The Billionaire I Was Meant To Hate

Chapter 23: Upstate

POV: Aria

The drive took just under three hours, most of it in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable so much as it was full —

both of us turning over everything we knew, and everything we still didn't, without either of us having the energy left to

say it out loud again.

Marcus met us at a gas station ten minutes outside town, having driven up separately after Damian called him with

the news. He looked worse than he had at his apartment days earlier, like a man who hadn't fully slept since his father

disappeared.

"Local PD found the motel," he said, sliding into the back seat. "Room's registered under a name that isn't Vance or my

father, but the clerk recognized my father's photo when they showed it to him."

"Are they still there?" I asked.

"Nobody's seen either of them leave. But nobody's seen them since the argument outside the room either." Marcus's

jaw tightened. "The clerk said it got loud. Said one of them left angry, slammed a door, and the other one hasn't come

out since."

Damian's hands stayed steady on the wheel, but I could see the tension climbing through his shoulders, the same

careful control he wore into every boardroom now stretched thin over something that had stopped being business a

long time ago.

"If Vance is the one still in that room," Damian said, "and my uncle's the one who left angry—"

"Then we don't know which direction the danger's pointing," I finished. "Toward Malcolm, or from him."

The motel was exactly the kind of place designed to be forgettable — a low strip of doors facing a cracked parking

lot, one flickering vacancy sign, a scattering of cars that had clearly been there longer than a single night. Two local

officers were already positioned near the office when we pulled in, having been quietly looped in by Reyes an hour

earlier.

"We wait for them," Damian said, parking well back from the room in question. "We are not the ones who go through

that door."

I didn't argue, though every instinct in me wanted to. Five weeks ago, I would have. Five weeks of watching how

carefully Sophie built a case, how deliberately Damian moved through every piece of this investigation, had taught me

something I hadn't expected to learn: that recklessness wasn't the same thing as courage, and the version of justice I

actually wanted required staying alive long enough to see it through.

We watched from the car as the officers approached the door, knocked, announced themselves.

No answer.

A second knock, harder.

Still nothing.

One of the officers tried the handle, found it unlocked, and pushed the door open slowly, weapon drawn, the

way training taught them to enter a room they had no guarantee was empty.

I held my breath the entire time it took for the second officer to step inside behind the first.

A long moment passed. Then the first officer stepped back out into the doorway and looked toward our car, his

expression unreadable from this distance, one hand already reaching for the radio at his shoulder.

Marcus was out of the car before either Damian or I could stop him.

"Marcus—"

He didn't slow down, and by the time we caught up to him at the doorway, he'd already gone still, staring into the

room with an expression I would remember for a long time after that night.

The room was empty.

No Malcolm. No Vance.

Just an overturned chair, a shattered lamp, and on the mirror above the dresser, written in something dark enough

that none of us wanted to say out loud what we thought it might be, four words.

HE KNOWS TOO MUCH.