married to my killer

chapter 12

NAOMI POV

The page felt wrong in my hands before I even finished reading it, too thin for what it was doing to me.

Naomi Reyes. My name, printed in a lawyer's careful hand, beside a signature line that had actually been filled in. Not mine. I would have remembered signing anything next to my father's name. I did the math without meaning to. I was six.

"I didn't sign this."

"No," Edmund said. "You wouldn't have. You were a child."

He said it so calmly it took me a second to realize he wasn't denying anything.

"Then who did it?"

"Your father. As your guardian." He reached for his water glass, didn't drink from it, just turned it slightly on the tablecloth. "A trust designation. That's all it is."

"A trust for what."

"Does the mechanism matter, or the fact that it exists?"

"Both," I said. "Try me."

Something flickered behind his eyes not quite a smile. Closer to recognition, the look of a man realizing the person across from him wasn't going to be talked past. "A small holding. Reyes Logistics, before it folded. Your father moved a portion of it somewhere the collapse couldn't touch. I imagine he thought he was being careful."

"How small."

"Small enough that it's taken this long for anyone to notice it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I'm giving you today."

Julian hadn't moved. He was still holding the edge of the table, watching the two of us the way you watch something you already know is going to go wrong and can't stop in time. "Dad. Why does it matter now? Eighteen years, and suddenly it matters."

"Because the merger audit requires a full accounting of every legacy holding connected to the acquisition chain. Reyes Logistics was absorbed into a subsidiary before either of you were born. Whatever your father left you came along with it, Naomi. Quietly. Until an auditor with nothing better to do decided to be thorough."

"You knew before the audit found it."

Edmund didn't answer that directly. "I make it my business to know things before other people find them for me. That's not a confession. That's how I've kept this family solvent for thirty years."

"So you knew," I said, "before the wedding."

"I knew there was a complication attached to your name. I didn't know the shape of it until recently." He said it evenly, and I couldn't really tell whether that was the truth or the version of the truth he'd decided I could survive hearing.

"What did you do about it?"

"I handled it."

"That's the same thing you said about Carla's situation."

The table went quiet in a different way than before, not shocked, exactly. Careful. Like everyone in the room had just heard a wire pulled taut.

"Carla," Edmund said slowly, "was a housekeeping matter."

"And I'm a merger matter."

"You're my son's wife." Something in his voice sharpened, just slightly, just enough. "I'd be careful how you categorize yourself at this table."

"Then tell me what handled means. Plainly. Right now."

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him decide, the way I imagined he decided everything weighing cost against exposure, calculating exactly how much truth a given room could survive.

"It means," he said finally, "that whatever your father tried to protect for you is no longer a liability to this family. That should be the only part of this that concerns you."

"It's not."

"It should be."

"Why does your archive still have my name marked pending, then? If it's handled, if it's resolved, why does a file three days after my wedding say otherwise?"

Edmund's hand was still on the glass.

"What file?"

"You know which file."

"I gave you acquisition summaries, Naomi. I did not give you permission to go looking through my private records for anything beyond what I handed you directly."

"You didn't have to give me permission," I said. "You just left the door unlocked."

Julian stood so fast the chair nearly went over behind him. "Stop. Both of you." His hands were flat on the table, and when he spoke again his voice had lost every bit of its usual ease. "Dad. Is she in danger? Yes or no. That's the only question I actually want answered."

Edmund turned to look at his son, and for the first time since we'd sat down, something in his face genuinely shifted not guilt. Something closer to disappointment, the specific kind reserved for watching someone you raised ask a question you'd hoped they'd never need to ask.

"No one at this table is in danger," he said. "I would ask you to trust that I have never once let anything happen to this family that I couldn't control."

"That's not an answer either."

"It's the one you're getting today." Edmund stood, buttoned his jacket, the same unhurried gesture I'd already learned meant the conversation was ending whether either of us agreed to end it. "Naomi. I'd think carefully about what you do with whatever else you believe you've found. Not as a threat. As advice, from someone who has spent longer than you've been alive learning exactly how much curiosity a family like this one can survive."

He walked out. I listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway, unhurried, a man who had never once needed to move quickly away from anything in his life.

Julian didn't sit back down. He stood there with both hands braced against the back of his chair, staring at the door, and when he finally turned to me, his face had gone somewhere I hadn't seen it go before.

"He didn't answer you," Julian said quietly. "Either question. Not really."

"No."

"That's an answer , isn't it."

"I think it might be the only one we're going to get from him today."

He looked down at the page still sitting on the table between us, my name, my father's signature, a trust neither of us fully understood yet and something in his jaw tightened like he was memorizing it. "I asked him a straight question and he gave me a lecture about curiosity."

"He does that."

"He's never done it to me before." Julian's voice cracked slightly on the last word, and I understood, watching him, that this wasn't really about the trust at all. It was about a lifetime of never once needing to ask his father a question that didn't get answered. "I don't know what to do with that."

"Neither do I," I said, and it was the first fully honest thing I'd said out loud in that room all afternoon.

My phone buzzed in my bag. I almost let it go. Something made me check it instead.

Unknown number. Silent for almost two weeks. Awake now, like it had been waiting for exactly this moment.

He knows you've seen the file. Leave the house tonight. Don't tell him where you're going. Don't tell your husband either.

I stared at the screen, my heart slamming against my ribs, and folded the page from the table into my palm before Julian could see what I was reading.

For the first time since I'd opened my eyes on my wedding morning, I had no memory of a first version of this to tell me what happened next.