STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 9: The Notebook

That night, Chad sat alone in the dark of his office on the sixty-eighth floor, with the city spread below him and an old leather notebook in his hands.

His father's.

He had found it six years ago, the week of the funeral, taped beneath a drawer in the old man's study, with the black tape gone stiff and yellow. Chad searches his father's study that same night and finds only pipe tobacco and the smell of a man he thought he knew.

He remembered the way his mother had stood in the doorway while he pried it loose, one hand on the frame, her face blank as a closed shutter.

"Leave the study alone, Chad," she had said.

"What was he hiding, Mother?"

"Nothing that matters now."

She had said it too quickly. In his line work and experience, that is a sign not to be ignored.

Most of the pages were numbers. Deals, debts, shorthand he'd spent months decoding. But the final entry was a single name, circled so hard the pen had torn the paper.

Halvorsen Capital. M. Maine.

Underneath, the name, in his father's shaky handwriting were some words he couldn't understand: He knows what I did. He'll use it. Protect the family. These words echoed in the dining-room floor, with Chad unsure whether it was an order, a warning or an apology.

After that day, Chad had spent six years trying to learn what his father had done. He had hired investigators, burned favors, and rejected every offer Halvorsen Capital had ever sent, because some part of him knew that a man like Marcus Maine did not send offers. He sent hooks.

Now the hook's wife had cold hands and a shadow under her eyes the color of a bruise, and she had laughed, one startled laugh, at a punching bag, as though she had forgotten she could.

Use her, said the cold part of him. The part that had run the Wenthworth empire since he was thirty-two. The part that knew how to move people like pieces of pawn in a chess game. She lives inside Maine's house. She knows his habits. She might know his secrets.

Chad closed the notebook.

He thought of the way she had said yes, with a shaky voice. He thought of the flinch, the exits she counted. He thought of how suprised and relaxed she looked when he asked her permission to help her out at the Gym.

Never, he thought and decided he doesn't want to be the next man who uses her.

Across the city, Marcus Maine sat in a hotel suite that was not his matrimonial bed and looked at a photograph on his private phone.

A photograph from a gym camera still, grainy but clear. A man at a punching bag. A woman beside him, hair pulled back, her mouth open in a laugh.

His wife had not laughed like that in his house for three years.

Marcus did not frown. He had no need to. He studied the man's face, the same face he had hated for so long, the same set of the shoulders, the family jaw. He studied the angle of the woman's body, turned toward the man, not away. A woman who turned toward something. He had spent three years making sure she only turned toward him.

Then he picked up the other phone and dialed a number that was answered on the first ring.

"The Wenthworth meeting," he said. "Tell them I accept the terms I rejected." He watched the woman's laugh freeze on the screen. "I've decided I want to know that man very, very well."