Page 132 of Pretend To Be Mine

“This is a hit piece,” Briggs said flatly. He’d stopped pacing, his lawyer brain already working through implications. “They’re trying to destroy us. Take down the whole family while we’re vulnerable.”

“Can we stop it?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Stop Vogue?” Briggs shook his head. “No. We can threaten legal action, but unless they print actual lies, we don’t have grounds. Opinion pieces and exposés based on factual information are protected.”

“So we’re just supposed to let them destroy us?” Dash’s voice was rising. “Let them tear apart everything Dad built because of one PR misstep?”

“It wasn’t a misstep,” I said quietly. “It was my decision. My plan. This is on me.”

“Adrian,” Sebastian started.

“No.” I cut him off. “I’m the one who brought Elizabeth into this. I’m the one who insisted we could control the narrative.” I looked around at my brothers, at my mother. “This disaster is mine.”

“We all agreed to it,” Briggs said. “We all signed off on the plan. You don’t get to take sole responsibility for a family decision.”

“It was working until someone leaked the truth,” Dash said. “That’s not on you—that’s on whoever talked to Clara.”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is.” Mom’s voice cut through our argument. “What matters is how we respond. Simone said the piece runs next week. We have maybe forty-eight hours before advance copies start circulating. We need a strategy.”

Briggs was already on his phone again, typing rapidly. “I’m getting our PR team on an emergency call. Legal too. We need to prepare statements, anticipate what they might reveal, get ahead of whatever damage is coming. I’ll sue everyone. It might get dismissed, but it will stop things.”

“And Elizabeth?” Sebastian asked, looking at me. “What about her? She’s going to be in this piece too.”

The thought made me feel physically ill. Elizabeth, who’d already been destroyed once tonight, was about to be dragged through the mud again. Publicly. Permanently. Her name would be forever associated with scandal and deception.

“I need to talk to her,” I said. “Warn her about what’s coming. I have to help her prepare.”

“She left,” Dash reminded me gently. “She was pretty clear she didn’t want to talk to any of us right now.”

“I don’t care. She needs to know.” I called her but it went straight to voicemail. I tried again. Same result. “She turned off her phone.”

“Give her space,” Mom said. “Tonight has been traumatic for her. Let her process. Give her some time. Talk to her when emotions aren’t quite so raw.”

I wanted to argue, wanted to jump in a car and go to the villa and make sure Elizabeth was okay. But Mom was right. Elizabeth had made it clear she needed distance. Pushing now would only make things worse.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked Briggs. “How do we survive this?”

He looked up from his phone, and I saw something I rarely saw on my brother’s face: uncertainty.

“Honestly? I don’t know yet.” He set his phone down. “We’re looking at a multi-front disaster. The Clara leak has already damaged our credibility. The Vogue piece will amplify that damage exponentially. Every skeleton in every closet is about to be dragged into daylight.”

“There has to be something we can do,” Dash said. “Some way to fight back.”

“We can try to control the narrative,” Briggs said slowly, thinking out loud. “Get ahead of the story. If we know what they’re going to print, we can address it on our terms before Vogue does.”

“How do we do that?” I asked.

“We come clean.” He looked at each of us. “About everything. Every mistake, every bad decision, every moment we’re not proud of. We own it publicly before Vogue can use it against us.”

“That’s career suicide,” Sebastian protested. “We’d be handing them ammunition.”

“They already have the ammunition,” Briggs countered. “At least this way, we control how it’s framed. We show remorse, growth, lessons learned. We make it a story about redemption instead of scandal.”

“And Elizabeth?” I asked. “How does that help her?”

“It doesn’t.” Briggs met my eyes. “Nothing we do is going to undo the damage to her reputation. That ship has sailed. The best we can do is make sure she’s not dragged down further when the Vogue piece drops.”

“We need to think about Blackwell Couture too,” Mom said quietly. “The company. Our employees. The people who depend on us for their livelihoods. This scandal affects more than just our family.”