Which would have been another awkward exchange in front of her fiancé if it weren’t for the fact that both had already set the story straight for him back at the hospital.
“The fight that Eve helped rescue me from when we first met was with my ex-boyfriend’snewboyfriend and his friends,” Mitchell had explained, sitting on the couch next to Darius’s hospital bed. “They were under the impression that I was trying to get back with him after we ran into each other earlier that day by accident. They accused me of using my money and influence to try and win him back. I…got a little heated at that, and that’s when they remembered it was three against one.”
Mitchell had shared a look with Eve that was clear in its gratitude. She’d accepted it from her spot on the edge of Darius’s bed with a little nod.
Then Mitchell’s attention had fastened on Darius again. There it had stayed for the remainder of his explanation.
“If that isn’t an indication of the important part—I’m gay,” he’d clarified. “But I’ve never come out to most of my family or the public, and so far I’ve managed to keep it a secret, despite people like those guys trying to make me pay for whatever imagined slights they think I’ve committed.”
“So Scott doesn’t know,” Darius had had to make sure.
Mitchell had nodded.
“Our father was a very traditional man, who made it very clear that to inherit the family money and business an heir had to be just as traditional. While I’ve never been in the running for being the CEO or taking a seat on any board since Scott is older, my mother’s deathbed wish was to make sure I at least inheritedmy share of the money when my father did pass. Which meant the easiest thing I could do was leave the idea oftraditionalon the table, at least for a few years.” He’d sighed out long at that. “Those few years turned into over a decade, and then Dad got sick, and I realized the idea of not admitting who I am just to get money…felt too wrong to keep going. So I decided to finally come out, and I was so nervous that I invited one of the few friends I had over to help me practice what I was going to say.”
Mitchell had been tensing slowly Darius had noticed. At that part, his shoulders had become a hard line of obvious stress.
“In hindsight I shouldn’t have picked a hotel as a meeting place but we were working out of town so it seemed practical,” he continued. “Scott saw me go into a room, with a man, and assumed we were there for other things. And when my friend left, Scott came in to—I thought—talk too.”
Eve had balled her hand into a fist. Her jaw had tightened.
She’d been mad.
Darius had understood why after Mitchell stood, turned around, and lifted his shirt.
Scars—so many different lengths and depths and severity—had been spread across the skin of his back, a horrifying series of stamps of the past. Even Darius had felt his own anger rise at the sight.
“The mere idea that I had kept a secret from him, sent Scott into a rage,” Mitchell had started again after a moment. He’d turned around, face fallen. “He didn’t care if I was gay—he didn’t even ask—but the thought that I might have been trying to ‘scam him out’ of what would have been all rightfully his? He was so angry that he didn’t even give me a chance to confirm or deny if I dated men or not. If it wasn’t for Eve, I’m not sure what would have happened had I actually told him the truth.”
Eve’s jaw had unclenched then.
“I had already been working for Scott for a while and saw him break from schedule,” she’d jumped in. “I followed him, worried I’d somehow made a scheduling mistake, and when I realized what was happening, I said what I thought would be the most helpful in the moment—that Mitchell wasn’t secretly dating men but secretly dating me instead.”
“And, even though I had been planning on telling the truth up until then, I saw something in my brother that scared me to lie along with her.” Mitchell had lowered his voice. It had made his next confession all the more sinister-sounding. “A man who would do anything and everything for power, for money, for status, even kill his own brother for even the chance of getting slightly more of it all.”
Eve’s expression had softened but her words were still as harsh as they had been before.
“I had just found out that the foundation had money coming out of and going into accounts I couldn’t identify or trace when they should have been going into various originations, specifically the drug trial that during which my father’s friend had died. I had been planning on asking, assuming it was some kind of clerical issue, but then I saw what he did to Mitchell. And how, even after I caught him in the act, he buttoned up like it was nothing after he accepted our lie. He even smiled.”
Eve had shaken her head.
“So I opened up to Mitchell instead, and for the last six months, we’ve been doing our own investigation into the missing money, andtwomonths ago we finally had a breakthrough.”
“But before we could do anything with it, Scott told me I needed to marry Eve,” Mitchell had added. “Not that I should or might want to, that Ihadto.”
“Right when you two found something that might expose him,” Darius had underlined.
They’d nodded in tandem.
“We’re worried that he found something out but can’t figure out what that might be,” Eve had said.
“And we were worried Scott was setting us up somehow. Why else would he want me to marry all of a sudden?”
This was when Darius finally understood the lie Eve had told him the day of the wedding.
“Which is why I met with Gary Whittaker once before we came to Seven Roads,” Mitchell had said, sheepish in his confession. “I wanted to know the full extent of what it meant for Eve and me to be married and what she would legally be able to do, wondering if there was a reason in there that we could find for the sudden rush down the aisle.”
“It was like I lit a fire beneath him and asked him to sit on it,” Mitchell had continued after a bewildered expression had crossed over his face. “He became angry and said he wouldn’t answer any family questions without the family there—without Scott there. Which only mademepanic, and I reeled everything back in and wrote it off as prewedding nerves. It seemed to calm him down, but then when I tried to talk to him last week, he looked like he was seeing a ghost.”
