A VOW FOR VENGEANCE

Chapter Sixteen: The Other Version

Stefan's POV

"Another one," Rico said, sliding the glass across before I placed my order.

I did not always drink here, but he had learned the drill of when I was going to need one anyway. Three years of the same stool, the same order, the same silence he never bothered filling with small talk unless I started it first. That was the only reason I trusted this bar more than the ones with better liquor.

"Rough day?" he asked.

"Rough month." I turned the glass once on the counter without drinking from it yet. "Engaged for two weeks and I still do not know anything about my future wife."

"Sounds like most marriages."

"Not like this one."

I had spent five years learning how to disappear from a room without anyone noticing. Learning how to make people stop asking questions simply by giving them nothing worth asking about. It had worked on my father. It had worked on the board and on every reporter who ever tried to dig into why the Walter boy vanished for half a decade and came back exactly the same, if a little louder about it.

It had not worked on her.

I remembered her, actually, from before. A charity dinner two years back, my father's idea, one of a hundred rooms I had been dragged into. She had been seated three tables away, quiet, folded into her chair the way people fold themselves when they have learned it is safer not to take up space. She said maybe four words the entire night. I remembered because it was rare, a room full of people performing wealth at each other and one woman who looked like she wanted to be anywhere else.

I remembered leaving early that night, and someone mentioning her name in passing on the way out. Lawson girl. Quiet type. I had not thought about her again until she sat down across from me with an envelope and a business proposal that read like a declaration of war.

That woman would not have walked into a restaurant and proposed marriage to a stranger in under a minute. She would not have found my father's pressure campaign about the board seat and used it like a scalpel.

That woman would not have sat across from my own brother and made him nervous enough to call me twice in one afternoon.

Something had happened to Hanna Lawson between that dinner and my restaurant table, and I did not believe for one second it was falling out of love with her fiancé.

I had put a man on her a week ago. Quiet, careful, the kind who did not leave a trace. Not because I thought she was dangerous exactly. Because I did not like being the only one in this marriage without information.

"Mr. Walter."

Dominic did not usually come find me at the bar. He stood at the end of the counter, phone still in his hand, waiting for me to look up.

"This better be good."

"Hanna Lawson left your brother's office forty minutes ago."

I set the glass down. "She was with Aiden?"

"Alone with him for forty minutes." Dominic hesitated, which meant the next part was the part he actually came to tell me. "And my contact inside the building says she was not there about the wedding."

"Then what?"

"She was asking about you. Specifically the five years before you came back." Dominic kept his voice low, professional. "She apparently told your brother's assistant she has proof the records were sealed on purpose, and she wants to know who paid for it."

I did not say anything for a moment. Rico, further down the bar, had gone quiet too.

"Did Aiden tell her anything?"

"I do not know. My man could not get inside the room itself."

I thought about my brother sitting across from her, watching her how he watched every stranger who got too close to the family, deciding in real time how much of a threat she was. Aiden did not hand out information. He traded it. Which meant if she walked out of that office with anything at all, she had given him something first.

The question was what she had, and how she had gotten it faster than my own security team.

"You good, Mr. Walter?" Rico asked, wiping down a glass a few feet away, watching me the way bartenders watch men who stop drinking mid-pour.

"Never better," I said, though the lie came out flatter than usual.

A part of me wanted to laugh this off. Reckless Stefan. Careless Stefan. The guy who crashed expensive parties and let his father waste money trying to control a son who simply did not care anymore. That side of me wanted to finish this drink, go home, and let my wife handle her own curiosity while I dealt with whatever happened later. It was a useful trick. It had kept me alive for five years by making sure nobody thought I was worth watching too closely.

But my actual mind was already three steps ahead, working out exactly how much she really knew and how fast that number was going to grow if I did nothing about it. I did not drink to relax tonight. Sitting still with a clear head just made it too easy to remember exactly why those five years had to disappear in the first place. For once, both sides of my brain wanted the same thing. They just disagreed on how hard to fight for it.

I could not go through Aiden for this. He would handle it the way he handled everything, quietly, slowly, protecting the family first and answering to nobody, including me. If I went to him now, I would get exactly what Hanna got. Just a wall of polite lies dressed up as worry.

I was done being handled by my own brother in my own marriage.

"Get me her number," I said to Dominic instead of answering Rico properly.

"You already have her number."

"Get me a different one. One she has not blocked, has not saved, does not know is mine."

Dominic did not ask why. That was the entire reason I kept him around.

I sat there after he left, turning the glass slowly, thinking about the woman at that charity dinner two years ago, quiet, careful, invisible on purpose. And the woman who had walked into my life two weeks ago knowing more about my own family than my own family sometimes let me know.

Somewhere between those two women was the truth, and I intended to find it before anyone else got there first, including my brother.

My phone buzzed. Dominic, with a new number attached to a message already typed and waiting for my approval.

I read it twice, deleted three words, and sent it exactly the way I wanted her to receive it. No explanation. No warning. Just enough to make sure she came alone.

Meridian Hotel Rooftop. nine o'clock tomorrow. Come alone, or do not come at all.