MARRIED TO MY BROTHER'S BILLIONAIRE RIVAL

WHAT DANIEL NEVER TOLD HER

## Chapter 3: What Daniel Never Told Her

"Marcus. Lock down the house."

Adrian's voice had changed. Gone was the weary man who'd confessed in the dark. This was the other Adrian, the one the magazines called ruthless, and he moved through the study like a general who'd just heard the first shot.

"Full perimeter. Every camera, every gate. Nobody in or out until I say." He listened for two seconds. "No, I don't care what time it is. Wake the team."

He ended the call and turned to me. "You should sit."

"I should call my brother."

"Elena..."

"You said no more decisions made for me." I held up the folder, my brother's letter trembling in my other hand. "Daniel has spent two years letting me believe you were a monster. He knew what Crane said about my mother. He's going to tell me, right now, or I'm getting on a plane."

A muscle jumped in Adrian's jaw. Then, to my surprise, he crossed to a bookshelf, pressed a panel behind a row of leather volumes, and took out a slim black phone.

"Encrypted. It routes through four countries. Crane can't trace it." He held it out. "He changes his number every month, but I've kept the last one he gave me."

I dialed with fingers I couldn't feel.

It rang six times. On the seventh, a voice I hadn't heard in two years answered, hoarse and wary.

"Who is this?"

My eyes closed. "Danny."

Silence. Then a sound I'd never heard from my brother, half a gasp, half a sob. "Ellie? How did you...? Is Dad...?"

"Dad's alive. He's stable. Danny, listen to me." I sank into the chair Adrian had pulled out. "I know. About Adrian, about the letter, about Crane. I know you asked him to do it."

The line went quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

"He told you," Daniel said at last, voice flat.

"I found out. Don't be angry with him. He kept his promise longer than he should have." I glanced up, and found Adrian watching me, impossibly still. "But there's something else. Crane sent a message tonight. He said he *knew Mum*."

I heard Daniel exhale, long and shaky, and I knew before he spoke that I wouldn't like the answer.

"I wanted to tell you a hundred times," he said. "I swear I did. But you were seventeen when I found out, and you had finals, and Dad was working himself half to death, and I thought..." His voice broke. "I thought if I could just fix it quietly, you'd never have to carry it."

"Carry *what*, Danny?"

"Mum didn't just work at the bakery, Ellie."

I frowned. "She kept the books for the shop on Willow Street."

"Before that." A breath. "Before she met Dad, before us, she was a bookkeeper at Crane Holdings. Victor Crane's father owned it back then, and Victor was just the young heir who ran the accounts. Mum found something. Money moving where it shouldn't. Shell companies, shipping contracts, the same pattern I found in my own startup twenty years later."

The room went very quiet.

"She copied it," Daniel said. "The whole ledger. She was twenty-four, terrified, and she walked out of that building and never went back. She hid the copy and told no one, not even Dad, because she thought if nobody knew, nobody could force it out of them."

My heart hammered. "That's why Crane's targeting us. He thinks we have it."

"He *knows* we have it. Or knows that she had it. I found Mum's letters in Dad's attic when I was clearing his files for the move. She'd written everything down in a notebook, just in case. Hidden in a shoebox under the Christmas decorations." He laughed, a terrible sound. "She was the bravest person I've ever known, and she spent the rest of her life pretending to be ordinary."

"Danny," I whispered. "Did Crane...? Mum got sick so fast. The doctors said it was..."

"I don't know." His voice cracked. "That's what keeps me up at night, Ellie. The hospital she died in has a wing named after the Crane Foundation. The last two months, her medication was changed three times by a doctor none of us had ever met. I couldn't prove anything. I still can't. But I have never believed it was only bad luck."

Tears slid down my face and I let them.

Across the room, Adrian looked as though someone had struck him. He hadn't known about my mother's death, I realized. Not this part.

"Where's the copy?" I asked. "If Crane's been hunting for it for twenty years, she must have hidden it somewhere."

"The notebook only said one thing." Daniel paused. "*Ellie will carry it before she knows.*"

The words curled through me like cold smoke.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. I've been trying to work it out for two years. A hiding place Mum could trust you with, something you'd keep with you without realizing what it was." His voice dropped. "Ellie, listen to me. If Crane found out before I did, if he knows you have it..."

I went still.

My hand had drifted to my throat, the way it always did when I was frightened. I didn't even notice until my fingers closed around the thin silver chain.

The small silver pendant, the shape of a tiny key, that my mother had pressed into my palm on my tenth birthday. *Wear it always, my darling. It'll keep you safe.*

I hadn't taken it off in thirteen years.

"Danny," I breathed. "I think I know where it is."

---

The pendant lay in my palm under the green glow of Adrian's desk lamp, small and innocent and so familiar that I'd stopped seeing it long ago.

"There's a seam," Adrian murmured. He'd come around the desk without my noticing, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him at my shoulder. A jeweler's loupe appeared in his hand, then a pair of tweezers, from a drawer I suspected held a surprising number of things. "Here, along the back. Hold still."

His fingers were careful against my skin. I tried not to notice how near he was, or how gently he turned my wrist toward the light.

"It's a screw top," he said. "Hand-cut. Whoever made this knew what they were doing." A faint click. The back of the pendant unscrewed, and something small and dark slid into his palm.

A micro drive, no bigger than a grain of rice, sealed in clear resin.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

"Thirteen years," I whispered. "She put it around my neck when I was ten. She *knew*..."

"She knew they'd come for it someday," Adrian said quietly. "And she knew nobody would think to search a little girl's necklace."

On the phone, still lying open on the desk, Daniel made a sound like a man trying not to cry. "Don't plug it into anything connected to the internet, Ellie. Not your laptop, not his. If it's what I think, it could be wired to ping Crane the moment it's opened."

"We have a clean room in the basement," Adrian said, his voice steady. "Air-gapped systems. My head of security can open it without a trace."

"Then do it. Please." My brother's voice was thick. "And Ellie? I'm sorry. For all of it. For leaving you to hate him, for keeping Mum's story from you, for being the kind of brother who thought you couldn't handle the truth."

I wiped my eyes. "You were protecting me."

"I was being a coward."

"You were being *my brother*." I smiled through the tears. "Come home, Danny. We'll fix this together."

"Not yet," he said. "If I come home now, Crane will know I've been in contact. Let me do what I can from here. I have names, I have accounts. I'll find a way to help." A pause. "Adrian?"

"I'm here," Adrian said.

"Take care of my sister."

"With my life."

He said it so simply, so plainly, that my breath caught.

The line clicked off.

---

Dawn was threatening the horizon by the time the house grew quiet.

Marcus, Adrian's head of security, a broad, grim man who'd regarded me with open suspicion until Adrian said, "She's Mrs. Blackwood, and her word is mine," had taken the drive down to the basement. Margaret, who had somehow arrived at five in the morning in a perfect cardigan, pressed a mug of tea into my hands and patted my cheek without a word.

Now I stood at the study window, watching the city turn from black to gray, and tried to remember how to feel like a person.

"You should rest," Adrian said behind me.

"I can't."

"I know." A pause. "Neither can I."

He came to stand beside me. Not touching, but close enough that his sleeve brushed mine. For a long while, we watched the light climb the skyline, and the silence between us wasn't cold anymore.

"My mother died when I was eleven," I said finally. "My whole life, I thought it was just terrible luck. That's what I told myself. That sometimes the world takes people and nobody's to blame."

"Elena..."

"And now I find out she was a hero, and I never knew, and the man who may have killed her sent my husband a *congratulations*." My voice shook. "I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything with it tonight."

"Don't I?"

"No." His voice was low and rough. "Tonight, you're allowed to just be someone who lost her mother and is only now learning how much she was loved."

I turned. He was looking at me, not at the city, with that same terrifying gentleness he'd shown at the altar, and something in my chest cracked open.

"I thought of my third rule," I said.

His brow lifted. "Oh?"

"Whatever happens next, you don't shut me out to keep me safe. Not once. Not even when it's hard, not even when you think I can't take it." I held his gaze. "If we're doing this together, we do it *together*. Even the ugly parts."

Something moved behind his eyes. For a moment, I thought he'd refuse.

Then he lifted one hand and slowly, slowly, brushed a stray strand of hair behind my ear.

"Even the ugly parts," he agreed, barely above a whisper.

The air between us shifted. I became aware of every inch of space that wasn't there, of his breath, of the warmth of him, of the fact that his gaze had dropped to my mouth and neither of us had moved.

"Adrian," I said, and it came out unsteady.

"Tell me to step back," he murmured. "I will."

I didn't.

He leaned in, so close that I could feel his breath ghost across my lips...

The door slammed open.

We sprang apart. Marcus stood in the doorway, pale and breathing hard, a tablet clutched in one hand.

"Sir," he said. "You need to see this. Both of you."

Adrian's face hardened instantly. "What is it?"

Marcus turned the tablet around. On the screen was grainy footage from a hospital corridor, time-stamped four minutes ago.

St. Catherine's. The private wing. The door to my father's room.

And sitting in the visitor's chair beside my father's bed, one leg crossed over the other, calmly adjusting a silk cuff as though he were waiting for a business meeting to begin, was a silver-haired man with kind eyes and a pleasant smile.

Victor Crane.

"He signed in as an old friend of the family," Marcus said grimly. "The nurse thought nothing of it. Mr. Hart is asleep. Crane's been in there for eleven minutes."

My blood turned to ice.

"My father," I whispered. "He's alone with him."

I was already running.