Chapter 16 What the Blood Knows
Brittany's POV
I didn't even try to sleep.
I lay in the dark for about twenty minutes staring at the ceiling, and then I gave up, pushed the covers back, and got out of bed. The marble floor was cold under my feet. I crossed to the desk by the window, sat down, and pulled the notepad from the top drawer.
I needed to think on paper. I had always been that way. When a design wasn't working, when the proportions were wrong or the fabric wasn't behaving, I didn't sit and think in the abstract. I wrote it down. I drew it out. I broke it into parts small enough to hold.
This was the same problem, just with higher stakes.
I uncapped the pen and started writing. Not in plain language. In the shorthand code Leo and I had invented as children, a mix of reversed letters, symbols, and numbers that looked like meaningless scratches to anyone else. We had created it originally to pass notes in my grandmother's house when we didn't want her to know we were planning something. It had never been more useful than right now.
I wrote everything Leo had told me, broken into categories.
First, Chloe. The powder in the tea tin. The phone call. The fifty thousand dollars from Richard Blackwell's account. The timeline, paid before she even visited, which meant this wasn't opportunistic. Someone had planned it before I arrived at the mansion. They had recruited Chloe in advance, which meant they had been watching me before the wedding, probably before the contract was even signed.
I underlined that twice.
Second, Marcus. The detailed surveillance reports. The phone calls to Thomas. The phrase "increase the tea dosage" was spoken in response to news about Sophia's visits. Marcus knew about Sophia. Marcus was monitoring who I connected with and adjusting the plan accordingly, which meant he wasn't just a spy passing along information. He was actively managing a strategy.
Third, the compound. The formula Leo had analyzed. Slow-acting neurological suppressant. Fatigue. Confusion. Emotional instability. Physical weakness over time. Not a killing poison. A diminishing one. Designed to reduce a person so gradually that they blamed themselves for falling apart.
I had been one cup of tea away from that fate.
I moved to the fourth category and paused before writing it.
David.
I wrote what I had observed over the weeks in the mansion. The trembling hands, always controlled, never acknowledged. The grip on chair edges and table corners when he stood. The moments of visible pain that crossed his face for half a second before discipline closed over them again. The rumors everyone accepted without question. The impotence story. The broken tycoon narrative kept his enemies comfortable and led them to underestimate him.
I had assumed, the way everyone assumed, that whatever was wrong with him was simply true. A health condition. A private struggle. Something real but unexplained.
It was explained. It had always been explained. The explanation was just hidden behind a locked door in someone's private plan.
Someone had been building David's weakness deliberately. The same compound base as Chloe's tea, stronger concentration, more targeted, and administered over a longer period. Not weeks. Based on what Leo had described about the deterioration pattern, this had been going on for a year at a minimum. Maybe longer.
A year of slow and careful poisoning to make the most powerful man in Texas look like he was fading naturally.
And only one group of people benefited from David fading.
His brothers.
If David became too weak to run the empire, too unreliable, too diminished to maintain control, the family trust shifted. The brothers took over. Everything David had built, everything he had protected, everything he had fought for inside this house became theirs.
I wrote their names. Richard. Thomas. And the others Leo had mentioned, three more brothers I hadn't met yet, who existed somewhere in the outer edges of this family like shadows waiting for the right moment to step into the light.
I circled the pharmacy account registered to Elena's name.
I stared at it for a long time.
It didn't fit. Everything else in the pattern had a logic to it, a cold and calculated consistency. Chloe was recruited in advance. Marcus positioned himself close to David for years. The compound is designed for long-term undetectable use. Every piece of it was careful and intelligent and patient.
Using Elena's name on a pharmacy account was sloppy. It was the kind of mistake that got discovered. Either someone had made a rare error, or Elena's name was there on purpose, placed deliberately to create a false trail that would land on her if the operation was ever investigated.
Someone was setting Elena up to take the fall.
Which meant Elena was probably not the source.
Which also meant Elena might be in danger.
I added that to the list and drew a box around it.
I was writing the final section, a column of questions I still couldn't answer, when my pen stopped.
Not because I had finished.
Because I heard something.
It came from the hallway outside my door. Soft and low at first, easy to mistake for a draft or the house settling, but then it resolved into something unmistakable. A voice. A woman's voice, singing. Not speaking. Not crying. Singing, quietly and steadily, an old hymn I hadn't heard since childhood. My grandmother used to hum it in the kitchen on Sunday mornings while she made biscuits, moving slowly between the counter and the stove with flour on her hands and the radio turned down low.
I sat completely still with my pen hovering over the notepad.
The voice in the hallway was not my grandmother's. It was older and more precise, the voice of someone who had sung that hymn so many times the melody lived in the bones rather than the memory.
I looked at the clock. It was ten past three in the morning.
I looked at the door.
The singing was moving. Not walking past. Moving closer, then stopping, right outside my door, the way someone stops when they have reached the place they intended to reach.
I got up from the desk slowly and folded the notepad, sliding it under the desk's false bottom, a shallow gap between the drawer frame and the wood panel beneath it that I had found by accident two days ago. I capped the pen and set it on top of the desk like I had been sketching casually.
Then I walked to the door.
I put my hand on the handle and stopped.
"Who's there?" I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me.
The singing stopped.
A brief silence.
Then a woman's voice, clear and unhurried, said: "Open the door, child. I have been walking these halls for eighty years and I have never once bitten anyone."
A pause.
"Though I came close once or twice."
I opened the door.
Standing in the hallway with a silver-tipped walking cane and eyes like black diamonds was the smallest and most formidable woman I had ever seen in my life. She was dressed in a silk robe the color of midnight, with white hair pinned perfectly despite the hour, and a string of pearls at her throat that caught the hallway light.
She looked me up and down with an expression that was neither warm nor cold but purely, surgically precise, the look of someone who had spent a lifetime measuring people and was very rarely wrong.
"So," she said. "You're the girl David married."
She stepped past me into the room without being invited.
"I'm Sophia," she said, sitting in the armchair by the fireplace like she had sat there a thousand times before. "His grandmother." She set her cane across her knees and looked at me with those extraordinary eyes. "And before you say a single word, I already know everything."
She reached into the pocket of her robe and placed a small glass bottle on the table between us.
The liquid inside it was clear and colorless.
Exactly like the contents of the syringe Elena had removed from my bathroom cabinet on the very first morning.