Chapter 133

Chapter 133
Alina's POV

The tape was still playing, but I had stopped hearing it.

My father's voice continued—something about the company's structure, the details of the money flows, where they had stored the evidence they had gathered. Every word reached me as though filtered through deep water, muffled and distant. My eyes were fixed on the screen, on my father's slightly parted lips and my mother's downcast lashes, while the only thing left in my mind was the name my mother had just spoken.

Sumia Vadalich.

Lowell's father.

The recording ended. The image held on the final frame—my father leaning slightly forward, mouth still open, as though the sentence had not quite finished. Then the screen went dark and dissolved into gray static, a faint hiss rising to fill the silence.

I was kneeling in front of the television. I didn't move. The shard of glass slipped from my hand and landed on the carpet without a sound.

I looked down at my hand. Blood was seeping through the gaps between my fingers—the glass had cut into my palm when I'd been gripping it too hard. It ran along the lines of my hand and dropped onto the carpet, spreading into a small, dark stain.

"It's fake." I heard my own voice, thin and desperate, and looked up at Adams, searching his face for any crack. "You made this. You fabricated the recording."

Adams looked down at me from where he stood. He let out a quiet laugh. "Fabricated it? Their handwriting, their faces, the way they spoke—all of it something I manufactured? You watched it clearly enough. Those were your parents. Those were their own words."

"You'd do anything to turn me against Lowell!" My voice shot up, the words scraping out of me with everything I had left. "You'd use my parents' final recording as a prop—"

"Alina." He said my name levelly. "Is it my recording you're questioning, or your own eyes? You recognized their voices. You know it was them. You just can't bring yourself to accept that this connects to the Vadalich family—because you fell in love with that man's son."

I couldn't breathe for a moment. My nails went into my palm. The pain of new cuts over old ones ran through me in a shudder.

"You ran the underground boxing operations yourself," I said, driving the words out through clenched teeth, forcing every tangled thought aside. "You were the one who put me in the ring. You knew exactly where that money went. When you stand there and talk about that network, have you asked yourself whether you were part of it too?"

Adams's expression barely shifted. "There are many ways to make money. Underground boxing was one of them. That makes me someone who used the system—not someone who killed your parents. Your parents' tape didn't name me as the one responsible. What exactly are you trying to prove?"

"You—!" I pressed my fist closed. Blood dripped from between my fingers onto the carpet.

He was right. I had no way to prove the tape was fabricated. The name my parents had left behind in their own voices, with their own faces, was Lowell's father.

They had been good people. They didn't lie.

I looked down at my hands.

After everything—all the searching, all the years—I had fallen in love with the son of the man who had killed them.

"Think carefully," Adams said from behind me, his voice carrying that particular arrogance of his. "Why has Lowell never told you what he's doing? Why does he shut you out of everything that concerns the family? Is he protecting you—or is he making sure you never find out what his father did, and what he's been covering ever since?"

"Be quiet."

My voice was trembling.

"Alina." He said my name again, and this time he put something into it that was meant to sound like patience and concern. "You're not a foolish person. Don't let a moment of feeling blind you."

"I told you to be quiet!"

The words burst out of me. I turned on him with every ounce of what was left.

Adams said nothing. He watched me for a few seconds in silence, then walked to the door.

He paused at the threshold. "Think it through on your own," he said coldly, and was gone.

---

In the days that followed, a wildfire swept down on the city without warning.

It had started at the outskirts and spread fast, fed by the dry winter wind and the dead grass that covered the hillsides. Smoke closed over most of the sky and didn't lift for days. News broadcasts ran continuous updates on the fire's movement; convoys of fire trucks moved toward the city's edge around the clock, sirens going day and night.

The city shut down piece by piece—theaters closed, sporting events postponed, restaurants pulling their shutters before dark, all of it giving way to the work of emergency response and evacuation.

And in the middle of it, Lowell's name kept appearing on the screen.

He had donated. He had moved supplies. He had opened several unused properties held under the family's name as temporary shelters. He appeared in one interview himself, standing in front of a camera to appeal for other companies and individuals to contribute to the relief effort.

In the footage, he was wearing a dark gray coat, standing in front of a supply distribution point, stacked boxes and busy workers behind him. His expression was composed. His voice was steady. He gave away nothing that wasn't necessary—the look of someone who knew exactly how to be seen doing the right thing.

I sat on the bed and looked at his face on the screen until my eyes burned.

Adams came in at some point. He stood behind me and watched the screen for a while before he spoke. "Look at him. Doing charity work. Rebuilding the family's name. He's got the whole performance down."

I didn't answer. Something in the softest part of me was being worked at slowly, like a dull blade that doesn't cut clean.

"Do you want to see him?" Adams's voice came from behind me. "I can arrange it. Go and see for yourself what he's actually doing out there."

The honest answer was yes. I wanted to stand in front of Lowell and ask him directly. I wanted to hear it from him. But I was also afraid—afraid of what his face would look like when he saw me, and more afraid of asking the question and getting an answer I wouldn't be able to carry.

In the end, the feelings won.

I let Adams have me disguised and went to where Lowell was working.

The car stopped at the edge of the camp—a temporary area of tents and shelters erected outside the city. I got out and moved into the crowd, walking slowly toward the center of the activity.

The relief site was large. Tents stood packed close together, long tables set up in the open ground between them, covered with water and food. Volunteers in different-colored vests moved through the crowds in every direction.

It was getting dark. Temporary floodlights had been set up across the site and they threw everything into sharp relief—the shapes of people moving through the light, dust rising and settling underfoot.

Then I saw him.

He was standing not far away, talking to an official in uniform. In the light, his face looked thinner than I remembered—his jaw more defined, the line of it sharper. His coat had small creases at the shoulder, the kind that come from wearing something through a full day without changing.

I stood at the edge of the crowd, twenty feet away, and watched him. The way he tilted his head slightly when he listened. The way his lashes fell when he nodded. The movement of his lips when he spoke.

My heartbeat was so loud and fast I could almost hear it against my eardrums—the pulse of it amplified into something I couldn't separate from the sound of the camp around me.

I still loved him. Even with all the doubt, all the questions, standing there and seeing him—something in me was warm in a way I couldn't shut off.

But the cold thing was still there too. My parents' faces on that screen. My mother's voice. That name.

Sumia Vadalich.

While I was standing there, lost in it, Lowell's gaze moved away from the official he was speaking with—drawn by something, or nothing. It came toward where I was standing.

Through the crowd, through the light and the drifting dust, his eyes found the exact point where I stood.

His expression changed—a brief, strange distortion that crossed his face—and then he was walking toward me, fast, leaving the official behind without a word.

I watched him coming closer and closer. Every part of me wanted to run.

I couldn't move at all.