The Billionaire They Buried

Chapter 14: The Face In The Reflection

I stared at the photograph until the shapes stopped making sense and started again, sharper the second time. My grandfather sat at his desk, half-turned toward the window, the same warm study I sat in a hundred times growing up, sunlight cutting across the same shelves I could still picture with my eyes closed. The timestamp printed in the corner placed it minutes — only minutes — before he collapsed in that ballroom in front of everyone who'd ever claimed to love him.

And behind him, caught in the glass like an accident of light rather than a choice, stood Benjamin Brooks.

I must have made a sound, because Daniel was beside me before I even realized . "What is it?"

I couldn't answer right away. I turned the photograph toward him instead, tapping the reflection with a finger that wasn't quite steady. "That's Benjamin Brooks."

Daniel leaned in and studied it for a long moment. "Your lawyer's lawyer. The one who gave you the letter and the key."

"He never told me he was in the house that night. Not near the study. Not anywhere close to Grandfather before—" I stopped myself before I said the rest of it, but the sentence finished itself in my head anyway. *Before he died.*

"Maybe he was there for a reason that has nothing to do with any of this," Daniel said carefully, still holding the photograph like it might change shape if he looked at it wrong. "Maybe it doesn't mean what you think it means."

"He had thirty years with my grandfather. Thirty years of trust, and he never once mentioned being anywhere near that study that night. If he had been in there, why wouldn't he say so? Why let me believe I was the last person who saw Grandfather alive?" The question sat in the cell with real weight to it, heavier than anything either of us said next. I thought back through every conversation I had with Benjamin since my arrest — the letter, the key, the warning to trust no one except the man carrying it, delivered to me like a gift when it might have been something else entirely. Every single piece of information I had about the conspiracy against me had come from him, filtered through him, arriving in my hands only because he personally chose to bring it to me and no one else.

What if the reason Charles trusted him enough to carry that letter was the exact same reason he needed to be trusted completely — because it put him in the one position where nobody would ever think to check his story?

"You don't know anything yet," Daniel said, reading my face better than I wanted him to right now. "A photograph puts a man in a room. It doesn't tell you what he did once he was standing in it."

"It tells me he lied. Or left something out big enough that it might as well be a lie." I set the photograph down on the bunk, careful not to crease it, like it somehow mattered whether I damaged the one piece of physical evidence I actually had. "He's the only person outside this cell who knows I have the key. The only person who knows about the safe deposit box, or what my grandfather might have hidden inside it."

Daniel went still, and I watched the same thought cross his face that had already crossed mine. "If he's not clean—"

"Then whatever's in that box, he's had every reason in the world, for weeks now, to make sure I never actually reach it."

Neither of us said anything for a while after that. The block noise carried on outside the bars, someone laughing too loud a few cells down, a door somewhere slamming shut with the same careless rhythm as any other night, while I turned the same thought over and over, looking for a version of it that didn't end with Benjamin Brooks having played me from the very night my grandfather died.

"Who sent you the photo in the first place?" Daniel finally asked. "No return address, no prison stamp, same as the note before it. Whoever's sending you these things clearly isn't on the side that wants you dead. Otherwise why hand you something like this at all ?"

I hadn't gotten that far yet in my own head. He was right, though — the note had told me to stop digging. The photograph was doing the exact opposite, practically shoving me forward, straight toward the one person I was supposed to trust above everyone else left alive. "Someone wants me to see this specific thing."

"Someone wants you to doubt him."

"Or someone wants me to stop trusting the one person who could actually still help me get out of here." I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling every bruise from the maintenance room fresh all over again under my palm. "I honestly don't know which possibility is worse."

"Maybe neither one is the real answer," Daniel said. "Maybe it's just true, plain and simple, and whoever sent it isn't trying to manipulate you at all. Sometimes the ugly thing and the honest thing turn out to be exactly the same thing."

That possibility sat heavier in my chest than either of the others had.

I thought about calling Benjamin right then, demanding an explanation over a monitored prison line, and decided against it before the thought had even fully formed. If he was compromised, a call would only tell him what I knew and give him time to prepare an answer. If he wasn't, I would be accusing the one real ally I had left of something I couldn't yet prove — and I would lose him either way. Trust, once you interrogate it out loud, rarely survives the conversation intact.

Better to wait. Better to watch quietly, the way he had apparently been watching me for longer than I've ever known.

I slid the photograph beneath my mattress, into the same spot where the note still sat folded from three nights before, and lay back against the thin pillow with my eyes open in the dark.

Isabella is currently out there building her entire case on the assumption that Benjamin's information could be trusted completely, without question, the same way I had trusted it from the very first night.

If I was wrong about him, I wasn't just risking my own life anymore.

I was about to hand her a case built on a lie — and I wouldn't even be the one who had told it to her.