Chapter 499: Ruthless Like Her Father

Amanda had Lexx settled on her hip before Arianne finished her coffee, the handoff so practiced by now it barely needed words between them. Twenty-eight mornings into a routine none of them had asked for, and none of it had gotten any easier so much as familiar.

"Vincent’s got the twins for the school run, and I’ve got this one until you’re back." Amanda pressed a kiss to Lexx’s temple before he could squirm free of it. "Aunt Estella’s covering Friday’s parent-teacher meeting too, in case this runs long. Go. We’ll still be exactly here when you are."

Gilbert stood by the door already, keys in hand, a second folder tucked under one arm that hadn’t been there yesterday. "Lucas confirmed the room an hour ago. Two visitor chairs and a third one by the door, exactly what I asked for."

"You didn’t have to ask for anything extra."

"I did, actually." He held the door for her, the hallway beyond it already busier than the hour usually allowed. "A supervised room built for one visitor doesn’t automatically become one built for two just because I show up standing in it."

Neither of them said much on the drive, and the silence suited her more than conversation would have. The nausea that had started catching her by surprise most mornings lately hit somewhere around the second turn, sharp enough that she pressed her knuckles to her mouth until it passed. Gilbert didn’t comment, just handed her the water bottle he’d apparently thought to bring without being asked, and let her drink it in the kind of silence that didn’t require her to explain herself.

The room hadn’t changed since the last time she’d sat in one like it — same table, same guard stationed outside instead of glass between them — except now there were three chairs instead of two, the third pulled back from the table entirely and set nearer the door, waiting for Gilbert exactly the way he’d described it two nights ago.

Edmund was already seated when the guard let them in, hands folded on the table in front of him, wearing the same gray a dozen other men in this building wore without any of it making him less unremarkable than he’d looked the one time she’d shaken his hand at a business forum and forgotten his face within the hour.

"Miss Summers." He said her name like he’d practiced the formality of it. Standing wasn’t required of him, and he didn’t offer it anyway. "I wondered if Mr. Pemberton would let you come alone. I see he answered that for both of us."

Gilbert took the third chair without comment, close enough to the table that the distance was more suggestion than fact.

"You asked for this. I don’t owe you small talk about how I got here." Arianne sat across from him, hands flat on the table the way she’d learned worked best when a man wanted to watch them shake. "Say what you asked me here to hear."

"Straight to it, then. I respect that." Something that wasn’t quite a smile crossed his face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "I’ve known for a long time that you had a hand in this. Longer than your Brotherhood realizes, I suspect. I let it happen anyway, because I wanted to see how far you’d actually go before you learned exactly whose daughter you are."

"I know exactly whose daughter I am."

"Do you?" He tilted his head, unhurried, a man with nowhere else scheduled to be. "I worked under your father for two years, Miss Summers, long enough to watch him decide which people were worth destroying and which weren’t worth his notice at all. You’ve spent this entire investigation deciding the same thing about me, without flinching once that I ever saw. Ruthless. Like him."

"You mean it as a compliment. I don’t need it to be one." Arianne kept her voice level. "You didn’t ask for this meeting to compare me to my father. You could have asked for Lucas. You could have waited for the arraignment and said all of this in front of a room full of reporters instead. You asked for me specifically."

"I did."

"Why?"

Something closed behind Edmund’s eyes, gone before she could read it fully. "That’s a conversation for another day, Miss Summers. Today isn’t it." His tone stayed exactly as level as it had been all morning, but the refusal itself told her more than an answer might have.

"You don’t get to hold that over me like it’s a gift you’re saving for later."

"I get to hold whatever I want over you, for as long as I want to hold it. That’s the one thing this building hasn’t taken from me yet." He said it without heat, which made it worse. "Ask your other questions. That one isn’t available today."

"Fine." Arianne let the refusal sit, an answer she’d come back to later rather than one she’d accept as final tonight. "Ask what you actually brought me here to ask."

"I already have, in a way." Edmund folded his hands again. "I wanted to see the woman who spent three years building a case against a man she didn’t know existed until someone finally traced the money back far enough to find me. I wanted to know if you understood yet what that cost you, going up against someone who’s had twenty years of practice."

"More than that, actually." Arianne watched something flicker behind his eyes at the correction, small and involuntary. "You’ve been sitting inside my grandmother’s own trust for over twenty years, drawing a position from Conway Capital while you drained it in pieces small enough that no one auditing it for a decade thought to ask why. You didn’t build that on patience alone. You built it on a woman you coerced into silence, and you let the rest of my family believe for over twenty years that she’d stopped caring about the business her own father left her."

Edmund’s fingers pressed flat against the table, the first crack in the performance since she’d sat down. "Your grandmother made her own choices."

"My grandmother was coerced into silence, and you know it, because you’re the one who built the leash." Arianne didn’t let her hands move from the table, refusing to let them curl into anything he could read as satisfaction. "You want me to believe this was a game between equals. It wasn’t. You spent decades deciding which women in my family you could use without ever once letting them say no."

"And it wasn’t only my grandmother." She held his gaze, something colder settling into her than the room’s temperature could account for. "You sent letters about an eight-year-old’s school schedule to a man who dismissed them without reading past the first paragraph. My mother read every one of them herself, because he never bothered to. She believed for years that dying would be the only thing that ever made you stop, and she was wrong, because you never once planned on stopping."

"I never touched your mother."

"You didn’t have to. That was the entire design."

Edmund said nothing to that for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost whatever warmth it started with. "You’ve done your research. I’ll give you that much." He leaned back, unhurried again despite it. "So let’s talk about your husband instead. I chose that particular rigging failure myself, out of three options my people brought me. The other two didn’t leave anyone breathing to visit. You can thank whatever’s left of my restraint that you still have a husband to sit next to at all, and you can spend every day he doesn’t wake up wondering how much of that restraint is left."

"You don’t get to decide what I’ll be." Arianne held the same even tone she’d used since she sat down. "Franz waited years for me before I let myself believe I was allowed to want him back. I can wait for him now, and whatever’s left of your restraint doesn’t get a vote in that. That’s not a debt you get to collect on, and it was never yours to threaten me with in the first place."

Something almost like admiration crossed Edmund’s face, gone as fast as it came. "Arianne." He said it plainly this time, no Miss Summers left in it, testing the shape of it in his mouth like a man trying on a permission nobody had actually given him.

"You don’t get to call me that." The words came out flatter than she expected, more fact than anger. "You don’t know me well enough to have earned it, and nothing that happens in this room is going to change that."

Gilbert leaned forward in the chair by the door, the movement small but enough to pull Edmund’s attention off her for the first time since she’d sat down. "You’ve had your turn. I’ve got questions of my own, and we’re not leaving until you answer them."

Edmund’s gaze moved between the two of them, taking his time with it, weighing something neither of them could see the shape of yet. "By all means." He folded his hands again, settling into the chair like a man with nothing left to lose and all the time in the world to prove it. "Ask."