Chapter 4 4. The Viewing

Hazel

I made it to the bottom of the stairs before my legs decided the rest for me.

I'd meant to go to my room. To sit in the dark and not think about clauses or claimants or whatever sick game my father was trying with his will. But my feet carried me the other way, down the hall, past the lilies, to the tall double doors of the family room that had been shut all afternoon. I stood in front of them the way I'd stood in front of Caden's door, dreading the knob, and then I opened them anyway.

The room was dim. They'd drawn the heavy drapes and lit candles, real ones, and the smell of them mixed with the flowers until the air was thick enough to lean on. And there, in the center, on a bier draped in black, was the casket.

Open.

I hadn't expected open.

I crossed the carpet one slow step at a time, and then I was looking down at my father.

He looked wrong. That was the thing no one warns you about. They'd done everything right — the good suit, the hands folded, the gray hair combed the way he'd worn it my whole life — and it was all wrong, because James Ellington had never once in his life been still. He'd vibrated with impatience even sitting down. He'd tapped his ring against tables, drummed his fingers, checked two watches. This waxen, composed, patient man in the box was a stranger wearing my father's face, and I hated him for it, and I loved him so much I couldn't breathe.

"Why," I said out loud, to the body. My voice came out cracked and small in the candlelight. "Why would you do this?"

He didn't answer. He was very good at not answering.

Male biological heir. He'd written it three months ago. Three months ago, I'd been in California, ignoring his calls the way I'd ignored them for years, sending a photo instead of a visit. Was that it? Was this the bill for six years of silence? One last iron-fisted lesson, delivered from beyond the grave, teaching his ungrateful daughter what it cost to leave?

As if he were to say:

“You said you hated your father. You said you'd never come back. Fine. Then you'll come back to nothing.”

Is that what this was? Punishment? Had I made him so angry, so long ago, that he'd spent his last healthy months making sure that even dead, he could shut a door in my face?

I pressed my knuckles to my mouth and I did not cry, because I'd told myself in the study that I wouldn't, and I'd already broken every other promise I ever made in this house.

"You know, he'd have hated this."

I didn't turn. I knew the voice. Of course, he'd followed me. He'd always been able to find me in this house.

"The casket, I mean." Caden came in unhurried, hands in his pockets. He stopped a few feet off from the bier, on the other side of my father, so the box lay between us like the table in the study had. He tilted his head down at my father with a critic's frown. "Mahogany. Brass fittings. Cream silk lining." A beat. "The man wore the same gray suit for thirty years and complained when the housekeeper bought the expensive coffee. He'd take one look at this box and demand to know who signed off on the budget."

My lips twitched ever so slightly, into a smile I quickly suppressed.

"I'm just saying. Somewhere right now he's filling out a complaint form." He studied the arrangement of lilies at the foot of the casket and his mouth twitched. "And these. He hated lilies. Said they smelled like giving up. Whoever ordered a hundred of them either didn't know him at all, or knew him exactly and did it on purpose." He glanced up at me, dark eyes glinting. "I genuinely can't decide which I'd respect more."

Despite everything —the body, the six years, the will that was still lodged under my ribs — something in me made a sound that was almost, horribly, a laugh. I caught it before it got out. But he saw it. Of course he saw it.

And the worst part, he was right, too. My father had said that about lilies, years ago, at some other funeral, and I'd forgotten it until this exact second — and the fact that Caden remembered, landed in me like a splinter.

"Stop it," I said, and the almost-laugh was gone, and my voice came out raw. "You don't get to stand there and know things about him. You don't get to grieve him. You left."

"So did you."

We stared at each other over the body of the man who'd raised us both.

I made myself breathe. I made myself remember what I'd walked out of the study promising. If I was going to fight, I was going to fight smart, and the first move was sitting three feet away with ink on his hands.

“So is this why you came back?” I asked. “To succeed my father’s company?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I have my own company to run. I don’t need another one.”

"Well, great. Then let's make this simple," I said matter-of-factly. "Since you don't want or need this, release your claim to my father’s will. Tell the board you decline. Let it come to me. It's mine, Caden. It was always supposed to be mine. And you know it."

For a long moment he didn't say anything. He looked at me across the casket, and there was something in his face I didn't like, because it wasn't refusal. Refusal I could have fought. It was worse than refusal.

It was pity.

"It's not that simple, Hazy," he said.

“Stop calling me that.” I warned. "And of course it's that simple. You say two words. You sign a paper. You get on a plane and leave. You're extraordinarily good at that last part."

He didn't rise to it. That, more than anything, told me something had changed — the Caden I knew never let a shot like that land without firing back.

"Listen to me.” He said slowly. “Things are more complicated and more dangerous than you think."

I laughed, and it came out thin. "Dangerous. It's a holding company, Caden. It's boardrooms and quarterly reports and men like Alan Maxwell being smug in expensive chairs. What's so dangerous about a portfolio?"

He looked at me for a long, level moment. And then he said it.

"Your father might not have died of natural causes."

The candles guttered. Or maybe that was just my eyes.

"What?"

"A heart attack, they said." Caden's voice was very even. "Sudden. Convenient. No history of it. A healthy sixty-year-old man who ran three miles most mornings, and one Sunday evening his heart simply stops, days before he was going to—" He cut himself off. "Hazel. I think James was murdered."

The word didn't fit in the room. It didn't fit next to the lilies and the good suit and the combed hair.

"No." I shook my head. "No. My dad had a heart attack. The doctor said so. There was a doctor, there were test results, people don't just—"

"People like your father do."

"Stop saying people like my father as if you—" My voice broke off its own leash. "He was a businessman. He imported things. He sat on boards. Why would anyone — who murders a man for a business, Caden, this isn't a movie—"

"Someone who wants the business," he said. "Or wants it broken. Think about the will. Think about what happens now." He leaned in slightly, and the candlelight caught the ink at his throat. "Someone murdered James Ellington, and the empire's suddenly got no clear heir. It deadlocks. It fractures. And in a hundred days, if the two people he named can't hold it together," His eyes held mine tightly. "It goes up for auction. Anyone with enough money and a reason can buy the whole thing, clean, at a fire sale. You couldn't design a better way to take an empire apart without a single shot fired in public."

I was cold all the way through now. "Then that's — that's the board's problem. The lawyers'. Or maybe the police. Not me—"

"And if you're named heir of the company, Hazel," Caden said, gently, which was the worst way he could have said it, "Then you'd be the next thing standing in the way.”

I stepped back from the casket. "This is insane. You've been in England for too long. My father was a normal businessman. He went to the office. He came to my recitals when he remembered. He was strict and cold and impossible and normal. Why would anyone in the world want him dead?"

Caden looked at me. And for the first time since he'd walked into that empty room upstairs, there was no armor in his face at all. No smirk, no distance, no six years. Just something quiet and grave and almost sorry for me.

"He wasn't just a normal businessman, Hazy," he said.

That name again. It went straight through me.

"What does that mean," I whispered. "What does that mean, Caden."

He held it a moment longer. Then he did the thing I wasn't ready for.

He held out his hand.

Palm up, across the space beside the casket. The ink ran down over his wrist and disappeared under his cuff, and his hand was steady, and his dark eyes didn't leave mine.

"I'll tell you everything," he said. "Come with me."

— End of Chapter Four: To Be Continued. —