2. Blood Money

2. Blood Money

Tania didn’t sleep that night. She sat on Caleb’s study floor until the sun came up, the diary’s three entries burned into her mind, and somewhere in the gray hours before dawn, she made a decision.

She was going to find out the truth. All of it. Whatever her mother had or hadn’t done, whatever Caleb’s family was hiding, she wasn’t going to spend her last months living inside someone else’s secret.

But first, she needed to survive long enough to find it.

She went back to Dr. Jeff the next morning and started the treatment plan he’d laid out weeks ago, the one she’d been too consumed by Caleb and her uncle to properly begin. Three days of intensive infusions, her arm bruised from the IV lines, her body too exhausted most nights to do anything but sleep.

When she finally switched her phone back on, it lit up with notifications. Six missed calls from Caleb. Four texts, each one colder than the last.

Where are you. Answer your phone. This isn’t a game, Tania. If you’re trying to disappear like your mother did, don’t bother. I’ll find you.

She almost laughed. He noticed her absence more than he’d noticed her presence in months.

Tania found him at his office that afternoon, still hooked up to a portable IV bag she’d insisted on taking with her. Caleb looked up from his desk, and for half a second, something like relief crossed his face before it hardened again.

“Where have you been?”

“I need the divorce money,” she said, ignoring the question. “Today. My uncle can’t wait any longer.”

Caleb’s eyes dropped to the IV line taped to the back of her hand, and something dark passed over his expression. “What is that?”

“It doesn’t matter. The money, Caleb.”

He stared at her for a long moment, jaw working like he was chewing on something he didn’t want to say. Then, in a fit of anger that seemed aimed more at himself than at her, he yanked open his desk drawer and threw a signed check onto the surface between them.

“Take it. Take it and get out of my life.”

They drove to the city hall in separate cars, Caleb’s trailing hers the whole way, and for one dizzying moment, Tania let herself believe this might actually end today. Clean. Simple. A signature and it would be over.

Then his phone rang.

She watched through her rearview mirror as his face changed, as he swerved into a U-turn without so much as a glance in her direction, tires screeching against the pavement. He was gone before she’d even parked.

Sophia. It was always Sophia.

Tania sat alone outside the city hall with a check in her hand and no husband to sign beside her, feeling something twist painfully in her chest. Relief and grief, tangled together so tightly she couldn’t separate one from the other.

She used the money exactly as she’d promised herself she would. Her uncle’s hospital bill, paid in full. Her own medication, refilled for another month. And the rest, every dollar of it, went to a private investigator with a reputation for finding things other people wanted to stay buried.

“I need you to find out everything about a woman named Carla,” she told him over the phone, pacing the hallway outside her uncle’s room. “She disappeared almost twenty years ago. She’s my mother.”

“And what exactly am I looking for, Mrs. Wilson?”

Tania closed her eyes. “The truth. Whatever it is.”

The investigator promised to start immediately, though he warned her that a trail gone cold for two decades wouldn’t be easy to pick back up. Tania hung up and sat down heavily in the hallway chair, exhaustion pulling at every part of her.

Her mother was long gone. But gone didn’t mean unreachable. Not yet.

 

• • •

 

Tania spent the next two days packing up everything she owned from the estate, folding two years of a marriage into cardboard boxes that fit surprisingly easily into the trunk of her car.

She found a small apartment near the hospital, close enough that she could check on her uncle without a forty-minute drive standing between her and an emergency. It wasn’t much. A bed, a kitchenette, a window that looked out onto a parking lot instead of a garden. But it was hers, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, that meant something.

She had just finished unpacking the last box when someone pounded on her door hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Tania Marie Wilson, open this door right now!”

Tania laughed for the first time in weeks and pulled the door open to find Cecile standing there, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed up into her hair despite the late hour.

“You didn’t think you were going to move apartments without telling your best friend, did you?” Cecile pulled her into a fierce hug before she could answer. “I had to hear it from Gabe, of all people. Gabe.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

Cecile pulled back, studying her face with the sharp, assessing look she’d perfected since her modeling days. “So? Did you finally do it? Please tell me you finally got rid of that man.”

Tania hesitated only a second. “Yeah. It’s done.”

It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. The papers still sat unsigned in a drawer somewhere, but the marriage had felt over for months. And she wasn’t ready to explain the rest, the diagnosis, the six months, the diary entry that had rewritten everything she thought she knew about her own family. Not tonight.

Cecile whooped loud enough that a neighbor thumped on the shared wall. “That calls for a celebration. Get dressed. We’re going out.”

The bar Cecile picked was loud and bright, and for a few hours, Tania let herself forget. She let herself laugh at Cecile’s stories from her latest photo shoot, let herself sip a drink she knew she shouldn’t be having, let herself feel, briefly, like a twenty-four-year-old woman instead of a dying one.

Then Gabe walked in.

“You didn’t,” Tania said, rounding on Cecile.

“I absolutely did.” Cecile grinned, entirely unrepentant. “The man has been mopey for weeks. He deserves to celebrate too.”

Gabe slid into the booth across from her, his smile wide and genuine. “I heard congratulations were in order.”

“Something like that.”

“To freedom,” he said, raising his glass.

Tania clinked her glass against his, trying not to notice how easy it felt to sit across from someone who looked at her like she wasn’t already halfway gone.

What none of them noticed, in the warm noise of the bar, was Nicole standing near the entrance, phone already lifted, snapping a photo of the three of them laughing together.

By the time Tania got home that night, her phone was silent. But across town, Caleb’s was not.

Nicole’s text arrived just after midnight. Thought you should see this. She looked awfully happy for someone who’s supposedly still married.

Caleb stared at the photo for a long time, at Tania’s bright laugh, at the easy way Gabe leaned toward her like he had every right to.

“Find out where she’s living,” he told his assistant the next morning, his voice flat and cold in a way that made even Marcus hesitate. “I want to know everywhere she goes.”

 

• • •

 

The report landed on Caleb’s desk two days later, and every line of it made his blood run colder.

She was living in a cramped one-bedroom near the hospital, barely bigger than his office. She hadn’t spent a single night there since moving in. Instead, the private investigator noted, she’d slept at Gabe’s apartment on more than one occasion.

And buried near the bottom of the report, a detail that made Caleb go still: she had also been seen slipping into the family estate late at night, more than once, when he’d been away.

His study. She’d been in his study.

Caleb didn’t wait for an explanation. He drove straight to Gabe’s address, jaw clenched so tight it ached.

Inside, Gabe had just returned from dropping Cecile home, finding Tania awake on his couch, weaker than she’d let on all night. He was in the middle of coaxing her to eat something when the door burst open.

Caleb crossed the room in three strides and grabbed Gabe by the collar, hauling him half off his feet.

“Caleb, stop!” Tania scrambled up from the couch, her legs unsteady beneath her. “He’s just helping me, let him go!”

“Helping you.” Caleb’s voice was low, dangerous. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

Gabe didn’t fight back, not really, though his hands came up instinctively when Caleb’s grip tightened. “She’s sick, man. She needed somewhere to go.”

“She has somewhere to go. She has a home. My home.”

The confrontation ended almost as quickly as it started, two of Caleb’s security men appearing in the doorway to pull Gabe back while Caleb dragged Tania out by the wrist, ignoring her protests, ignoring the way she nearly stumbled trying to keep up with his pace.

He didn’t speak again until they were in the car, and when he finally did, his voice had lost all its earlier heat, replaced by something colder and far more permanent.

“Tania, we are no longer getting a divorce.” He didn’t look at her, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the road. “Because I’m going to torture you forever.”

 

• • •

 

Tania fought him the entire ride back to the estate, pulling against his grip, demanding he let her go, but Caleb’s hold never loosened. By the time they reached the front door, she was too exhausted to do anything but let him pull her inside.

He didn’t hit her. He never did. But the cold, punishing silence, the way he gripped her arms hard enough to bruise as he shoved her into a chair and paced in front of her, firing off questions she was too tired to answer, wore her down just the same.

By the time his phone rang, Tania could barely hold her head up.

Sophia’s name flashed on the screen. Caleb answered it, listened for a moment, and without a single glance back at Tania, walked out and left her alone in the house, shaking and spent.

She dragged herself upstairs to wash the day off her skin, and it was there, toweling off in front of the mirror, that her phone buzzed with a text from the private investigator.

Confirmed cause of death: cardiomyopathy, advanced stage. Same condition as yours. There were also unconfirmed rumors circulating at the time regarding an affair involving Caleb’s father. More details to follow.

Tania sat down hard on the edge of the bathtub.

Caleb’s mother had died of the same disease that was killing her right now. That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? And an affair? Was that where her mother came in?

She didn’t want to believe it. Her mother had been a gentle woman, the kind who hummed while she cooked and cried during sad movies, at least in the few fragmented memories Tania still carried of her. Her father had loved her mother so completely that he’d never so much as looked at another woman in the years after she vanished, mourning her right up until the day his own heart gave out.

A woman like that didn’t seduce another woman’s husband. Tania refused to believe it. Her mother hadn’t left. She’d been taken.

She needed new medication. Caleb had trashed the apartment near the hospital in one of his rages, scattering pill bottles and shattering the little bit of independence she’d managed to carve out for herself, so she made the trip back to the hospital pharmacy alone, exhaustion dragging at every step.

It was there that the news found her.

“Mrs. Wilson.” The nurse’s face was grave. “Your uncle has slipped into a coma. We’re doing everything we can, but I need to be honest with you. His condition is critical.”

Tania sat by his bedside long after visiting hours ended, holding the hand of the one person who had never once made her feel unwanted, and thought about how strange it was that even now, even after everything, some small, stubborn part of her still loved Caleb completely.

She loved him, and she pitied him, this man who had lost his mother the same way she was about to lose everything, who had spent a decade carrying a grief so heavy it had curdled into cruelty.

She would find the truth. Not just to save herself, but to save whatever was left of him too.

Her phone buzzed. Cecile.

“Tania, it’s Gabe. Caleb’s men roughed him up pretty bad. He’s at Saint Mary’s right now.”

Tania closed her eyes, guilt washing over her in a hot, sick wave. She couldn’t go to him, not with Caleb’s spies watching her every move. So she did the only thing she could.

She sent him a message instead, her thumbs trembling over the screen. I’m so sorry. Please get better. Please.

 

• • •

 

When Tania finally made it back to the estate late that night, she found the front door standing wide open.

Caleb was already inside, tearing into the young security guard on duty with a fury that made the man visibly shrink. “You let her walk out of here alone? Do you have any idea what could have happened to her? You’re done. Get out.”

Tania barely had time to process the guard’s firing before Caleb rounded on her, snatching the phone straight out of her hand.

“Caleb, give that back—”

He was already scrolling, his thumb stopping on the message she’d sent Gabe hours earlier. His expression darkened with every line he read.

“I’m so sorry,” he read aloud, voice dripping with contempt. “Please get better. Please. Touching. Really touching, Tania.”

“He’s in the hospital because of you.”

“Are you having an affair with him?” Caleb demanded, ignoring her completely.

Something in Tania finally snapped. “You don’t have the right to accuse me of having an affair. You had a child with your mistress out of wedlock, Caleb. You don’t get to stand there and judge me.”

“At least I’m not a murderer.” His voice was low, cutting. “Unlike your mother.”

“My mother and father loved each other,” Tania shot back, her voice shaking now, whether from anger or exhaustion she couldn’t tell. “She would never have seduced your father. Never.”

Caleb crossed the room so fast she didn’t have time to step back. His hand closed around her throat, not hard enough to truly hurt her, but hard enough that fear shot through her entire body, hard enough that the room seemed to tilt sideways.

“Don’t you dare mention her again,” he snarled, his face inches from hers, something wild and broken in his eyes. “Do you understand me? Never.”

He released her as suddenly as he’d grabbed her, and Tania stumbled back against the wall, coughing, dragging in air that felt like fire in her damaged chest.

Caleb looked at her for a moment, something flickering across his face that might have been regret, before it hardened over again. He must have decided she was overreacting, dramatizing something that hadn’t really hurt her, because he turned without another word and disappeared into the bathroom, the shower running a moment later like nothing had happened at all.

Tania slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her throat throbbing, a faint metallic taste of blood in her mouth that made her stomach turn. She couldn’t bring herself to eat the dinner sitting cold on the table.

When Caleb emerged, he looked at the untouched plate, then at her, still curled against the wall.

“Then starve,” he said flatly.

He grabbed his jacket and walked out into the night, leaving her alone with nothing but the ache in her throat and the growing certainty that whatever love had once existed between them was buried somewhere neither of them could reach anymore.