Chapter 66
Chapter 66:
She walked between them. Looked at Callum — at the stubble, the bloodshot eyes, the suit, the desperation — with an expression that held pain and pity and something harder than either.
“I trust Edmund.” Her voice was steady. “If you want to prove he was involved, find evidence. Real evidence. Not accusations p>
Callum stared at her. The fury was still in his body — in the tension of his arms, in the set of his jaw — but the fight was draining out of him the way water drains from a cracked vessel: steadily, visibly, leaving less with each second. He was looking at Lara in a nightgown in the hallway of another man’s house, and the image was accomplishing what no argument, no punch, no strategy had accomplished: it was making the situation real.
She lived here. With Edmund. This was her home.
The Blackwell investigation arrived within the hour — delivered by Nigel-equivalent staff with the efficient thoroughness of a family whose legal apparatus operated at the speed of necessity. The report was clear: Declan’s accident had been caused by brake failure. Mechanical.
Documented.
Consistent with the stress patterns of a high-performance vehicle driven at extreme speeds on roads not designed for extreme speeds. No external tampering. No sabotage. No connection to Edmund or the Blackwell organization.
The brakes had failed because Declan had driven too fast, too desperately, in a car that was meant for racetracks and had been subjected to city streets at racetrack velocity. The engineering was simple, the physics inevitable. The car had failed because it had been asked to do something it wasn’t designed to do — which was, if you thought about it, a metaphor for everything.
Edmund’s actual plan — the one he’d prepared, the one that had been executing while Callum and Declan sat in a garden watching holograms — was revealed in the same briefing. His men had been positioned to intercept Callum and Declan after the decoy ceremony and return them to Halcombe. Not violently. Not permanently. Just…
Efficiently, the way Edmund did everything. Sedated, transported, delivered to their respective families with the professional courtesy of a man who understood that his wife’s childhood friends were not enemies to be destroyed but obstacles to be managed.
The confrontation with the Hargrove and Thorne families had already begun. Not personally — Edmund didn’t wage personal wars — but commercially. The Blackwell Group, in partnership with the Ashworth family, had opened a subsidiary in Halcombe.
A direct competitor to Hargrove Industries. The message was not subtle: if Callum wanted to fight, the fight would be on Edmund’s terms, in Edmund’s language, on a battlefield where Edmund had the advantage.
Vivienne had been calling Callum for two days.
Declan had been transferred back to Halcombe for treatment. The world that Callum had left behind — the company, the family, the life — was demanding his return, and each unanswered call was a crack in the foundation of the empire he’d spent a decade building.
Callum stood in the hallway of the Blackwell estate and looked at Lara and understood, with the terrible, final clarity of a man who has been fighting and has lost, that there was nothing left to fight for. Not because Lara wasn’t worth fighting for — she was worth everything, she had always been worth everything — but because the fight itself had been the problem.
Every punch, every scheme, every midnight flight and intercepted message and infiltrated ceremony had been a version of the same mistake: the belief that persistence could substitute for deserving.
He left. Walked to his car. Started the engine.
And drove back toward a city that needed him — not because he’d chosen it, but because the city he wanted had closed its gates.