Married to My Father's Killer

Chapter 6

For three full seconds, I forgot how to breathe.

You remind me so much of someone I used to know.

The whole table waited. Damon's smile sat there like a baited hook. One wrong flicker of my face and three years of planning would die in this room.

So I did the only thing I could. I smiled back.

"People say I have one of those faces," I said lightly. "Forgettable, apparently. You're not the first to think we've met."

Gregory's eyes didn't leave mine.

"No," he said. "Not forgettable. That's exactly what it isn't."

"Father." Adrian's voice cut through the room, cool and final. He pulled out the chair beside Cora and looked at me. "Sit. You're interrogating my fiancée before she's had a glass of water."

The spell broke. Gregory leaned back, the strange intensity folding away behind his composure, though I could feel it still there, banked like a coal.

"Forgive an old man's memory," he said. "It plays tricks." He lifted his glass, and just like that the table exhaled and the conversation resumed around us as if nothing had happened.

But Gregory watched me through the whole first course. I felt it like a hand on the back of my neck.

I sat. My legs were grateful.

"You did well," Adrian murmured, so low only I could hear it. He'd taken the seat at my other side, and the warmth of him was a strange anchor in a room full of knives. "He likes testing people. He'll do it all night."

"I noticed."

"Don't let him win."

I turned my head and found his face closer than I expected. For a moment we just looked at each other — two strangers conspiring at the edge of a hostile table — and something passed between us that wasn't quite warmth but wasn't the cold either.

Then Cora elbowed me, beaming, and the moment dissolved.

"Ignore them all," she whispered. "The food's the only honest thing in this house."

Dinner crawled.

I learned the family the way I'd learned to read a building's plans — quietly, from the edges in. Gregory ruled the table with a glance. Damon performed charm like a weapon, flattering his uncle, needling Adrian, letting his eyes find me a beat too often. Cora chattered and laughed and tried to fill every silence, and I understood with a small ache that she was the only one in the room who didn't know how to lie.

I smiled. I deflected. I said Hart a dozen times and watched it land on deaf, uninterested ears — everywhere except the head of the table, where Gregory still turned me over in his mind like a coin he couldn't place.

When the plates were cleared, Cora stood and tugged my hand.

"Come on. Before the men start talking about money and I die of boredom. I'll give you the tour."

I glanced at Adrian. He gave the smallest nod.

I let her lead me out of the dining room and into a long gallery lined with portraits — generations of Sinclairs frozen in oil, the founders and the heirs, the whole proud history of an empire built on better men's bones.

"This is the boring hall of dead relatives," Cora said cheerfully, breezing past them. "Great-grandfather started the company. Grandfather doubled it. Father turned it into what it is now." She slowed. "And that one's my favorite. Even though it makes everyone sad."

I followed her gaze.

At the end of the gallery, larger than all the rest, hung the portrait of a young man. Maybe thirty. Dark hair, a wide, easy smile — the kind of warmth I'd never once seen on Adrian's face, though the bones were unmistakably the same. Below the frame sat a small table with fresh white flowers and a candle, unlit.

A memorial.

"Who is that?" I asked, though something in my chest had already begun to tighten.

"Ethan." Cora's voice softened, lost its brightness. "My oldest brother. He was supposed to run all of it one day. Everyone loved him — even Father smiled when Ethan was around." She reached out and brushed a petal straight. "He died. Five years ago, almost six now."

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it, and hated that I meant it. "How?"

Cora was quiet for a moment.

"There was a building," she said. "A tower the company was finishing downtown. The whole front of it came down during the opening. People were inside." Her jaw trembled. "Ethan was inside. He'd gone to check the work himself, because that was the kind of person he was. Hands-on. Careful."

The gallery seemed to tilt around me.

A tower. The opening. The collapse.

"They blamed the architect," Cora went on, not seeing my face. "Said he cut corners, falsified the safety reports, let it all rot to save money. There was a trial. The man went to prison." Her voice hardened into something older than she was. "He died in there before he could ever say sorry. Good. I hope it was slow."

I couldn't feel my hands.

I knew that tower. I knew that trial. I had sat in the back of that courtroom three years ago and watched them lead my father away in chains, screaming that he was innocent.

The architect they hated. The man they believed had killed their golden son.

My father.

I had come to this house to destroy the family that buried Thomas Vale — and I had just learned that, in their eyes, my father was the man who'd murdered their Ethan.

"Lucia?" Cora's voice came from very far away. "You've gone white. Are you—"

"Who," I heard myself say, "was the architect?"

And from the doorway behind us, low and quiet and watching me far too closely, came Adrian's voice.

"His name was Thomas Vale," he said. "Why do you ask?"