He turned on his heel and left. He’d let Skylar roam the estate without raising so much as an eyebrow. That could be loyalty to the old order, or it could be something else entirely.
Madison was about to speak when I pressed my finger to her lips and gave her a subtle shake of my head.
I carried her back upstairs. It wasn’t until I set her down that I asked her if Elijah had said anything to her.
“He has made his distaste for me very clear, even before whatever that was.”
“Do you remember Jameson ever talking to him, or about him?”
She shook her head. “No, why?”
“Just a suspicion.”
Madison stumbled backward into a chair. “I screamed.”
“He has strict orders not to come up here, no matter what he hears.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Her hands shook.
“What don’t I understand?”
“Not in here, in your study, when I thought you were dead. I screamed for help. Tompkins, who always seems to be lurking nearby, took forever to come to our aid and when he did, he looked oddly surprised—as if he wasn’t expecting you to be alive.”
She was trembling.
I pulled her into my arms and kissed her.
Not a demand this time.
My kiss wasn’t taking anything—not power, control, or pleasure. Just giving comfort.
“I’ll fix this. I promise.”
“You’ll fix this? You’ll give me my life back?”
He stilled.
I continued. “After this is all over, I’ll return to my cozy little bookshop and my messy apartment filled with secondhand furniture as if none of this ever happened.”
He cupped my cheek. “Madison…”
I placed my palms against his chest and pushed out of his arms. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Pierce.”
CHAPTER 56
SKYLAR
“It’s been a full day. There’s nothing on the news. No ambulance. No hospital. Nothing. Why?” Jameson demanded as he threw one of my Waterford glasses across my living room, the crystal shattering against the wall.
Bringing him here was a mistake. My mother had given me those glasses. A set of twelve, wrapped in tissue paper, tucked into a box she’d carried on her lap the entire flight back from a trip to London. The last things she’d touched before she died. I watched the crystal detonate against the wall and said nothing.
But I couldn’t stand that dingy hovel another minute. I needed my own space. Some semblance of control. What I hadn’t counted on was how little control I’d actually have once I brought him here.
We’d been here since last night. Sixteen hours of Jameson checking his phone, scanning news alerts, pacing grooves into my floors. The plan was simple: Pierce collapses, he’s rushed to the hospital, the news breaks, and I play the devastated almost-wife at his bedside.
None of it had happened. Not a single headline. Not a whisper.
“Calm down,” I said. “If they’d taken him to the hospital, it would have made the news by now. A Worthington in a coma? That’s not something you keep quiet. Unless the family is controlling the story before it breaks. They have the resources.”
