Page 62 of Hostile

Forty thousand dollars. Thirty days before the beach house weekend.

Billy Brown had been infatuated with Megan since the first week at Harvard. I’d watched it and dismissed it as harmless because Billy had always been like that—easy charm, persistent attention, the kind of interest that looked like affection but was usually just ego. I’d kept him at a distance from her without making it a confrontation, as you do when you’re nineteen and don’t yet understand that the things you keep at a distance have a way of finding their own routes.

I understood now what route Billy had found.

Blair had found him first.

She’d identified the infatuation, assessed the impulse, and given it structure. Forty thousand dollars for access to a beach house she knew I’d take Megan to, plus whatever equipment was needed to produce something that could be distributed the morning after.

I pressed my fingers flat against the desk.

Blair had been standing six feet away in that hallway when Billy held up his phone. She’d been there when I said that’s not me—meaning I didn’t send that text, meaning I didn’t distribute that video, meaning the four words that were true yet insufficient, which Megan had heard as something else entirely. Blair had known exactly what Megan would hear. She’d built the hallway the same way she’d built everything else—with patience, with precision, with the total confidence of someone who had mapped the outcome before the event.

She’d been nineteen years old when she did it.

That felt different from what I had anticipated. I was nineteen in that hallway. Blair was also nineteen, but she was the one who crafted the plan that put me there. We were the same age, yet our intentions couldn't have been more different. I was cowardly and unsure, trying to handle a situation I didn’t fully grasp. Blair, on the other hand, knew exactly her purpose and executed it regardless.

I tried to find the version of my sister I’d grown up with in this picture—the one who had always been fierce about the family name, whose protectiveness I’d read as love even when it expressed itself in ways I didn’t always agree with—but I couldn’t quite make it fit. What I was looking at wasn’t protectiveness. It wasn’t even ambition. It was the cold, systematic elimination of something she’d decided was a threat to a future she’d already deemed hers.

Megan had been the threat. Not to the company. Not to the family.

To Blair’s version of what the Aldridge name was supposed to look like and who was supposed to carry it.

I closed the folder.

Marcus appeared in the doorway at nine. “You’ve been through all three.”

“Yes.” I looked up. “How long have you known the full extent of this?”

He crossed to the chair across from my desk and sat down, something he rarely did. “I’ve suspected the consulting arrangements were irregular for about two years. I didn’t have the full picture until Nolan began pulling the threads three months ago.” He paused, deliberate and careful. “I want to be clear that I raised concerns with your father about the advisory structure before he handed over the company. He chose not to pursue them.”

I held his gaze. “Why are you telling me that now?”

“Because you’re going to ask eventually, and I’d rather you hear it from me.” He held my gaze. “Your father knew Blair’s arrangements were aggressive. He chose to believe she was an asset and that the fees were the cost of keeping her inside the tent rather than outside it.” He paused. “He was wrong, but he wasn’t deceived the way you were.”

I understood the distinction. My father had known exactly what he was choosing. I’d simply grown up inside the consequences. “The Billy Brown payment,” I said. “Did he know about that?”

“No.” Marcus’s voice was certain. “That was Blair operating entirely outside the family structure, using company-adjacent funds to finance a personal matter.” He paused. “Something that had nothing to do with the business and everything to do with Megan Hale.”

The office was very quiet.

“She paid him to set it up,” I said. “The camera, the distribution, all of it. She gave him the money and the access and let him believe he was acting on his own impulse.”

“That’s my read of it.” Marcus held my gaze. “Wyatt. Whatever you decide to do with this information—how you present it, to whom, and in what order—it needs to be handled carefully. If this comes out the wrong way, in the wrong context, it doesn’t just damage Blair. It damages the company. It damages everything your grandfather built.”

“I know.”

“The acquisition Megan Hale is running⁠—”

“I know, Marcus.”

He was quiet for a moment, studying me in the careful way he had—the study of a man who had spent thirty years reading people across boardroom tables and knew when someone was managing something significant. “She’s going to find all of this herself. If she hasn’t already.”

“I know that too.” I looked at the folders in front of me. “That’s why the timeline matters. I need to put this in front of her before she finds the last piece on her own. Before she draws a conclusion from incomplete information.”

“What do you want her to know?”

The question was simple and enormous. I thought about the rain. About her face when she’d said was it worth it after you got what you wanted and the collapse I’d felt when I’d understood what she’d been carrying. About standing on a wet sidewalk trying to find the words for something that had needed saying for ten years and finding only the beginning of them.