STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 12: The Question

Dinner was a battlefield disguised as a banquet.

Silver gleamed on white linen. Marcus sat at Chad's right and talked: mergers, synergies, a joint infrastructure fund that would put Halvorsen's money inside Wenthworth's ports. Chad ate little and said less. Shyne, seated three chairs down beside an ambassador's bored wife, watched her husband circle him the way a wolf circles a fire, pretending it only came for the warmth.

She also watched Chad watch Marcus.

Not the face. The hands.

The way Marcus never touched anyone unless he wanted something. The way his fingers closed on Shyne's wrist under the table when she reached for the wrong wine glass, hard and quick and bloodless, a silent behavior.

She went still. It did not hurt, not precisely. But the grip had a weight she knew in her bones, the weight of ownership, and a small cold thing curled in her stomach, the old fear, the old shame.

I'm making a scene, she thought. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry.

And across the table, Chad Wenthworth saw it.

She watched the knowledge arrive. Not in his face. His face was a closed door. But his fork stopped. A single muscle jumped in his jaw, and for one second, before he locked it away, something dark and dangerous moved behind his eyes, like a shape under ice.

"Mrs. Maine," Chad said, over the dessert plates and the quiet clink of crystal.

The table quieted, the way tables always did when he spoke.

"I'm told you once ran SHYNE. Tell me, in your professional opinion, what's wrong with the Wenthworth cotton mills?"

Marcus laughed lightly. "Chad, my wife—"

"I asked your wife."

Silence. Forty people holding their breath.

Shyne felt the old fear rise like floodwater. Her husband's hand, still resting on the table beside hers. The room's eyes turned toward her. The reflexive oh, I couldn't possibly, already shaped in her mouth like a stone.

Then she looked at Chad.

He was not rescuing her. That was what she understood, with a clarity that felt like a slap. He was not rising to defend her or taking the floor. He was handing it to her, steady and unsmiling, and waiting to see whether she would stand on it.

An offer. Not a rescue. The difference was everything.

She lifted her chin.

"Your mills are in the wrong place," Shyne said.

A few forks stopped.

"You ship raw cotton four hundred miles to be dyed, then four hundred miles back to be cut. You're burning forty percent of your margin on diesel. Move the dye houses to the port, and sell the finished cloth directly to European buyers. They'll pay double for traceable fabric."

As she spoke, something happened that she had not planned. Her voice steadied. Then it deepened. It was the voice she had used in boardrooms and fitting rooms and on the phone with mill owners at three in the morning, a voice that had once made grown men reorder their entire supply chains. It rose out of some buried place in her like a spring.

"And you're underpaying the weavers in your northern plant, which is why your best ones keep leaving for the coast. You're not losing workers, Mr. Wenthworth. You're losing craft. You can't buy that back with a bonus."

The silence stretched.

Then Chad smiled, small and slow and utterly genuine, and half the table seemed to forget how to breathe.

"Nobody in my company has told me that in six years," he said. "Thank you, Mrs. Maine."

Under the table, Marcus's hand closed around her wrist and tightened until her bones ached.

She let him. She did not look at him. For the first time in three years, she was too busy being seen.

On the drive home, Marcus said nothing in the car. In three years, that had never once meant good news.