“What the fuck do you want?” he snarled.
“If you delete every copy of the video Alice gave you, right now, in front of me . . . no one has to know what caused the AdrenaJex recall.”
Even though I knew it was coming, it crushed me anyway to hear him make this offer. A true deal with the devil.
If we turned what we had over to the authorities, it’d be months before there’d be any fallout, and Vance couldn’t wait months. The video of the initiation was Lambert’s poison pill. If he didn’t get a seat, he’d take the whole fucking company down.
I despised the offer because it felt like everyone was losing. I’d given away the only thing I could use as revenge in order to save what was important to the man I loved. Barlowe would go on, profiting off their schemes, and Lambert was going to get away with it.
My hands clenched so tightly, my muscles ached. In fact, everything ached from holding on to ten years of rage and knowing now I’d never get satisfaction. I had nothing to show for it.
“And the gold Rolex you have,” I blurted. “The one with the initials MJS engraved on the back.”
Both men turned their attention to me. Lambert’s expression was shock, and Vance’s was dismay, but I pressed on. I wasn’t walking away with nothing.
“That’s a specific request.” Lambert’s eyes narrowed as he studied me. “What makes you think I have something like that?”
Because I saw it in your safe.
That was the moment I realized what a huge mistake I’d made.
The information Vance had offered to Lambert to trade could have come from a half dozen different sources. A disgruntled employee or a hacked email account, for example. But my father’s watch? It had likely been locked away, hidden for the last ten years. The only people who knew it was in his possession were the ones who’d seen the inside of his safe.
Which meant I’d just confessed, throwing a grenade into Vance’s carefully laid plans.
For once, I didn’t have a good pivot strategy. I couldn’t see a way out of the hole I’d dug, and my gaze flew to Vance, hoping he had a way to save us. But he struggled the same as I did, and I could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to think.
When it was clear I wasn’t going to answer, Lambert put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward, his gaze locked on me. “If I had such a thing, why would you want it?”
I dry-swallowed. There was no going back now, so I went all in. “It was my father’s.”
He had the nerve to let a ‘that can’t be right’ expression cross his face, but then a lightbulb must have gone on. He tilted his head, and his voice was curious. “Are you . . . Em Slattery?”
I flinched. My father had been the only one to shorten my name to Em, and I couldn’t tolerate hearing it come out of Lambert’s mouth. Bitterness flowed through my veins. “I was.”
Because Em Slattery no longer existed. Emery Mendenhall had risen in her place.
“It wasn’t David’s watch.” Lambert sighed, as if reluctant to reveal it. There was so much gravity in his eyes, I couldn’t escape from him. “It was our father’s.”
TWENTY
VANCE
Wayne’s statement landed like bomb, and it was so deafening, we sat in the brutal silence of its aftermath. Had he just said Emery’s father was his brother?
Holy fuck. That would mean Wayne Lambert . . . was Emery’s uncle.
She was motionless for so long, I wondered if she was broken, but then it burst from her in the same tone I’d expect her to shout, ‘how dare you.’ “What are you talking about?”
He laced his hands together and rested them on the desktop, taking his sweet fucking time to explain. “After my mother died, my father remarried and had two more children. David came first, and I don’t just mean that literally. Your dad was everything our father wished I could be, and let’s just say the only thing your grandmother wanted for me was that I didn’t exist.”
Emery stared at him with dubious eyes, but she didn’t tell him to stop talking. There was just enough pain in Wayne’s voice, it was hard to ignore.
“By the time I was seventeen,” he said, “I’d had enough. I wanted more, and no one was going to help me as Michael Slattery, Jr. so I left. I went to Boston, bought a new life as Wayne, and started over.”
He sat back and looked around the room, clearly impressed with all he’d accomplished. He thought of himself as a self-made man, but was he? He’d found himself an heiress and married into the Barlowe fortune.
“I met Serena one night on campus when I returned her lost wallet, and that was that. We were married a year later.”