The devil's private bride

WORKING LATE

She didn't answer him that night. Couldn't, with her uncle's warnings still echoing and her father's newly processed claim sitting like its own complicated referendum on everything she'd believed walking in. But over the next two weeks she stopped avoiding the late evenings in his office, stopped holding the professional distance either of them had promised after the confrontation.

"Still here," he said, finding her at her desk on a Thursday well past anything the audit's remaining scope required.

"Finishing my report."

"You've been finishing your report for a week." Warmth in his voice now, careful, as he settled into the chair across from her. "I don't think that's actually what's keeping you here, Camille."

"No," she admitted, setting down her pen. "I think I'm staying because I don't know how to walk away from whatever this has become without being honest about it first."

"Then be honest."

"I came here to prove your family was still lying. Instead I found a man who processed my father's claim before I'd even fully confessed who I was, who carries his family's guilt more heavily than anyone who benefited this much from that history should reasonably have to." She met his eyes, unsteady. "I don't know how to reconcile that with everything I was raised to believe. I don't know how to trust it without feeling like I'm betraying my father's memory."

"I don't think honoring your father's memory requires distrusting me specifically," Marcus said carefully. "I think it requires making sure what happened to him never happens to anyone else — which is exactly what I've spent the last eighteen months trying to build. Those aren't incompatible, Camille. I'd like to think we could work toward the second one together, if you were willing."

"My uncle would see it as a betrayal."

"Your uncle already lost his brother, and years of his own life, to this family's crimes," Marcus said quietly. "I understand why he can't easily let that go. But you're not your uncle. You get to decide what trust actually looks like, based on what you've witnessed rather than what his history requires him to believe."

She sat with that, the architecture of loyalty and grief she'd carried into this building three weeks ago finally beginning to shift under the weight of everything she'd actually seen.

"This is complicated," she said finally, "in ways that go well beyond a simple audit."

"I'm aware," Marcus agreed, something hopeful in his tired eyes despite his effort to stay measured. "I'm willing to navigate complicated, if you are."

"I don't know yet," she admitted. "But I want to find out."

Something in his face eased into relief, and for the first time since her cover collapsed, the distance between them felt more like anticipation than unresolved betrayal.