Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Pantry"He doesn't trust you, Andrew," Elizabeth said quietly, pacing slowly toward the living room while holding Alex against her chest. "And can you blame him? For nine weeks, this penthouse has been a tomb. You hired a rotation of twenty different nannies, and you ran background checks on every single one of them like they were enemy combatants. You turned his home into a maximum-security prison."
"I was protecting him!" I snapped, rising to my feet and following her out of the kitchen. "Do you have any idea how many enemies I have? Do you know what happens to the children of men in my position?"
"Yes," Elizabeth stopped dead in her tracks near the floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the glittering New York skyline. She turned her head slowly to look at me. "They grow up terrified, mute, and broken. Just like Emma warned you they would."
I froze. "What did you say?"
"Emma tried to leave you, Andrew."
The statement hit me with the force of a freight train. The room seemed to spin on its axis.
"You're lying," I breathed, shaking my head violently. "Emma loved me. We were building an empire together. We had a life!"
"You had a gilded cage," Elizabeth corrected, her voice dripping with venom and sorrow. "She came to Julian and me six months before the crash. She told us you were becoming a monster—that the syndicate was consuming your soul, and that you were starting to look at Alex not as a son, but as a future soldier. She wanted out. She was packing her bags. She was going to take Alex and disappear into witness protection with our help."
The memories rushed back, violently distorted by this new lens. The sudden tension in our marriage. Emma’s frequent trips out to Brooklyn to visit "friends." The argument we had the night before she died—an argument about preschools, or so I had thought at the time.
"No," I growled, taking a step toward her. "If Emma wanted to leave, she would have told me to my face."
"And risk you locking her in this penthouse forever? You think you own everything, Andrew. You thought you owned Emma, you thought you owned Julian, and you thought you could control your son's mind." Elizabeth shifted Alex slightly, who had drifted into an exhausted sleep against her shoulder. "Julian didn't die in that plane crash, Andrew. But Emma didn't die by accident on that bridge either."
My breath hitched. The air vanished from my lungs.
"What... what are you saying?"
"I'm saying," Elizabeth whispered, stepping closer to the moonlight filtering through the glass, "that your wife discovered your inner circle had a leak. But it wasn't Julian. Julian was taking the fall for your most trusted right-hand man—Marcus Vance... wait, no. Marcus Thorne."
The blood drained completely from my face.
Marcus Thorne. My current second-in-command. The man who had managed my security detail for the past five years. The man who had consoled me at Emma’s funeral.
May you like
"Marcus..." I muttered, the name tasting like poison.
"Marcus rigged Emma’s brakes," Elizabeth said, her eyes locked onto mine with absolute, chilling certainty. "And he's the one who cornered Alex in the hallway the morning your son stopped speaking. Alex saw something he wasn't supposed to see through the half-open study door. He saw Marcus holding the detonator remote that killed his mother."
