The Husband They Bought To Die

Chapter Two: The Corpse At The Engagement

At 12:03 a.m., Gideon walked down the grand staircase of Whitlock House, very much alive.

He took the steps slowly. The banquet hall opened below him, all crystal and candlelight, with a long table set for forty and a wall of white roses behind the head seats. The string quartet had stopped playing. Forty faces turned toward the stairs at once, and he watched each of them understand what they were seeing.

Grandmother Margaret Whitlock sat at the head of the table in black silk and pearls. Her champagne glass slipped from her fingers and shattered across the marble. "No," she whispered, and then her voice climbed into a shriek. "He's alive! It's past midnight and he's still alive! The curse will pass to the groom!"

Near the window, Roland Pike had gone the color of old paper. Gideon held his gaze for one long second and let him wonder.

Mrs. Vale rose from her seat beside her son. She was a thin, elegant woman with diamonds at her throat, and she looked at Gideon the way people look at something stuck to the bottom of a shoe. "Margaret, we had an understanding. There will be no wedding while that thing breathes under this roof." She picked up her clutch. "Until this is settled, the Vale money is frozen. Every cent of it."

Margaret's face drained of color. "Eleanor, please. The bank calls in the loan at noon tomorrow. One hundred and twenty million. Without your support, the company…"

She didn't finish, and she didn't have to. Everyone at that table knew what happened to Whitlock Textiles without the Vales. It died, and every person sitting there would lose the life they had built on it.

The family turned on him like a single animal. Aunt Celeste was on her feet first, a sharp-boned woman who had never once said his name. She snatched a leather folder from a side table, as if she had kept it ready all evening, and hurled it at his chest. Papers scattered across the floor at his feet.

"Divorce papers," she snapped. "And a statement of voluntary disappearance. You sign both, you leave Harrowgate tonight, and you never come back. If anyone asks, you abandoned your wife and ran. That's the only kindness you'll ever get from this family."

Preston Vale hadn't moved from his chair. He was handsome in the polished way of men who had never been told no, and he was smiling as he took a pen from his breast pocket and wrote out a check. He tore it free and held it up between two fingers.

"Fifty thousand dollars," he said pleasantly. "That's more than you've earned in your whole worthless life. Take it, and go die somewhere quieter."

A few relatives laughed. Gideon walked to the table, took the check from Preston's fingers, and read it. Then he tore it in half, tore it again, and dropped the pieces into Preston's champagne, where they floated and slowly turned pink.

Preston's smile thinned.

Celeste's son Damien shoved back his chair. He was twenty-six, wore a suit his mother had paid for, and had spent three years treating Gideon like a piece of furniture. "You heard them. Get him out of here." He snapped his fingers at the two Vale bodyguards by the door. "Drag him to the gate and throw him in the street."

The first guard grabbed for Gideon's arm. Gideon turned his wrist, stepped inside the man's reach, and drove his elbow down. There was a wet pop, and the guard dropped to his knees, howling, his shoulder hanging at the wrong angle. The second guard lunged. Gideon caught him by the collar, used his own weight against him, and sent him crashing into the dessert table. Cake, silver, and glass exploded across the floor.

It took two seconds.

Silence swallowed the hall. Someone's fork clattered onto a plate. In three years, not one person in this house had seen the curse husband raise a hand, not when Damien tripped him on the stairs, and not when Celeste tipped his dinner into the trash. Now they stared at him as if a piece of furniture had stood up and spoken.

Then a voice came from the far end of the table, quiet but clear. "That's enough."

Iris stood beside her chair in her silver gown. Her face was pale, and when her eyes met his, he saw the question in them, the same fear he had seen in the closet. He should have been on a train by now. Yet her voice didn't shake. "Until I sign those papers, he is still my husband. And nobody lays a hand on him in my grandfather's house."

"Iris!" Margaret hissed. "Have you lost your mind?"

Gideon bent, gathered the scattered papers, and set them neatly on the table in front of Margaret, every page unsigned.

"I'm not signing anything," he said. "And the Whitlocks won't need the Vales' charity. By noon tomorrow, the loan will be handled, without selling Iris."

For a moment, nobody seemed to understand him. Then the laughter exploded. It rolled down the long table, cruel and relieved, the laughter of people who had just been frightened and needed something to mock. Mrs. Vale arched one thin eyebrow. Even Margaret let out a brittle, disbelieving sound.

Damien laughed loudest of all. "A hundred and twenty million? You?" He spread his arms to the room. "Fine. Everybody hear this. If this corpse saves anything by noon, I'll crawl across the company lobby on my knees in front of the whole staff."

"I'll remember that," Gideon said.

He turned and walked out of the hall. As he passed the head of the table, his gaze fell on Preston's wrist where it rested on the white cloth, and the cufflinks caught the candlelight. Each one was a small silver key set inside a circle.

Gideon kept walking, and nothing in his face changed, but something cold settled in his chest. He knew that crest. He had watched his uncle Lucius hand it out to the few men he trusted most, the private mark of his inner circle. Whatever Preston Vale was, he wasn't just a rich man's son who wanted to marry Iris.

* * *

Minutes later, Preston excused himself from the wreckage of the party and climbed to the second-floor balcony. Below him, in the lamplit courtyard, the curse husband stood near the service gate with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the empty road as calmly as a man taking the night air.

Preston raised his phone and took a photograph. He zoomed in on the face for a long moment, then opened a message to a number he had never saved.

Is this him?

He pressed send. He hadn't even lowered the phone before the reply arrived.

Make sure he doesn't see noon.