The fake Medical Saint had stopped being a person.Whatever had been holding him upright for the past two minutes, the last scraps of performance, the residual muscle memory of a man who had spent years projecting authority in rooms full of desperate people, it left him all at once. His body went first, the knees giving, the shoulders collapsing inward, and then the rest followed in a way that had nothing dignified about it and could not be made to.The smell reached the nearest guests before they understood what had happened.Several people near the front turned their faces away. A woman two tables back pressed her hand over her mouth. The disgust that moved through the room was quiet and total and the fake Medical Saint knelt in the middle of it on the Holden family stage and shook.Vivien looked at him for one moment with an expression that carried nothing at all. Then she looked away, because he was no longer the interesting part of the stage.Ken had watched it happen and felt no

The applause had faded and what replaced it was the particular quiet of a room that has finished one thing and is waiting for the next.Vivien stood at the podium and let the quiet sit.Her eyes moved from the guests, across the faces turned toward the stage, and came to rest on Ken and Peter with the unhurried patience of someone completing an inventory. She looked at them the way you look at a problem you have already solved and are simply confirming the solution.Ken had not gotten up from his knees. The bodyguards had loosened their grip slightly after the applause but neither man had made any real move to rise, the energy for that having gone somewhere else entirely. Peter sat back on his heels with his jacket twisted and his eyes fixed on Vivien with the focused, calculating attention of someone still searching for the angle that gets them out of this room intact."Miss Holden." Peter's voice came out carefully, each word placed with the controlled precision of a man who underst

Chapter 39: Because of YouEdward did not turn around when the screaming started.He sat in the front row with his hand on the table and his eyes forward and listened to the sounds coming from the stage with the expression of a man hearing rain against a window, present, registered, not particularly interesting. The hall around him had gone very quiet in the specific way of two hundred people deciding simultaneously that looking at the stage was something they needed to do but would prefer not to remember doing.He felt no pull toward the stage. No tightening in the chest, no residual tenderness toward the men on it. Ken had stood at a podium in front of everyone who mattered in this city and called him garbage. Peter had smiled his comfortable smile and nodded along. They had done it with the confidence of people who believed there would be no answer.There was always an answer.Vivien glanced at him once from the podium, a brief sideways look, checking.Edward did not move. Did not

Chapter 40: John StantonEliza stared at Harley for a long moment.The shock moved through her in a slow wave, not the sharp kind that arrives with volume but the low, spreading kind that starts somewhere behind the sternum and works outward, touching everything it reaches. She had heard the words correctly. She had understood them. She simply could not locate the version of Harley she had grown up with inside the woman standing in the middle of this ward looking at her like she was a problem that had finally been named."That is not fair," Eliza said. Her voice came out even, controlled, the voice she used when she needed to sound steady regardless of what was happening underneath. "I was deceived the same as everyone else. Peter's contacts vouched for that man. Everything about his credentials appeared legitimate." She looked at the faces around the room, the Norton family members in the doorway, Jenna beside Ken's chair, Mark on the bed. "I did not bring a killer into that hospital

Chapter 41: WaitingHarley did not sit down.She stood in the center of the ward with her arms loose at her sides and looked at the family members around the room with the patient, deliberate expression of someone who had prepared for this conversation long before tonight and was simply waiting for the right moment to have it.The right moment had arrived."One cause," she said, her voice carrying into every corner of the room without being raised. "Everything that happened tonight, Ken's leg, Peter's leg, the Holden family's anger, the banquet, all of it traces back to one cause." She looked around slowly, making sure she had every face. "The Norton family offended a first-tier family. Under Eliza's leadership. As a direct result of Eliza's decisions." She paused. "That is not an interpretation. That is what happened."One of the cousins near the door made a sound of agreement.Jenna, who had been silent since Harley mentioned grandfather, pressed her lips together and said nothing,