Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

018 Beatrix!!!!

Sebastian

We left the gala twenty minutes after the photographer's flash went off, my lawyer already on the phone issuing a statement I hadn't approved but didn't have the energy to argue with, Christabel silent beside me in the car, her hand tight around mine the entire ride home.

"Talk to me," she said finally, once we were back in the penthouse, Jane asleep, the door shut behind us. "What did that journalist mean, funds dating back to before your father died?"

"I don't know." I dropped into the chair by the window, exhaustion sitting on me like something physical. "The expansion account had a discrepancy flagged three years ago, right around when Elena died, right around when my father's health started failing. It was small enough at the time that it got written off as an accounting error. Nobody looked closer."

"And now someone's looking closer."

"Now someone's feeding a journalist very specific numbers that took my own internal audit team two years to find the first time." I rubbed my eyes, the pieces of the last two weeks rearranging themselves in my head into a shape I didn't like at all. "Someone wants this story told, Christabel. Someone with access to records that aren't public."

"Beatrix."

"Maybe. Or someone who wants me to think it's Beatrix." I stood, restless, crossing to the window where snow was still falling steadily over the garden, the same garden where a figure had stood watching us less than forty eight hours ago. "I called the accounting firm that did the original audit. I want everything pulled again. Every transaction, every signature, going back four years."

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know yet." I turned to face her, and something in my chest ached at how tired she looked, dark circles under her eyes that hadn't been there two weeks ago, before any of this became her problem too. "I keep thinking about that access code. The one that was never deactivated. And now this, funds moving right around the time everything else in this family started falling apart."

"You think it's connected to Gabriel."

Hearing her say his name out loud, steady, unflinching, made something in my chest twist. "I think it would be a strange coincidence if it wasn't."

"He's dead, Sebastian." Her voice cracked slightly on the word, old grief resurfacing even now, weeks later. "I saw the confirmation myself. The headlines were everywhere,remember?"

"I remember." I crossed the room and sat beside her, close enough that our knees almost touched, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the accusation I couldn't quite bring myself to make sitting heavy in the air between us. "I'm not saying he's alive. I'm saying someone with access to things only he should have had access to is still moving pieces around this family, and I don't know who, and I don't know why, and I am terrified it's going to land on you or Jane before I figure it out."

She reached over and took my hand again, quiet, steady, the same gesture that had somehow become the only thing keeping either of us tethered through the last few days.

"Then we figure it out together," she said. "Whatever this is. I'm not going anywhere."

I wanted to believe that would be enough. I wanted, more than I'd wanted anything in three years, to let myself lean fully into the warmth of her hand in mine and stop bracing for the next blow.

My phone rang before I could say any of it out loud. An unfamiliar number, the same area code as the anonymous text from days before, and my stomach dropped even before I answered.

"Hello?"

Silence on the other end, just breathing.Then, finally, a voice, low, distorted, impossible to place.

"You're asking the wrong questions, Sebastian," it said. "Ask her what really happened to Elena. Ask Beatrix why she never let anyone see the toxicology report."

The line went dead before I could respond, and I sat there holding a phone gone silent, my heart hammering, Christabel watching my face with growing alarm, and for the first time since my wife died, I let myself consider, fully, terribly, that her death might never have been the accident everyone told me it was.