Page 73 of Cruel Fate

Harper winks as if to say, “Isn’t he a cutie?” but how can she not know what’s happening?

I paste a smile onto my face.

Maybe she does.

Mina texts and asks me to go to lunch tomorrow, but I check Zane’s schedule before I respond. He has meetings through the lunch hour and won’t have time to see me. I text her back and accept. She says to meet her at a place I’ve never heard of, and I send back a goofy smiley emoji that is far from how I feel.

I count the forty-five minutes I took to have my panic attack as a lunch break, and at noon, I’m sitting at my desk when Zane comes out of his office. “Will you clear my schedule for the rest of the day, Miss Mayfair?”

“Yes, Mr. Maddox. Is there anything else you need me to do?”

He steps behind me and whispers in my ear, “I like the sound of that. Maybe you can call me that in bed.”

I force out a giggle to keep the atmosphere light. “Maybe I will.”

He smiles, but his skin has a grey pallor and I want to hug him to me. Make all his pain go away.

It solidifies my choice to stay. Zane needs someone to watch his back.

He hasn’t reached the elevator and I’m already canceling his plans.

I wonder where he’s going.

I wish he would have asked me to go, too.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Zane

Iask Douglas, the family driver and Dad’s jack-of-all-trades bodyguard, to drive me to the Sacred Heart Cemetery where my parents are buried. Their caskets, anyway. Without their bodies, I don’t feel like they’re there, but I walk across the grass toward their headstones to pay my respects. I need air. Alone. The office is stifling, and Lucille will be at the penthouse. I don’t want to go to the club, and Ash wouldn’t give me the consolation I need. All he’d say is, “I told you so.”

Denton told me he caught Stella going through his personal email. He equipped his account with a security alert, and she tripped it when she logged in using an unauthorized computer.

I don’t know what she was looking for. I thought I could trust her, but now I’m not sure. I want to. I need someone on my side, but she took it upon herself to dig through my father’s partner’s email.

While I don’t like the idea that Denton and Clayton Black are meeting behind my back—I would like to know what they’re talking about just as much as it appears Stella does—there’snothing in Denton’s contract that says he and Clayton can’t form other business interests outside Maddox Industries and Black Enterprises. It could be as simple as that, but I would be stupid and shortsighted not to have doubts.

My father and Clayton were good friends. That shouldn’t have changed because Dad’s gone. I would like to think Clayton is still loyal to Zarah and me, if anything because Ash is in love with my sister. We’re tied together by love and honor, but how strong are those ties now that my father is dead?

I believe Denton is still dedicated to the company, perhaps not to me, specifically, but to the company at least, if only to keep lining his own pockets, and I will until I know differently.

Our talk with Chase last night started something, and Stella could have been looking for dirt on Clayton, maybe Ash, too, hoping to find something in Denton’s correspondence. After what we heard, I doubt she trusts Denton, either, but snooping through his private email is not the way to find evidence to prove her suspicions correct.

I won’t tell Stella I know. If she has an agenda, I want it to play out. If she’s betraying me, I need proof, but hacking into Denton’s email isn’t like her, isn’t like the woman who got her back up when someone called foster kids a cause. The whole situation hurts my heart.

I kneel at the matching headstones, my parents’ names etched into the granite. Their bodies aren’t under the grass, and until their remains are found, I’ll always harbor a secret wish they’re alive, that Mom and Dad are hiding until they can figure out what caused the crash.

It’s a pipe dream. Kagan Maddox wouldn’t let me flounder like this. If he were alive, no matter how dangerous, he would have found a way to get word to me.

Somehow.

I want to cry, but there’s a flash of a camera’s lens in the dense brush alongside the cemetery grounds. I’m not alone. The paparazzi won’t let me grieve, and now on the gossip sites there will be pictures of me on my knees and blogposts speculating if I’m fit to take over my father’s legacy after all.

Strong men don’t cry.

I pull out my phone and give the camera my back. Make a call. I shouldn’t wait until the party. Waiting is stupid. I ask to speak to the person my dad trusted as much as he trusted Clayton Black. Maybe more.

“Wagner.”

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