notebook in that unit."

"Or recently. Someone knew this facility existed. Someone got there before us and decided what we were allowed to

find."

"Marcus knew about it before either of us."

I looked up sharply. "You don't actually believe that."

"No," she admitted. "I don't. I'm just saying it out loud because I think you need to hear yourself argue against it, instead

of just wanting it not to be true."

She wasn't wrong, and I hated that she wasn't wrong, in the specific way I'd been hating a lot of things lately — not

because they were unfair, but because they kept forcing me to look directly at things I'd spent five years finding ways

not to.

"My father knew," I said, mostly to make myself say it. "Not just had access. Knew. Wanted deniability, according to a

dead man's private notes, which means he understood exactly what was happening to your family and chose to protect

himself instead of stopping it."

"Damian—"

"I spent five years building a version of him where he was just careless. Chairman on paper, not paying close enough

attention, an old man too trusting of his own brother." My voice had gone rougher than I meant it to. "I don't get to

have that version anymore."

Aria came around the desk and sat on the edge of it, close enough that our knees nearly touched. "You didn't do

this. Whatever he knew, whatever he chose — that was him. Not you." "I know that logically."

"But?"

"But I've spent five years hating a version of myself I built out of guilt for things I didn't do, and I don't know how to feel

anything else about a man who actually did." I looked up at her. "You spent five years hating me for something that

wasn't true. I think I've spent the same five years not hating myself enough for something that actually was, in a

roundabout way, mine to carry."

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had softened into something I hadn't heard from

her before — not pity, something steadier than that. "Then let's carry the part that's actually yours," she said. "Making

this right. Not the part that belonged to him."

I didn't have an answer for that, not one made of words. I reached for her hand instead, and for once neither of us

pulled back or reasoned our way out of it.

---

Reyes called an hour later, interrupting the first quiet moment either of us had allowed ourselves in weeks.

"We got a hit," he said. "Malcolm Blackwood's credit card. Small charge, a diner in upstate New York, forty minutes

ago."

I was on my feet before he finished the sentence. "Address."

"Sending it now. Damian — " Reyes hesitated. "There's something else. Local PD flagged an incident report from the

same town, filed two hours before the card was used. A man matching

Elliot Vance's description, seen arguing with someone outside a motel off the interstate."

Aria was already reaching for her coat.

"We're not going alone," I said, before she could argue. "Reyes, get local law enforcement looped in. Discreetly. If

Malcolm and Vance are both in the same town, at the same time, after everything that's happened—"

"Then it's not a coincidence," Aria finished for me, grim. "It's a meeting."

And whatever they were meeting about, I had the sick, certain feeling that it was going to determine how this

ended for all of us.