Chapter 75 The Dead Man
Brittany’s POV
The floorboards in the hallway felt like they were vibrating, but it was just my own body shaking. I had stayed exactly where David told me to. I stood by the marble table, my fingers digging into the edge of the wood until my nails turned white. The silence of the mansion was terrifying. It wasn't a peaceful quiet. It was the kind of silence that happens right before a storm breaks the windows. I watched the shadows at the top of the stairs, waiting for a monster to appear.
When David finally emerged from the darkness of the guest wing, he didn't look like the man who had just won a fight. He walked slowly, his shoulders heavy, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance that I couldn't see. He stopped three feet away from me. The moonlight caught his face, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
I had seen David angry. I had seen him calculated. I had even seen him vulnerable when we talked about the ball. But I had never seen him like this. He looked like the world had just shifted an inch to the left and he no longer knew where to put his feet. The color had left his skin entirely, leaving him a ghostly, ashen gray.
"David?" I whispered. I reached out, my hand trembling as I touched his arm. His muscles were as hard as stone. "What did she say? Who is she working for?"
He didn't look at me at first. He stared at the poison diary still sitting on the table. When he finally spoke, his voice was a hollow rasp, the sound of someone whose vocal cords had been scorched.
"It wasn't Richard," he said. He took a breath that sounded like a sob he was fighting to keep down. "It wasn't even the brothers. They were just the noise. They were the distraction."
"Then who?" I asked, my voice rising. "Who could have done this?"
"My father," David said.
The name hung in the air like a thick, poisonous fog. I blinked, my mind struggling to find a place for the word. "Your father? Harrison? David, Harrison has been dead for seven years. Everyone knows the story. The plane crash. The fraud investigation. The funeral."
David finally looked at me, and the look in his eyes made me want to scream. It was the look of a man who realized he had been playing a game of chess against a ghost.
"He staged it," David said, the words coming out fast and jagged now. "He staged the whole thing. The investigation was going to destroy him. The feds were days away from freezing every account he had. He didn't just die to escape the law. He died to become invisible. He’s been operating from the shadows this whole time. He’s been moving Richard and Adam like they were toys. He’s been using Webb as his voice. Every layer of the conspiracy, every move we thought we were countering, it all came from him."
I felt the hallway spinning. I sat down on the bench by the wall, the wood cold against my legs. "He’s been watching us? All this time?"
"For seven years," David said, pacing the small space like a caged animal. "He’s been watching me rebuild the trust. He’s been watching you. He probably knew about the masked ball before I did. Elena said he’s been receiving daily reports. He’s been waiting for this gala. He’s been waiting for us to get exactly this close to the finish line because he wants to take it all back the moment we think we've won."
I watched him, my mind running at a hundred miles an hour. I thought about the complexity of the credential clone. I thought about the way the brothers had been so clumsily aggressive. It made sense now. They weren't the masterminds. They were the bait. They were the ones sent to make us feel smart, to make us feel like we had everything under control while the real hunter was waiting in the tall grass.
"He knows about the evidence," David muttered, his hands moving through his hair. "He knows about the server download. He probably let me get it so he could see exactly what I had. Everything we have built, Brittany. Everything. The collection, the legal filings, the witnesses. He could dismantle it in a single move. He’s a man who has been invisible for seven years. He doesn't play by the rules because the world thinks he doesn't exist."
David stopped pacing and looked at me, his eyes filled with a desperate kind of fear. "We have to cancel the gala. We have to pull you out of here tonight. If he’s alive, if he’s coming for us, we can't be in that room. It’s a trap that he’s been preparing for a decade."
I sat with that for exactly forty-five seconds. I felt the weight of the secret, the terror of the dead man coming back to life, and the sheer scale of the lie. I looked at the studio door, where my mother’s soul was stitched into twelve dresses. I thought about the year David spent looking for me. I thought about the heartbeat in my own body.
Then, I stood up. I felt a strange, cold calm wash over me. The shaking stopped. The fear didn't go away, but it changed shape. It turned into something sharp. Something useful.
"Good," I said.
David froze. He stared at me like I had just started speaking a foreign language. "Good?" he repeated, his voice incredulous. "Brittany, did you hear anything I just said? My father is alive. The man who destroyed your mother’s life is currently orchestrating our downfall from a Mediterranean uplink. He is coming to the gala to end this. How is that good?"
I walked over to him and took his hands in mine. I squeezed them until he finally focused on me. "Because he’s tired, David. He’s been hiding in the dark for seven years, and he thinks he’s still the king of the castle. He thinks he can just walk back into the light and reclaim his throne whenever he wants."
"He can," David argued. "He has the power. He has the money."
"No," I said, a smile pulling at my lips that wasn't about happiness. It was about the kill. "He has the illusion of power because nobody is looking for him. He’s a shadow. But tomorrow, we aren't just having a fashion show. We are having a reckoning. We have the press. We have the feds. We have a sitting judge who is hungry for the truth."
I looked at the photograph of me from the ball, then back at the man who had found me. The architecture of my own plan was shifting, growing larger, becoming something that could swallow a ghost whole.
"If he comes to the gala to stop us," Brittany says, "then he comes out of hiding. And a dead man walking into a room full of federal contacts, press, and a sitting judge is not a counter-move. It is a confession."