Chapter 8
The room where Marcus was being held was in the basement of a building Adrien owned but did not officially acknowledge.
Adrien arrived near 5:00 a.m.
Marcus looked at him without fear.
If anything, he looked relieved.
“The great Adrien Voss,” Marcus said. “Come to do it himself. Good. I wanted it to be you.”
Adrien sat across from him.
He asked his name.
Marcus Reed.
Adrien did not recognize it.
That made the situation worse.
It meant this was not business.
Adrien asked why he had tried to murder a 19-year-old girl who had never hurt anyone.
Marcus laughed.
Adrien genuinely did not remember.
That was what Marcus could never understand.
Adrien had destroyed his family and had not even kept the memory.
4 years earlier, Adrien needed a block of old buildings near the water for a construction deal.
The residents would not sell.
Marcus’s father had owned a small shop there for 30 years.
First Adrien’s people offered money.
When Marcus’s father refused, they stopped offering.
Then there was a fire.
It was officially called an accident caused by bad wiring in an old building.
Marcus’s father was inside.
He survived the fire but spent 11 months in a hospital before dying.
The medical bills consumed what remained.
Marcus’s mother lost the will to fight.
18 months after her husband burned, she was gone too.
Marcus had watched Adrien’s lawyers make the entire thing disappear in court.
He had watched Adrien leave without even turning his head.
His family had been nothing to him.
A line item.
The cost of doing business.
Adrien remembered the deal.
He did not remember the family.
He remembered saying 2 words.
Handle it.
He had said them countless times.
He had never followed the thread afterward.
Now the thread had followed him back.
Marcus wanted Adrien to feel what he had felt.
He wanted him to watch Lily die slowly and discover there was nothing his money could do.
He wanted them to be even.
But when Clare stepped between the blade and Lily, Marcus saw something else.
He realized he had become the thing that had destroyed him.
He had come to make an innocent girl suffer because of someone else’s crime.
The waitress had been willing to die to stop him.
For the first time, Marcus saw himself clearly.
Adrien listened.
Then a more difficult realization came.
He had made Marcus.
How many more were there?
How many fathers, mothers, and families had Adrien turned into line items because they happened to stand where he wanted to build?
Marcus warned him not to make his suffering noble.
He had come to murder Lily.
The fact that Clare stopped him did not turn him into a teacher or Adrien into a redeemed man.
His father was still dead.
Adrien’s fire had still killed him.
Nothing said in that basement would change it.
Adrien agreed.
His guilt meant nothing to Marcus.
But it could mean something to the next family.
He called Maya into the room.
“Take the cuffs off him.”
Maya stared at him.
Marcus had tried to murder Lily.
Adrien knew.
He also knew why Marcus existed.
Marcus would not disappear.
Adrien would hand him to the real police, not the officers under his influence.
Marcus would be arrested, charged, tried in a real court, and sent to prison for what he had done.
But he would remain alive.
He would receive the process Adrien’s lawyers had denied his father.
When Marcus eventually left prison, money would be waiting for him.
Not a bribe.
Not payment for silence.
Marcus could tell the entire world what Adrien had done to his family.
Adrien hoped he would.
The truth deserved to be told.
Marcus asked whether Adrien believed money could fix anything.
Adrien said no.
Nothing could fix it.
His father was still dead.
Adrien was doing this because a woman had taken a blade for a stranger and asked for nothing, while Adrien had spent 20 years living according to the opposite principle.
He finally understood what he was.
And he could not remain that person.
Marcus put his face in his hands and wept.
For 4 years, rage had held him together.
Without it, there was only grief.
Adrien did not comfort him.
He knew he had not earned the right.
He simply allowed Marcus to cry.
When Adrien left the basement near 6:00 a.m., Maya followed him.
She demanded to know what was happening.
2 hours earlier, the man she had worked for over the previous 10 years would have made Marcus disappear without losing a minute of sleep.
Now he was arranging a real trial and money for the man who had tried to kill his sister.
Adrien told her about Clare.
She had thrown herself in front of a blade for Lily.
Then she had awakened in a hospital, been offered enough money to change her life, and refused because she would not allow Adrien to turn the one clean thing she had done into a transaction.
Adrien had spent 20 years believing everyone had a price.
His entire empire rested on that belief.
In 1 night, he had met someone who did not.
If a woman working double shifts to pay for a child’s failing heart could afford to be decent, Adrien could no longer pretend he could not.
He ordered Maya to produce a complete accounting.
Every deal like the block by the water.
Every family.
Every fire.
Every accident.
Every person his organization had reduced to a line item.
He wanted every name.
Maya warned him the list could destroy him.
If it became public, his empire could collapse.
May you like
Adrien no longer cared.
He was finished being protected from the truth of his own life.
