Page 51 of Hostile

Wyatt told me. Wyatt, especially. We are aligned, Megan. We have always been aligned. Whatever you think happened ten years ago—we are on the same side.

I looked at her for a long moment.

Blair Aldridge at thirty was exactly as I would have predicted—more polished, more resourced, the rough edges of her cruelty smoothed by years of practice into something that barely registered as cruelty at all. She was good at this. She’d always been good at this.

What she had miscalculated, in the Harvard party kitchen and apparently still, was that I had been watching her methods for twenty-six years and could read their architecture in my sleep.

When Wyatt told me.

Was it true? Had Wyatt told her? Were they still operating as a unit—the aligned Aldridge twins, managing threats to the family enterprise as they always had, with Blair handling the social interference while Wyatt stayed clean?

Or was she saying it because she wanted me to believe it, because the most effective way to derail a hostile acquisition was to make the person running it doubt her own conclusions?

I didn’t know.

That was the part I couldn’t file neatly, the part that sat in my chest alongside the forty-thousand-dollar payment, the files Charlie had sent, the coffee cup rotated a quarter turn, and the quiet voice in a conference room saying you saw what it looked like, not what it was.

“It’s a beautiful event,” I said pleasantly. “The foundation is lucky to have your support.”

Something shifted in Blair’s expression—just for a moment, the arrangement slipped slightly, revealing something beneath it that looked almost like frustration before it was smoothed back into place.

She’d expected a reaction. I hadn’t given her one.

“Of course.” She touched my arm briefly, a practiced social gesture between two women with a cordial history and no agenda. “Let’s have coffee sometime. I’d love to catch up properly.”

“I’ll have Dana reach out,” I said, which meant exactly what it always meant in New York when someone said it to someone they had no intention of calling.

She moved away with the easy, unhurried grace of a woman who had either gotten what she came for or was very good at looking as if she had.

I turned back toward the room, held my water glass in both hands, and breathed.

When Wyatt told me.

I didn’t know if it was true.

I didn’t know if it was a lie.

I didn’t know which answer was worse.

I called Charlie from the cab on the way back.

“Blair was at the luncheon,” I said.

“I know. I saw the host committee when the invitation arrived, and I was going to flag it.”

“It was intentional. She wanted to look me in the eye.” I watched the city stream past the cab window, the early-afternoon light doing nothing in particular, just moving. “She said Wyatt told her about my position.”

I hesitate before asking. “Did he?”

“I don’t know. It could be true—they’re twins, they’ve always been close, and he’s known about the acquisition for weeks. It could also be a social maneuver meant to make me think they’re aligned and to destabilize my read on him.”

“Which do you think it is?”

I was quiet for a moment.

When Wyatt told me, it was said with the ease of a woman stating a fact. No performance in it, no visible effort. Either the truth or a lie, polished so smooth it had lost all the marks of its making. I’d seen Blair do both, and I knew what each looked like. The problem was that this time I couldn’t tell the difference.

“I think,” I said carefully, “that I need the full picture before I make any assumptions.”