Page 76 of The Cruel Heir
The Bentley’s door thudded shut, sealing us into leather and low light. Raindrops drummed overhead, a heartbeat I could not match. Sterling answered his buzzing phone.
“Send the press release. Seventeen-hundred characters, headline emphasis on tragic accident,” he said. A pause. “No, omit speculation about the investigation. Focus on our commitment to stability.” He ended the call and slipped the device back into his breast pocket, all without once looking at me.
I traced a circle of fog on the window, watching the cathedral recede. “Was it always going to be this quick?” I whispered.
“Justice delays nothing.” His tone was almost gentle, which somehow hurt worse.
“For whom?” The question escaped before I could sand down its edges.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for my hand, and rested it on my stomach, fingers lacing possessively. I felt the weight of a thousand camera flashes that were no longer there.
The city lights smeared into silver lines. My chest tightened, breaths turning thin. I counted them, one, two, three, until numbers lost meaning, and tears slipped free without warning. I pressed a fist to my mouth, but the sob rose anyway, cracked and raw.
Sterling’s arm tightened, steadying, not comforting. He handed me a monogrammed handkerchief, the gesture was almost clinical. My tears soaked linen that smelled faintly of hiscologne. I turned toward the window, hiding the tremor in my shoulders, and let the darkness unspool behind my eyelids.
Miles later, minutes, hours?... the car eased through the estate gates. I only knew because the engine’s rhythm changed. Sterling said something to the driver I couldn’t parse, while my pulse throbbed too loudly in my ears. Exhaustion folded over me like weighted silk. The last thing I felt was the upholstery beneath my cheek, and Sterling’s palm settling on my hair, a curious, absent-minded stroke, as if quiet, sleeping grief were the easiest version of me to manage.
The world dimmed to rain and leather, and the faint ache of a goodbye unsaid.
And then it dimmed to nothing at all.
ZARA
The first thing I heard was the clock, one of those antique regulators that measures a room’s pulse in slow, elegant heartbeats. Its tick-tock slipped beneath my eyelids, teasing me awake. I tasted salt at the corner of my mouth and remembered crying earlier, remembered the depressive state of most everyone around the gravesite.
I jerked upright. Leather squeaked. I wasn’t in my bedroom. Dim lamplight, amber, velvety, painted a library of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Sterling’s study.
Fear wanted to bloom, but instead a blunt, exhausted calm settled over me. My shoes were gone, jacket folded across the arm of the settee like a truce flag. A charcoal throw lay over my knees, smelling faintly of bergamot and the rain that had soaked us at the cemetery.
Across the room, Sterling Kingsley prowled between bookshelves, shirt sleeves rolled, throat bare where his tie had once reined him tight. Glass in hand, untouched. He didn’t look surprised to find me awake, he looked relieved, the kind of relief that cuts deep enough to bleed.
“You slept a whole hour,” he said softly, voice rasped raw from too many condolences. “How do you feel?”
“Like I borrowed someone else’s bones.” I pushed hair from my face. “Why am I here?”
“Because I wanted no audience for this.” He set the glass down with a muted click, and picked up a matte-black folio from the desk: thin, but the weight of it shifted the air. On top sat a card, black metal, our house crest laser-etched so dark it caught the lamplight only when he tilted it. He brought both to the low table between us, and waited until I met his eyes before he spoke again. “It’s time I stop lying by omission.”
I stiffened. When Sterling admitted he’d lied, it meant running out of excuses.
He laid the folio flat. “Open it.”
I didn’t reach for it. Memories scraped like glass; contracts waved over my teenage head, the snap of violin strings, his cigarette-rough whisper ‘mine’ in the rose garden. “If this is another leash-”
“It’s a key.” He nudged the card closer. “Half the contingency trust. Voting shares, quarterly draw, full liquidity. It has been yours since our parents signed the marriage contract.”
My stomach dropped. “You hid this from me.”
“I protected it.” The words tasted like regret even on his tongue. “The board would have contested your claim, while you were still… pliable. I won’t let them weaponize your dependence on me.”
I swallowed against the bruise in my throat that wasn’t physical. Dependence. He said it like a curse.
Lightning forked white outside the mullioned windows, and thunder rolled half a heartbeat later, shaking rain from the gutters. The storm we’d buried them under hadn’t blown out after all.
Sterling’s gaze never left me. “Take it, Zara. The card activates at midnight. First draw covers whatever you need to live away from here.”
“That simple?” My laugh came out hoarse. “You murder my choices for months, then hand them back because it suits your conscience tonight?”
His jaw tightened, hurt, not anger, which somehow hurt me back. “No,” he said. “Because it’s the only apology you’ll believe.”
