Chapter 5 WHAT VICTORIA LEFT BEHIND

"Victoria was here last night?"

Amelia's voice came out thin, disbelieving. She turned to Damian, hunting his face for confirmation, for denial, for anything.

"She came by after you left the office," Damian said slowly, like he was only now grasping the shape of what he was admitting. "Said she wanted to talk. I told her there was nothing left to discuss."

"And you didn't think that was worth mentioning? The woman who threatened your family less than a day after you introduced me as your fiancée showed up at your house the same night, and I'm finding out because your uncle is in a hospital bed?"

"I didn't think it mattered—"

"Everything matters now, Damian." Her hands shook again, but this time something harder was driving it. "You promised me five minutes ago. No secrets."

Alexander was already moving, cardigan forgotten, phone back at his ear as he barked instructions about which hospital, which floor, who was cleared to talk to press. The golden retriever paced anxious circles at his feet, reading the shift in the room the way animals always did.

"Grandfather, what hospital?" Damian asked.

"Henry Ford. West wing." Alexander's warmth had drained out entirely, replaced by something clipped and commanding — the voice, Amelia realized, of a man who'd steered a company through worse than this. "Security found him twenty minutes ago. Still breathing when they called it in. Barely."

"I need to go."

"You need to think," Alexander snapped, harder than Amelia had heard from him yet. "If Richard dies, this becomes a criminal investigation. Once it's a criminal investigation, every person who saw him yesterday becomes a suspect. That includes you. That includes Victoria. And unless I'm very much mistaken, it includes whoever poured his coffee."

The room went quiet except for the refrigerator humming down the hall and the dog's nails clicking against hardwood.

"You think Victoria did this," Amelia said.

"I think," Alexander said carefully, "that my son has spent two years trying to strip Damian out of this company, and last night the woman helping him showed up at this house uninvited, left angry, and four minutes later Richard was dying in his office. I don't believe in coincidences at my age. I've watched too many turn out to be plans."

Damian's face drained of color. "If she did this to remove Richard from the equation, that means she stopped protecting him. That means she's playing for herself."

"Or," Alexander said quietly, "it means someone else wanted Richard gone before Thursday, and Victoria's about to learn she was never running this the way she thought she was."

Amelia gripped the back of a chair to steady herself. Two days ago her biggest problem had been a foreclosure notice and a bank that wouldn't stop calling. Now she stood in a mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores, married to a man she'd known for twenty-four hours, listening to his grandfather calmly weigh whether someone in this family had just tried to kill someone else in it.

"I need to see him," Damian said, already reaching for his keys.

"Damian." Alexander's voice stopped him at the door. "Think hard before you walk into that hospital. If this is what I think it is, someone's watching how you react. Don't hand them anything."

"He's my uncle."

"He's also the man who's spent two years trying to take everything my father — your grandfather — built," Alexander said, real grief cutting under the steel in his voice for the first time. "I don't wish him dead. But I won't pretend I trust him, and neither should you. Not even in a hospital bed."

Damian's jaw worked, loyalty and suspicion fighting it out openly on his face. Finally he turned to Amelia.

"Come with me."

"What?"

"To the hospital. If someone's watching, they need to see a united front — a husband and wife standing together, not a man running in alone half out of his mind." His eyes held hers, something desperate underneath the ask. "Please."

Amelia thought of the contract folded in her bag — separate bedrooms, no public displays beyond what the role required, a year of careful pretending. Nothing in it had prepared her to stand beside a hospital bed faking grief for a man who might have just tried to destroy her husband's entire life.

"Okay," she said. "Let's go."

The drive to Henry Ford Hospital took eleven minutes that felt like eleven hours. Damian didn't speak. His knuckles stayed white on the wheel the whole way, and Amelia tracked the city sliding past the window — brick storefronts, church spires, the hollowed-out shell of the old Packard Plant off Jefferson, its broken windows catching the flat gray light like the whole city was holding its breath along with her.

When they reached the west wing, the hallway outside Richard's room was already crowded — two security guards, a nurse arguing quietly into a phone, and standing near the window with her arms crossed and her mascara suspiciously untouched, Victoria.

She looked up when they walked in, and for a fraction of a second something crossed her face that didn't match the scene at all.

Relief.

"Damian." Victoria crossed the hallway fast, hand reaching for his arm before Amelia cut between them. "Thank God you're here. I got the call an hour ago. I've been out of my mind."

"You were at the house last night," Damian said, flat, watching her closely.

"I was trying to warn you," Victoria said, her voice cracking in a way that sounded almost genuine. "I told you Richard was planning something for Thursday, and you wouldn't listen because you think everything I say is manipulation."

"Isn't it?"

Her eyes filled. "Not this time. I swear to you, not this time."

A doctor stepped out of Richard's room, stripping off a pair of gloves, his expression grim in the way doctors trained themselves not to show. "Family of Richard Blackwood?"

"That's us," Damian said.

"He's stable for now, but I won't lie to you — this was close. Whatever he ingested wasn't an accident. Toxicology's confirming it, but I've seen enough poisonings to know one on sight." The doctor's gaze lingered half a second too long on Victoria. "We also found something in his jacket the police are going to want. A hotel key card. Room 412, MGM Grand Detroit, dated last night."

Victoria's face went white.

"That's not — I don't know anything about a hotel room," she said, too fast, her voice climbing half an octave. "Damian, you have to believe me, I was at your house all night, I never—"

"You told us you left before midnight," Amelia said. It was the first thing she'd said since the hallway, and every head snapped toward her. "Just now. You said you warned him and then you left."

Victoria's mouth opened. Closed.

"So which is it?" Amelia pressed, voice steady despite everything happening under her ribs. "Were you at Damian's house all night, or somewhere else entirely — somewhere with a key card in Richard's pocket that puts you both in the same hotel four hours before he nearly died?"

Victoria's lips parted around an answer that never came.

Because at that exact moment, two uniformed officers rounded the corner of the hallway, and the taller one looked directly past Damian, past Amelia, straight at Victoria.

"Victoria Sinclair? We need you to come with us. Room 412 wasn't booked under Richard Blackwood's name."

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