I Married My Father's Worst Enemy

Chapter 5: The Phone Call

He curses under his breath — a real curse, not the polished version he uses in boardrooms — and steps back toward the terrace railing to answer it, and I should walk away right now. I should give him privacy and go back to the party and let this be one more thing I never find out. Instead I stay exactly where I am, in the shadow of the terrace door, my champagne glass forgotten and going warm in my hand, my pulse loud in my own ears, and I listen.

At first it's just fragments. A name I don't catch, clipped and businesslike. The word Saturday. Something about a filing, something about a vote. I could still walk away and tell myself I heard nothing worth knowing. Business is boring. Business is always boring, right up until it isn't.

Then his voice drops into the register he uses when he thinks no one is close enough to hear it, low and hard, and every trace of the man who almost kissed me thirty seconds ago disappears.

"—no, the timeline doesn't change," he says. "Saturday. The board vote is Monday morning, first thing, before Hartley can call in a favor or find a lawyer who owes him something." A pause, longer this time, someone on the other end pushing back. "No. She doesn't know that part yet."

My whole body goes cold.

She. Me. He's talking about me like I'm a line item in a meeting I wasn't invited to.

I know I should move. I know that if he turns around right now and finds me listening, whatever fragile thing we built on this terrace in the last ten minutes is over before it started. I stay anyway, my back pressed to the wall, because some part of me has known since the night in my father's study that the gentle version of Damon Ashford is not the only version that exists, and I'd rather hear the truth from the wrong side of a doorway than keep pretending I haven't noticed.

"She thinks this ends with a wedding," he says. "It doesn't. The second that ring is on her finger, Richard Hartley doesn't have a company. He doesn't have a house. And depending on how she takes the rest of it, he might not have a daughter who's still speaking to him, either." Another pause. "That's the point. I didn't build this for half of him. I want all of it."

I want all of it.

Twenty minutes ago his hand was on my jaw and I wanted his mouth on mine badly enough to forget I should be afraid of him. Now I can't remember why I ever let myself stop. I think about every soft thing he's said to me this week and hold each one up against those five words to see if any of them survive. None of them do. Not the terrace. Not I don't know how to stop. Not the funeral photo and the flicker of grief I was so sure was real. Maybe it was real. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore if it was.

I step back from the door before he can turn and see my face, but it's too late — my heel catches on the stone, and the sound is small, but in the sudden silence of the terrace it might as well be a gunshot.

Damon turns. Phone still pressed to his ear, forgotten. And for one terrible second, before his expression locks back into that careful, controlled calm I'm starting to recognize as armor, I see it.

He knows I heard him.

"Elena."

For one absurd heartbeat I think about pretending I heard nothing — walking back inside and letting him keep believing his careful world is still intact. I almost do it. Some small, humiliating part of me wants to.

I don't answer. I turn and walk back into the noise of the ballroom, past the string quartet and the champagne towers and the board member's wife who thinks we're the most romantic thing she's seen all year, my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat. Behind me, I hear him say my name again, closer this time, like he's following.

I don't stop walking.

I find my father by the bar, swirling his third scotch, and for once in my life I don't ask him a single question. I just stand beside him and let him think I want his company, when really I just need somewhere to stand where Damon Ashford can watch me refuse to turn around.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," my father says, which is almost funny, coming from him.

"I think I just met the real one," I say, and he doesn't ask what I mean, and I don't offer it. Some nights the only mercy left in a family is the things everyone agrees not to say out loud.

Two days until the wedding, and I finally understand exactly what I agreed to sign.

Not a marriage.

A demolition — and he handed me the detonator himself.