He says something that makes other diners turn their heads, his hand slamming down hard enough to make silverware jump, and Samantha flinches back like she’s been struck.
“Who is he?” Kai asks, his voice tight with something that might be concern or might be fury.
“Robert Allen. Her stepfather.” Dad closes the video and pulls up another file, this one dense with text and photographs. “I had Davis run a comprehensive background check after I caught her lying about a phone call the other day. Samantha came back clean, almost suspiciously clean, but Robert Allen is an entirely different story.”
He turns the screen toward us again, and I lean forward to read through the report that Davis compiled, my eyes catching on phrases that make my blood run progressively colder with each line.
Gambling debts totaling over two million dollars. Multiple aliases used across different states. Embezzlement charges that were mysteriously dropped. And then, buried in the middle of the financial analysis, the connection that makes everything suddenly make terrible sense.
“Volkov,” I say aloud, and the name tastes like poison on my tongue. “He’s working for the Volkov operation.”
Dad nods slowly, his fingers steepled in front of his face. “Has been for at least three years, based on the financial records and communication logs we pulled. Regular contact with known Volkov associates, meetings at locations tied to their operations,and payments that track back to their shell companies. And based on the timeline of when Samantha started dating Logan, her presence here appears to be anything but coincidental.”
Kai goes very still beside me, the kind of stillness that precedes violence. “You think he planted her. You think she’s been working with him this entire time, gathering intelligence on us for Volkov.”
“I don’t know what to think yet,” Dad admits, but his jaw is tight. “Which is why I need you both to listen to this before we make any decisions.”
He pulls up another window on his laptop and hits play, and Robert Allen’s voice fills the office, smooth and confident in a way that makes my skin crawl.
He’s talking to someone whose voice I don’t recognize, discussing Samantha in terms that make it clear she’s an asset rather than a daughter.
“She’s compromised, gotten too emotionally involved with the targets, but we can still salvage this situation if we move quickly enough,” Robert says, his words clipped and businesslike. “I need those offshore account numbers within forty-eight hours, or we’re pulling the plug on this entire operation and exposing her connection to our organization. The chaos from that revelation alone should give us the opening we need to move against Hale.”
The recording ends, and the silence that follows is suffocating in its weight. I feel like someone has reached into my chest and squeezed my lungs until I can’t draw breath, because the implications of what we just heard are staggering in their betrayal.
“She’s been spying on us,” I hear myself say, and my voice sounds distant and hollow. “For months, she’s been here gathering intelligence, getting close to us, sleeping with us, and the entire time she’s been working for Volkov.”
“Maybe,” Dad says, but then he pulls up another screen, this one showing live security footage from inside the private wing. “Or maybe she’s caught in something she doesn’t understand. Look at this.”
The image shows Samantha’s bedroom, and she’s sitting on the floor with her back pressed against the bed and her arms wrapped around her knees while her whole body shakes with sobs. She’s not just crying but breaking apart completely, her face buried in her knees and her shoulders heaving with the kind of grief that can’t be faked.
“That’s not what someone looks like when their plan is working,” Dad says quietly. “That’s what someone looks like when their entire world has just shattered around them.”
Kai stares at the screen, and I can see the war happening behind his eyes between rage and something that might be concern. “Or that’s what someone looks like when they’ve just been caught.”
“Maybe,” Dad says again, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “The question we need to answer is whether she came here knowing she was working for Volkov, or whether Robert manipulated her into position without her understanding what she was really doing.”
I watch her cry on the screen, and my mind is racing through every conversation we’ve had and every moment we’ve shared, trying to figure out which parts were real and which parts were performance.
The night she got drunk and told me she felt like a fraud, was that her conscience breaking through? The way she looked at me after we slept together in the pool house, was that genuine emotion or calculated manipulation?
“We need to confront her,” Kai says, already moving toward the door with violence coiling in his shoulders. “Right now, before she has a chance to run or destroy evidence or contact Robert again.”
“Stop.” Dad’s command freezes Kai mid-step, and when he turns back, Dad is standing behind his desk with his hands flat on the surface. “We don’t do anything tonight. We let her rest, we keep surveillance on her room to make sure she doesn’t try to leave the property, and we give ourselves time to think through how we’re going to handle this rationally instead of emotionally.”
“Rationally?” Kai’s voice rises with disbelief. “She’s been lying to us for months, Dad. She came here specifically to destroy us, and you want to let her sleep peacefully while we sit here knowing she betrayed everything?”
“I want us to remember that she’s carrying a child that belongs to this family,” Dad says, and his voice cuts through Kai’s anger like a blade. “I want us to consider the possibility that she’s a victim in this situation rather than a willing participant. And I want us to handle this in a way that doesn’t result in us losing both her and the baby because we acted out of rage instead of strategy.”
“How do we even know the baby is ours?” The question comes out of my mouth before I can stop it, and hearing it spoken aloud makes something twist painfully in my chest. “How do we know she wasn’t sleeping with Logan or someone else this entire time?”
Dad looks at me with something like pity in his eyes. “Do you honestly believe she was sleeping with Logan? You saw how he treated her, how he cheated on her repeatedly and didn’t hide it. Do you think she stayed with him for any reason other than needing access to this family?”
The truth of that settles over me like cold water, because he’s right.
Logan never wanted her and never valued her. She stayed anyway, because getting close to us required going through him first, which means everything that happened after she arrived here, everything between her and me and Dad and Kai, that could have been real.
Or it could have been the deepest layer of the deception.
