Chapter 2 - What My Brother Had Been Hiding
When the water filled most of the cabin, Caleb forced the rear door open and we went under together. The current dragged hard. He grabbed my coat and pulled me not toward the bank where Marcus and Isabelle stood waiting, but downstream, toward a line of concrete pylons holding up an abandoned pumping station.
There was a rusted maintenance ladder behind one pylon. We climbed onto a narrow hidden platform beneath the old structure, and I collapsed there, coughing up river water, shaking so hard my teeth clicked. Then I turned and slapped my brother across the face.
He let me.
"You deserved that."
"I did."
"Fourteen years?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
His whole expression changed. "Because the crash that killed Mom and Dad wasn't an accident."
My anger just stopped.
Our parents had died fifteen years earlier, when I was nineteen and Caleb was twenty-one. Their car had gone off a mountain road outside Ashford Bend. Caleb had been in the back seat. He survived with catastrophic spinal injuries. Doctors told us he might never walk again.
Apparently they'd been wrong.
He sat beside me on the concrete platform. "I got movement back during private rehab, about eighteen months after the crash."
"And told no one."
"I meant to tell you."
"Fourteen years ago?"
"Yes."
"What changed?"
"Someone walked into my rehab room at two in the morning. A nurse saw him before he ran. Security found a syringe in the stairwell the next day."
My skin went cold. "Caleb..."
"I'd already started asking questions about Mom and Dad's crash by then. There were inconsistencies. Parts replaced before the investigators ever looked at the car. A mechanic who vanished right after. Insurance photos with timestamps that didn't line up with the official file."
He pulled a waterproof phone from his jacket and showed me a photograph. Marcus — years before our wedding, standing outside a private airport terminal beside his father.
Marcus had always told me his father cut him off financially after some bitter falling-out. His father was an industrialist who'd spent decades competing against Calloway Holdings.
"He was never estranged from him," Caleb said. "Not for one day."
The rain kept falling above us. I barely heard it.
"I think Marcus was put in your path on purpose," Caleb said.
I felt sick. We'd met at a fundraiser. He'd spilled champagne near my dress, apologized, found me later, sent flowers, waited three full weeks before asking me to dinner. He never seemed interested in Calloway Holdings. Never pushed.
Which suddenly felt less like romance and more like strategy.
"What does his father want?"
"Calloway Holdings."
My family's company. Founded by our grandfather. Logistics, river terminals, warehousing, commercial land — private, valuable, and exactly the kind of asset worth quietly dismantling instead of publicly fighting for.
When our parents died, Caleb and I had both inherited significant voting interests through family trusts. Because everyone believed Caleb was permanently disabled, I'd slowly absorbed more and more of the operational authority.
Marcus had married the person holding the keys.
Me.
I stared out at the river. "What happens now?"
Caleb stood. "We disappear."
"I have done enough disappearing for one family tonight."
"Only until morning."
"No."
"Renee—"
"Marcus thinks I'm dead."
"Yes."
"Isabelle thinks I'm dead."
"Yes."
"And they planned something for after I died."
May you like
Understanding passed over his face. "You want them to move."
"I want them to believe they won."
