Chapter 174 The Real and the Fake Steward
Chapter 174 The Real and the Fake Steward
Nora locked her phone and held it tight in her hand.
"Oliver, turn around. Head to the north side of the city."
Oliver didn't ask why.
The steering wheel turned fifteen degrees. The car made a U-turn at the nearest intersection.
Nora reached into her hidden pocket and pulled out the two copper coins, closing her fingers around them. The metal pressed into her palm — hard and cold.
Atlas, how many more secrets are you hiding? The basement of Harmony Private Clinic had been Wyatt's job in the end — he'd gone in with a team.
By the time Nora and Oliver's car reached the north side, Chase was already gone. Ryder's car had followed Chase out, and Storm had taken over the surveillance on the clinic's perimeter.
Wyatt hadn't come back with much — the unlisted treatment room did have someone in it: male, bedridden long-term, with visible burn scarring on his face. The patient ID on the monitor was twelve digits, and the first four matched The Ashes' coding system exactly.
But no one got a clear look at his face.
The clinic's attending physician was Dr. Efrain Hubbard. Storm had cornered him in the parking lot at three in the morning and spent twenty minutes asking questions. Dr. Hubbard held firm — he claimed he had no idea who the patient was. All he knew was that money came into the clinic's business account every month, always the same amount, always with the same note in the memo field: "Equipment maintenance fee."
When Nora passed this along to Todd, he replied: [Leave him for now.]
---
Leave him for now meant it wasn't time to close the net yet. Chase had just taken a hit at the auction, and then Oliver had proposed to Nora in front of the whole city — after all that, every move Chase made next would be more careful than the last. Push too hard now and they'd tip him off.
The clinic situation was put on hold.
Over the next two weeks, Nora's life was consumed by two things.
The first: sorting through the data on the USB drive. Todd and Storm broke three years of communication records down into over four hundred individual entries and cross-referenced each one against The Ashes' organizational chart. The picture that emerged got clearer by the day — Chase's actual control within The Ashes was far greater than Julian's. Julian was the public-facing "Steward," but Chase had always been the one calling the shots.
The second: the wedding.
Three days after Oliver's proposal, his assistant team was already in motion. Nora didn't know who was coordinating everything, but someone came to ask her opinion every single day — which venue, what kind of flowers, how many rounds of invitations to send.
Nora handed all of it to Wyatt.
"Go ask Oliver. He's the one who proposed. He can handle it."
It was the first time Wyatt had ever looked genuinely uncomfortable in front of her.
"Ms. Thorne, Mr. Percy said... whatever you decide is fine."
"Then keep it simple."
"Mr. Percy also said — anything you want is fine, except for 'keep it simple.'"
Nora stared at Wyatt for two seconds.
Wyatt's ears went red again.
"Fine." Nora leaned back in her chair. "Tell him: no church, no garden party, no walking down a red carpet in front of a thousand people."
Wyatt wrote it down in his notebook.
"He picks the location. Fifty guests maximum. I only have one condition — my brother walks beside me."
Wyatt's pen paused.
"Which brother?"
Nora said nothing.
Wyatt figured it out, swallowed the question, closed his notebook, and left.
Todd didn't say a word when he heard. He'd been buried in the USB data for days — when he finally came out of the study, his eyes were bloodshot and his jaw was dark with stubble. Nora brought him a bowl of oatmeal. He took it and kept scrolling through his phone while he ate.
"Todd."
"Mm."
"Did you hear what I said?"
"What?"
"I want you walking beside me. At the wedding."
Todd's spoon stopped in the bowl.
"I'm not deaf."
"Then why didn't you react at all?"
Todd set the bowl down. Looked up at her.
His expression was hard to read. But Nora noticed him swallow.
"React? Nora, you're asking your brother to walk you down the aisle. What exactly do you want from him — tears? Cartwheels?"
Nora had no answer for that.
Todd picked up the bowl and kept eating.
Two spoonfuls later.
"What color are you wearing? I need to match. Suit."
"...Black, I think."
"Okay."
He didn't say anything else. Nora didn't ask.
But the next day, walking past Todd's room, she noticed the door wasn't fully shut. She glanced in — Todd was standing in front of his wardrobe, a black suit in his left hand and a dark charcoal one in his right, holding them up to the mirror one after the other.
Nora didn't go in.
She stepped back and walked away.
The wedding was set for eleven days later.
Oliver chose the location — the stretch of woods behind The Percy Group's old family estate. Not indoors, but not a grand outdoor affair either. A stone path wound through the trees and ended at a small pavilion by the water.
Nora went to see the venue and came back without saying it was good or bad.
Oliver was waiting in the car.
"So?"
"Lots of trees."
"You don't like it?"
"I didn't say that."
Oliver tapped a finger on the steering wheel.
"That stone path takes about three minutes to walk end to end. Two and a half if you're in flats."
Nora turned to look at him.
"You remembered?"
"What?"
"That I said heels make my legs give out — you actually remembered."
Oliver didn't respond. He started the car and drove.
Nora leaned back in the passenger seat and slipped her hand into her hidden pocket, touching the coins. The two of them fit together perfectly, their square holes aligned.
She'd ended up getting a box made for them, like Todd had said — stop carrying them around in your skirt pocket. The box was barely the size of a palm, lined inside with a thin layer of velvet. The two coins fit inside just right.
But she never used the box.
She sewed the coins into the lining of her dress instead.
---
The night before the wedding.
Nora tried on the dress in a guest room on the third floor of the Percy family home. It wasn't a white gown — she'd chosen something in a deep, dark red, with subtle embroidery along the collar and cuffs. Nothing flashy.
After Wyatt took the dress away, Nora sat alone by the window.
Moonlight filtered through the branches of a ginkgo tree. The courtyard was quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a car passed on the road.
Nora went to sleep early.
---
The wedding was smaller than anyone had expected.
Forty-three people total, including staff.
No press, no camera crews. Wyatt set up two security checkpoints at the entrance to the woods. Every name on the guest list had been verified twice — once by Todd, once by Storm.
The Thorne family was all there. Meredith cried with the kind of tears that only mothers cry, pointing at her three sons and scolding them between sobs.
Heartbroken to be losing her daughter. Furious that none of her sons had managed to find a wife.
Nora came downstairs in her dress at three in the afternoon.
Dark red, with a clean-cut neckline and embroidery at the cuffs that caught the daylight and glowed a dull gold. Black flat shoes.
Wyatt was waiting at the top of the stairs. When he saw her, he went still for about a second.
Then stepped aside.
"Ms. Thorne, Todd is downstairs."
Nora went down.