PLAYING FOR HER HEART

Chapter Four: The Future Mrs. Carter

Ava didn't sleep that night.

She'd reported the threatening text to no one.Not the police, who would ask questions she wasn't ready to answer, and not Ethan, who was still, despite the strange honesty in his office, a man she barely knew and couldn't yet trust. Instead she'd sat cross-legged on the hotel bed until three in the morning, photographing the message, backing it up to two separate cloud drives, and running searches on burner phone purchases that told her, depressingly, that anyone with forty dollars and a convenience store could have sent it.

By seven a.m. she was back at the factory, hollow-eyed and wired on coffee, telling herself that whoever had sent the warning wanted her scared, not gone, and that giving them the second reaction would be handing them exactly what they wanted.

She found Ethan on the mezzanine overlooking the factory floor.

"You look like you didn't sleep," he said, without turning.

"Occupational hazard."

"Or you're already regretting taking this job." He glanced sideways at her, something almost like concern flickering across his face before he visibly decided not to indulge it. "Victoria can have that effect on people. I heard about yesterday."

"Word travels fast."

"This building has thirty-one hundred employees and the gossip infrastructure of a village of forty." A ghost of a smile. "For what it's worth, she was out of line. I'll talk to her."

"Please don't," Ava said, more sharply than she intended. "I don't need you fighting my battles. I need you to answer my questions honestly, which is a much rarer thing around here, from what I can tell."

Ethan studied her for a long moment, and Ava had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of being recalculated as if every interaction with her was quietly updating some internal model he kept about who she was and what she might be capable of.

"Fair enough," he said finally. "Ask me something honest, then."

"Are you going to marry her?"

The question surprised even Ava as it left her mouth, unprofessional, unrelated to any biography, driven by something she didn't fully want to examine. But Ethan didn't flinch, didn't deflect the way she expected.

"No," he said, simply.

The occasion was a sponsor lunch in the executive dining room, a glass-and-oak space reserved for the kind of conversations that decided which corporate logos ended up on which square inch of car bodywork. Ava had been invited to observe, ostensibly for color and texture in the biography, and she sat near the back of the room with her notebook, watching Ethan work a table of nervous executives with the easy, practiced charm of a man who'd been doing it since adolescence.

Victoria arrived twenty minutes into the lunch, unannounced, in a dress the color of good wine, and moved through the room the way she moved through every room,as though she'd already decided, long before entering, precisely how the next ten minutes would go.

"I'm so sorry I'm late," she said, sliding into the empty seat beside Ethan without asking, resting a possessive hand on his forearm that he did not immediately remove, whether from politeness or resignation Ava couldn't tell. "Fittings ran long. You know how it is."

"Fittings for what?" one of the sponsor executives asked, an older man in an ill-fitting suit who clearly hadn't gotten the memo about which conversational threads were safe to pull.

"Oh, nothing official yet." Victoria's smile was radiant, aimed at the whole table but landing, unmistakably, on Ava. "Just planning ahead. Ethan and I have been together, in one form or another, since we were sixteen years old. Families like ours don't waste time pretending the ending isn't obvious." She squeezed his forearm. "Isn't that right, darling?"

The table's attention swung to Ethan, several executives visibly delighted by the prospect of a real announcement to bring back to their marketing departments. Ava watched his jaw do the same almost-imperceptible tightening she'd seen in his office, watched him choose, in the space of half a second, the path of least resistance.

"Victoria has a way of getting ahead of things," he said, which was not a denial, and everyone at the table heard it as confirmation, and Ava watched something in Victoria's expression settle into satisfied triumph.

"When Ethan and I marry," Victoria continued, warming to the audience, "I intend to expand the Carter Foundation's work significantly. Motorsport safety, driver welfare, that sort of thing. It's important to me that whatever legacy we build together does justice to everything his family has sacrificed to get here." Her eyes flicked, just briefly, toward Ava, and something in the phrase *everything his family has sacrificed* landed with a precision that felt anything but accidental. "Wouldn't you agree, Ms. Monroe? You're writing about legacy, after all. You must understand how important it is to protect one."

"I understand that legacies built on secrets tend to be fragile," Ava said, before she could stop herself and saw the ripple of discomfort move down the table.

Victoria's smile didn't waver, but something behind her eyes went very still, very cold, the pleasant social mask holding by sheer force of will. "How philosophical," she said lightly. "I do love a writer who thinks in metaphors."

The lunch moved on. Sponsors asked about lap times and marketing rights and next season's livery, and Ethan answered smoothly, and Victoria laughed at exactly the right moments and touched Ethan's arm exactly often enough to make her claim on him feel like established fact rather than aspiration. Ava took notes and said nothing more, but she watched, and what she watched troubled her more than the humiliation in the hospitality suite ever had.

Because underneath the performance, underneath the wine-colored dress and the practiced laugh and the possessive hand, Ava saw something in Victoria Sinclair that no one else at that table seemed to notice.

Fear.

Not of losing Ethan, exactly. Something deeper than that, something that flickered across Victoria's face for less than a second whenever the words *legacy* or *foundation* or, once, quietly, *the past* entered the conversation. It was the same look Ava had seen in her own mirror for three years . The look of someone standing guard over a wound they could not afford to let anyone else find.

Ava was still watching that flicker, still trying to name it, when Victoria's phone buzzed against the white tablecloth. Victoria glanced at the screen, and whatever color had been in her face drained out of it entirely. She rose from the table with a murmured, brittle excuse, phone already pressed to her ear as she walked briskly toward the door.

The dining room doors swung shut behind her, and Ava sat very still among the clinking glasses and sponsor small talk, absolutely certain that whatever call had just drained the color from Victoria Sinclair's face had nothing to do with wedding planning.

She excused herself moments later, murmuring something about notes she needed to write up, and slipped out of the dining room in the same direction Victoria had gone. The corridor beyond was empty, the lunch's chatter fading behind her, replaced by the low hum of the building's ventilation system and the distant clatter of the factory floor below. She caught a glimpse of wine-colored fabric disappearing around a corner near the service stairwell, a part of the building Ava hadn't yet been given access to, tucked behind a door marked *Authorized Personnel Only*.

She didn't follow. Not yet. Some instinct, sharper than curiosity, told her that whatever waited beyond that door wasn't ready to be found yet, not by her, not today. But she memorized the location anyway.

She was halfway back to the guest offices, still turning Victoria's fear over in her mind, when she heard a faint but unmistakable voice of Victoria, murmuring into her phone just before she'd walked out of earshot. Four words, barely audible, that would change everything Ava thought she understood about who the real enemy in this building might be.

"She can't find out."