Chapter 84: Alexander Vane looks like a bitch.

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Alexander Vane looks like a bitch.

They finished going through the rest of Alexander’s suite a while later, Emiliana pointing out a couple more things Garrett only half absorbed, his attention circling back to the file sitting against his ribs every few minutes despite his best effort not to let it show.

He wasn’t going to open it properly with her standing right beside him. That much he was certain of.

"I should probably head out soon," Garrett said eventually, keeping his tone easy. "Don’t want to be getting back too late."

"Right. School tomorrow." Emiliana made a small face at the reminder, though she didn’t push back on it this time. "Come on. I’ll walk you up to get your stuff."

They made their way back to the guest room together, and Garrett gathered his things with the same unhurried efficiency he’d have used packing for anywhere else, folding the new clothes back into their bags, checking the bathroom counter for anything he might have left behind.

"You’re very thorough for someone who just spent one night here," Emiliana said, watching him check under the bed for a phone charger that was already in his pocket.

"Old habit. Used to move around a lot growing up. You learn to double-check."

"Should I be sad about that or impressed?"

"Bit of both, probably."

She smiled at that, sitting on the edge of the bed while he finished up, the conversation staying light and easy, nothing between them suggesting anything was sitting wrong.

Once he’d double-checked everything, they headed downstairs together and out through the main entrance.

"I’ll walk you out," Emiliana said, already moving toward the door alongside him. "Maybe even ride along partway, if you want the company."

"You don’t have to do that."

"I want to."

They’d barely made it past the entrance when one of the security staff approached, polite but deliberate, stepping into Emiliana’s path just enough to get her attention without addressing Garrett directly.

"Miss Vane. A moment, please."

Emiliana glanced at Garrett. "One second."

She stepped aside with the guard, low voices exchanged too quietly for Garrett to catch more than the shape of it, something about instructions, about her father, about the incident from that Sunday. He didn’t try to close the distance to hear better. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t meant for him.

Emiliana’s posture stiffened slightly partway through, though she kept her expression composed by the time she turned back to him.

"Sorry," she said, a little too quickly. "Turns out I can’t actually come with you. Something’s come up."

Garrett studied her for a second. "Everything okay?"

"Fine. Just some scheduling thing." She waved it off, though the wave didn’t quite land as casually as she probably wanted it to.

He didn’t push it. He already understood well enough by now that her family kept rules around her that she didn’t always control, or want to explain, and turning her goodbye into another conversation about the Vanes wasn’t how he wanted to leave things after finally smoothing over yesterday’s argument.

"No worries," he said instead. "I’ll see you at school."

"Yeah." She stepped in and hugged him, tighter than the moment probably called for. "Text me when you get home."

"Will do."

Garrett pulled back, glanced toward the car still parked near the entrance, and gave Owen a small wave. Owen returned it with a nod from behind the wheel.

"Bye, Emiliana."

"Bye."

He turned and walked toward the waiting Uber he’d requested a few minutes earlier, climbing in without looking back. Through the window, he caught a last glimpse of her standing near the entrance, watching him go, unable to follow.

Once the car pulled through the gates and the estate shrank behind them, Garrett finally reached into his jacket and pulled the file out.

Alone now, no reason left to hide it.

He didn’t read it front to back. There wasn’t time for that, not properly, not crammed into the back of a moving car. He flipped through instead, scanning, letting his eyes catch on whatever phrasing actually meant something and skating past the rest.

The termination notice up front had made it sound simple enough. Breach, termination, done. The pages behind it told a messier story.

Paragraph after paragraph of dense corporate language, obligations, performance requirements, compliance standards, review procedures, material deviations. Some of it made a kind of sense. Some of it sounded needlessly complicated, the kind of wording that existed mostly to sound official. And some of it, Garrett had to admit, meant almost nothing to him at all.

...failure to demonstrate sustained compliance with the prescribed operational framework...

He paused on that one. "Okay," he muttered, mostly to himself, not actually any closer to understanding it.

Further down: ...the continuation of the contractual relationship was rendered incompatible with the revised strategic requirements of the undertaking...

"What does that even mean," Garrett said quietly, staring at it a second longer before moving on.

The contract clearly involved something bigger than a simple business deal, though the actual shape of it stayed frustratingly out of reach the faster he skimmed. Then he caught references to humanitarian objectives. Social development. Public benefit. Charitable initiatives.

He slowed down there.

The language suggested the agreement, whatever it originally was, had eventually passed to Alexander Vane, apparently on the strength of his humanitarian contributions to the project’s stated goals.

Garrett read it again.

Something about it didn’t sit right. Not that anything looked outright false. Just that the reasoning felt too smooth, too polished, every decision arriving already dressed up as the obviously correct one. He didn’t know enough yet to call it suspicious. He just knew it didn’t read like an honest account of something ordinary happening.

"Alexander Vane seems to be a bitch, eh?"

He kept flipping. A date here. A signature there. Erling’s name surfacing again in one clause, Alexander’s in the next, a termination reference buried a few pages later.

He didn’t have time to actually understand the whole thing before the car started slowing for his street. But he had enough now to know this wasn’t the story of some small, failed business venture.

Whatever had actually happened between his father and Alexander Vane ran a lot deeper than Garrett had ever assumed.

The Uber dropped him outside his building, and Garrett carried his things up, dropping his bag in its usual spot by the door.

The file went down on the coffee table.

He stood there for a moment, looking at it.

He could call his father right now. Get it over with, ask the question outright, see what came back.

He didn’t.

Not yet. Not while he was still working off fragments, half-read sentences and legal phrasing he barely understood on the first pass. If he was going to confront his father with this, he wanted to actually know what he was confronting him about, not stumble through it working from three lines at a time.

Garrett sat down, pulled the folder toward him properly, and set his phone within reach for later.

The call he’d originally planned to make, the one about the £175,000 and what to actually do with it, could wait.

This couldn’t.

He’d read the file properly first. Then he’d call.

Garrett picked the folder back up, settling into the couch.