“It might’ve made me trust you sooner.”
His gaze darkened, not in anger but truth. “Trust doesn’t come with confessions. It comes with time.”
Something passed between them, then. Something wordless and weighty. Recognition. Respect. Maybe more.
She nodded once. “Thank you. For telling me.”
He watched her closely, felt something inside him ease.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, “for listening.”
The silence that followed wasn’t silence at all.
It was the space where something real took root.
?
After Arden slipped out, Gideon stared at the West Virginia folder for a long beat before closing it with measured care. The hush of his office pressed in. Hollow. Stark. After the storm she left behind.
She unsettled him.
Not because she was intelligent because he’d expected that.
Not because she grasped complexity with unsettling ease. He’d anticipated that, too.
But because she looked past every carefully worded explanation and straight into the core of what drove him.
She stirred clarity he hadn’t felt in years, but laced with an ache he hadn’t yet named.
Bringing her into his orbit had been a gamble. One whose consequences were only beginning to take shape. The Blackwell Room wasn’t just a club. It was a battleground of legacy and bloodlines, power and pretense. Every hour she spent here pulled her deeper into that war,hiswar.
He rose, crossing to the window. His reflection hovered against the skyline, a ghost outlined in steel and glass.
The city stretched outward, glittering and untouchable. A monument to everything his family had built… and buried.
He couldn’t rewrite what had been carved into history. Butmaybehe could chip away at the rot, one stolen piece at a time.
And maybe he wasn’t fighting alone anymore.
The thought should’ve rattled him. He’d spent years keeping others at arm’s length, shielding them from the ruin his name so often left behind.
But Arden didn’t need protection.
She needed truth.
He exhaled slowly, breath fogging the glass—gone in a second, fleeting. Outside, the city glittered on, indifferent.
His gaze slid to the bourbon decanter, his grandfather’s favorite, left untouched.
Some truths deserved to be faced with a clear head.
Whatever storm waited, he’d meet it head-on.
And if Arden stood beside him,maybewas the risk wasn’t survival.
Maybe it was living.
CHAPTER 12
