Chapter 22 MADISON'S PLAN
VANESSA'S POV
I sat in my father's chair after he left the room.
Just sat there.
The folder was in my lap and I hadn't opened it yet. I already knew what was inside. My father didn't hire people to dig up information and then leave out the good parts.
Three months.
He had given me three months to lock down an engagement with a man who had looked straight through me today like I was made of glass.
I laughed, but nothing about it was funny.
My phone was already in my hand before I'd made a conscious decision to call anyone.
Madison picked up on the second ring.
"I need you," I said.
A pause. "How bad?"
"Bad enough that I'm sitting in my father's office alone in the dark."
"I'll bring the good tequila."
She showed up forty minutes later in a silk co-ord set with her hair still in a clip, which meant she'd come straight from her bath.
She took one look at my face, set the bottle on the coffee table, and sat down next to me on the floor without saying a word.
That was why Madison was my person. She didn't ask questions first.
I told her everything. My father's voice, the way his hands had felt on my shoulders, the three month deadline, all of it.
I talked until my throat felt dry and my chest felt slightly less like it was being sat on.
Madison poured two glasses while I talked. She slid one toward me without interrupting.
When I finally stopped, she was quiet for a second.
"He actually said three months," she repeated.
"Three months."
"Or you lose the house."
"And the cars and apparently our entire identity as human beings." I took a long sip from my drink.
Madison looked at the folder sitting between us. "Is that her?"
"Everything they could find on her."
She reached for it and opened it herself, flipping through slowly. I watched her face while she read.
Madison had a very specific expression she made when something interested her. Her eyes went a little sharp and her mouth went a little flat and she got very, very still.
She was making that face now.
"She's been through it," Madison said finally.
"Don't."
"I'm not feeling sorry for her, I'm assessing." She turned a page.
"I'm looking at what we have to work with, Nessa, that's all." She tapped something on one of the pages. "She's broke. She has no family left. The only reason she has a roof over her head is because the brothers put her there." She looked up. "She's already hanging by a thread."
"Which means?"
"Which means we don't need to do much to make things difficult for her." Madison closed the folder and set it down neatly. "But that's the small picture. Your father wants her out of the picture. That takes more than just making her uncomfortable."
I poured myself another drink. "Say what you're thinking."
Madison looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that meant she was deciding how honest to be.
"We could get Callum alone," she said. "One controlled night. Something he can't take back in the morning."
The words landed quietly between us.
I knew what she meant. I had known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that this was the direction we were heading the second my father slid that folder across the desk.
But knowing something and hearing it said out loud were different things.
"If it comes out," I started.
"It won't."
"Madison."
"It won't, because we plan it properly." She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, voice dropping like we might be overheard even here in my own living room.
"At least not tonight but we both agree right now that it's the move, and then we take our time doing it right."
“She has nothing.”
"Which is exactly why we need a night where it's just you and Callum. No Nova and no Elias running interference. Just you, him, and a situation that makes the decision for him."
"Something in his drink," I said.
Madison didn't flinch. "Something light. Nothing that hurts him. Just enough to make the night go the way we need it to go."
I sat back against the couch cushion and looked up at the ceiling.
My mother's voice floated through my head from somewhere distant. All that money and no class, Vanessa. That's not who we are.
I pushed it back down where it came from.
"We need to figure out when we can get him away from her," I said. "That's the real problem. He doesn't go anywhere she isn't right now."
"There'll be an event," Madison said, reaching for the tequila again. "There's always an event. We just have to wait for the right one and make sure we're positioned correctly when it comes." She filled both our glasses and handed mine over.
"Patience, Nessa. We don't rush this."
"I have three months."
"Three months is plenty of time." She clinked her glass against mine, slow and deliberate. "We just have to be smart."
I looked at her over the rim of my glass.
Smart. Yes.
I could be smart.
I had grown up watching my father maneuver people like chess pieces and I had learned from every single move he ever made. The difference between him and me was that I wasn't going to be sloppy about it.
Callum Blackthorn was going to end up with me.
Nova Sinclair was going to end up exactly where she started.
And nobody was going to be able to trace a single thing back to either of us.
I drank.
\---
ELIAS'S POV
I was still awake at midnight and I genuinely had no excuse for it.
I lay flat on my back staring at the ceiling with one arm behind my head, and the worst part was I wasn't even trying to sleep anymore.
I had given up on sleep about an hour ago. Now I was just lying there being pathetic about it.
I had backed off.
I had stood in that office, looked her dead in the eye and said the words, and I had meant them when they came out. That part was true. I was not going back on it.
But nobody had told me it was going to feel like this.
She was down the hall.
Thirty feet, maybe. Probably less. And I had just finished promising to act like that wasn't the most distracting fact in my entire life right now.
I pressed both hands over my face and made a sound into my palms that I would never let another living person hear.
Because the thing that was actually killing me wasn't even the distance. It was thirty seconds before the distance.
I sat up.
Lying down was making the whole thing worse. I got up and went to the window and stood there with my arms crossed, looking out at the dark garden below like it had answers in it somewhere.
Soon it will be thursday and she will go on that date.
I exhaled hard through my nose and dropped my forehead against the cold glass of the window.
"Back off," I reminded myself, out loud this time because apparently I needed to hear it.
I had said it. I had meant it.
I was backing off.
Even if it was currently making me feel like I was standing still while everything I wanted moved slowly in the wrong direction.