Chapter 18 18

Chapter 18 18
Frederick's POV

Chapter Eighteen

I heard every word.

I wasn't trying to listen. I was standing close enough that her phone conversation reached me whether I wanted it to or not, and I stood there in her small kitchen and listened to the colour drain out of her voice and watched her face do something I hadn't seen it do before.

Not grief. Not anger.

Something quieter than both. The particular stillness of a person receiving news that rearranges everything they thought they knew about their own life.

A will. A solicitor. Sole beneficiary.

Eleanor Darclen had left Charlotte everything.

I should have felt relieved. Charlotte would have money, security, something solid under her feet for the first time in over a year. That was a good thing. That was what I had been trying to manufacture in smaller, clumsier ways for weeks.

I didn't feel relieved.

I felt something cold settle in the back of my mind, something I didn't want to look at directly yet because looking at it directly would mean dealing with what it meant.

She ended the call and looked at me and I looked back at her and said the right things. Asked the right questions. Watched her sit down at the table with the document still in her hands and that new expression still on her face.

I left when she asked me to.

I drove back across the city and sat in my office on the fourteenth floor with the door closed and the city spread out below me and thought about Eleanor Darclen.

\---

I had known about the will for six weeks.

That was the thing I hadn't told Charlotte in the kitchen. The thing I hadn't been able to find the right moment for, which was a lie I was telling myself because the truth was I hadn't looked for the right moment. I had found reasons to wait. Found reasons to hold it back just a little longer.

My investigators had flagged it in their final report. A will filed through a private solicitor in the town where Eleanor had died. Charlotte named as sole beneficiary. Assets estimated at considerable value, built quietly over years from Eleanor's own family inheritance, the part that had transferred before Klifor Darclen could get his hands on it.

I had read that report and I had sat with it and I had made a decision I wasn't proud of.

I had waited.

I told myself it was because I needed to verify it fully before raising Charlotte's hopes. I told myself the timing wasn't right, that she was just getting back on her feet, that news like that needed to be delivered carefully.

All of that was true.

None of that was why I waited.

I waited because the moment Charlotte had money, real money, legitimate and entirely her own, she wouldn't need the apartment on Calloway Street. She wouldn't need the job at Rosa's restaurant. She wouldn't need any of the small careful things I had been putting in her path like someone laying stones across a river, hoping she'd keep walking in my direction.

She would have options. Real ones.

And one of those options was walking away from me completely and never looking back, which was what she should do, which was what any person with sense would tell her to do, and which was the thing I had been lying awake at night trying not to think about.

I pushed back from my desk and went to the window.

The city below was going about its business. Small and busy and indifferent.

I had spent five years building a case against Klifor Darclen. Five years of patience and planning, of working my way into the right circles, the right rooms, the right family. I had done things I couldn't entirely defend. Made choices that had collateral damage I had told myself was acceptable at the time.

Charlotte was that collateral damage.

I had married her knowing what I was going to do. I had sat across from her at dinners and watched her laugh and felt her trust me completely and told myself it was necessary. That the end justified it. That the people my family and hundreds of others had lost their homes, their savings, their stability over, deserved justice more than Charlotte Darclen deserved the truth.

I had believed that.

I wasn't sure I believed it anymore.

What I knew was that somewhere between the plan and the execution I had made a mistake that had nothing to do with strategy. I had let it become real. I had let her become real, which was the one thing I had specifically told myself not to do.

And now I was standing in my office on the fourteenth floor trying to untangle whether the things I was doing for her now were about genuine guilt or whether they were just another version of the same thing. Another plan. Another way of keeping her close for my own reasons while telling myself it was for hers.

I didn't like the answer I kept arriving at.

My phone buzzed on the desk.

Daniel.

I let it ring.

It buzzed again. I picked it up.

"She got the call," he said, before I could speak.

"I know. I was there."

A pause. "You were there."

"Don't."

"Frederick." His voice carried that particular weight it got when he was about to say something I wasn't going to enjoy. "The estate. If she inherits it outright, her name goes back through the courts. The financial review. Everything her father touched gets looked at again."

"Her mother's assets were clean. Nothing to do with Klifor's company."

"That's not how it'll look to the press."

"I don't care how it looks to the press."

Silence on the line.

"You've changed your position considerably," Daniel said carefully.

I didn't answer that.

"She's going to find out you knew about the will," he said. "If she hasn't already started to put it together."

I looked out at the city.

"I know," I said.

"And when she does?"

I thought about her face in the kitchen this morning. The way she had stood at the window with her back to me. The way she had turned around and looked up at me and said you don't get to say things like that to me in a voice that was soft and unguarded in a way she hadn't intended.

"Then she finds out," I said.

And whatever was left after that would have to be enough.