Secret Lover, Public Enemy

By sunrise, the photos were everywhere.

By noon, they had been cut, cropped, and rewritten into a story I didn't recognize.

*FALLEN HEIRESS ELOWEN VOSS CAUGHT CHASING ENGAGED BILLIONAIRE.*

*THE OTHER WOMAN: HOW A BANKRUPT DESIGNER CLAWED HER WAY BACK TO THORNE.*

In one shot, they'd trimmed away the library roof and the date. Now it looked like last month. In another, they'd blurred his face and circled my hand on his chest. They made it look like I was grabbing him.

"Don't read the comments," Priya said, standing in my kitchen with her laptop clutched to her chest.

"Read me one."

"Elowen—"

"Just one."

She swallowed. "'She probably slept her way onto the shortlist. That's why her math is garbage.'"

I nodded. "Another."

"No."

"Priya."

"'Somebody find her address. Homewreckers should be scared to leave the house.'" Her voice cracked on the last word. "Can we stop now? Please?"

My phone buzzed against the counter. Again. Again. Four hundred new messages since dawn. My college thesis had been dug up and called "plagiarized." My old internship boss had been quoted saying I was "ambitious in an uncomfortable way." I'd never even met the man.

"She's not trying to beat me," I said quietly. "She's trying to erase me."

Priya set the laptop down. "Who?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to.

...

At six that evening, Jasper called.

"Turn on Channel Nine. Or the Thorne livestream. Either one."

"Why?"

"The charity gala. Corwin's making him speak." A pause. "About you."

My fingers went cold around the phone. "He agreed to that?"

"I don't think agreeing was part of it."

I sat down on the couch and opened the stream. Two million viewers. Hearts and laughing faces floated up the side of the screen like bubbles in a fish tank.

The ballroom glittered. Seraphina stood near the front in pale blue, hands folded like a saint in a painting. Corwin sat at the closest table, his cane resting against his knee.

Kaiyan stepped onto the stage.

He looked fine. That was the worst part. Clean shave, dark suit, every hair in place. He set a single white card on the podium and didn't look up from it.

"Good evening," he said. "I want to address recent reports concerning Ms. Elowen Voss."

The chat exploded. *HERE WE GO. Drag her!!*

"Ms. Voss and I shared a brief acquaintance years ago. It ended long before my engagement. Since then, I have had no personal relationship with her." He turned the card over. "Any contact in recent weeks was not invited by me. I regret that my family's privacy has been disturbed. I ask the public to respect my fiancée, who has handled this with more grace than anyone should have to."

Not invited by me.

Four words, and suddenly I was the woman in the parking garage, the woman in the stairwell. The one who wouldn't stop following.

Seraphina dabbed the corner of her eye. The crowd applauded her.

"He's lying," Priya whispered beside me. "Elowen, he's *lying*, he came after you—"

"I know."

"Then why are you smiling?"

I touched my mouth. I was. A small, tired curve, like the end of a joke I'd finally understood.

"Because I waited," I said. "Three years, and then three more days. I kept thinking he'd find one sentence. Just one."

On screen, Kaiyan folded the card in half and walked off the stage without looking at the camera.

I tapped the screen dark.

The room went silent, and something I'd been carrying since I was nineteen burned down to nothing. No smoke. No sound. Just gone.

...

An hour later, a gala waiter posted a blurry photo online. A private lounge. A shattered mirror. A chair lying on its side, its leg snapped off. Glass glittering across the carpet like spilled sugar.

*Thorne CEO lost it backstage,* the caption read. *Security had to clear the hallway.*

Priya held it out to me. "He's falling apart."

I glanced at it for exactly one second.

"He gets to break furniture," I said. "I get death threats. Put it away."

...

Jasper showed up at eleven with two coffees, a laptop, and a box of folders tied with rubber bands.

"I've screenshotted everything," he said, dropping onto my rug. "Every doxxing post, every fake quote. Three accounts are spreading the edited photos first, every single time. Same posting window. Same phrasing. That's not fans. That's a team."

"Paid?"

"Paid." He tapped the folders. "But that's not why I came."

"What's in the box?"

"Your family." He slid off a rubber band. "I pulled the bankruptcy records from eight years ago. The lawsuits, the asset sales, the buyers. Elowen, look at this."

He spread three pages across the coffee table.

"Everybody blamed Thorne. The press. Your dad. You. Because Thorne pulled out of the joint venture first, right?"

"Right."

"Thorne pulled out, yes. But they didn't buy a thing afterward. Not one property." He pointed. "These shell companies did. Six of them. They bought your shipping line, your warehouses, your father's patents. For pennies."

I leaned closer. "Who owns them?"

"It took me all night to untangle." He looked up. "Every one goes back to the Hale family."

The pages blurred in front of me.

"No," I said. "Corwin told my father—"

"Corwin told your father whatever kept the Hales happy. They were already talking marriage between the families back then." Jasper's voice softened. "And Kaiyan was, what, twenty? I don't see his name anywhere. Not one signature. I think they kept him blind."

I stood up so fast my knee hit the table. The coffee shivered in its cup.

"I hated them," I said. "For eight years, I hated the wrong name."

"Maybe not the *wrong* name. Corwin's still filthy." He caught my wrist gently. "But not the whole story."

I stared at the window, at my own reflection over the city lights. My face looked very calm.

"Okay," I said. "Here's what we do. The original drawings stay on the external drive, and we make two copies. One in a bank box. One with your lawyer. You keep tracing those three accounts."

"And you?"

"I'm going to find out who got paid to destroy my father." I picked up the first folder. "Quietly. In the light, when I'm ready."

Jasper grinned. "There she is."

...

At 1:14 a.m., my phone lit up with a number I'd blocked twice.

I almost let it ring out.

"What," I said.

"Don't hang up." Kaiyan's voice was raw, like he'd been shouting. Or not speaking at all. "Please. Thirty seconds."

"You spent five minutes on stage telling two million people I stalk you."

"I know what I did." A ragged breath. "I found it, Elowen. All of it. Toby's payments came through a Hale consulting account. The photos came off a cloud backup Seraphina's assistant accessed in April. I have bank records. I have the login trail. It was her. Every piece."

My grip tightened on the phone. "Then release it."

"Corwin saw the file an hour ago. He said if I put the Hale name in public, the board votes me out by morning. No vote. No appeal."

"So you're calling me in the dark. Again."

"I'm calling because I'm done hiding it from *you*." His voice dropped. "Let me give it to you. Everything. You decide what happens next. Not me. Not them."

I said nothing for a long moment.

"Where?" I asked.

"The old library. The roof. Tomorrow, nine p.m. Come alone."

He hung up before I could change my mind.

I didn't know then that a man with a long lens was already renting the apartment across the street from that library.

Or that Seraphina had paid for it two days ago.