Then she turned to Khloe.
“You came here planning this.”
“Yes.”
“You let my son become attached to you.”
Khloe’s stomach tightened.
That accusation hurt because it touched the one part of the plan that had stopped being simple.
“I came for information,” she said.
“What happened between Silas and me wasn’t part of it.”
Silas looked at her.
There would be another conversation about that.
A painful one.
But not yet.
Beatrice seized on the hesitation.
“You see? She used you.”
Silas’s eyes remained on Khloe.
“Did you?”
She could have softened the answer.
She didn’t.
“At first, yes.”
Pain flashed across his face.
Khloe continued before fear could stop her.
“I needed to know whether the Romano family still had records from my father’s time.
I needed access.
I needed to watch who came here and who spoke to whom.”
“And later?”
Khloe swallowed.
“Later became complicated.”
Silas gave one humorless breath that was almost a laugh.
“That may be the first completely honest thing anyone has said tonight.”
Beatrice looked between them with disgust.
“This is pathetic.”
“No,” Silas said.
“What’s pathetic is that you poured wine on her because you thought humiliation would make her obedient.”
He placed the recorder beside the financial pages.
“And instead you identified the one person in this room you were afraid of.”
Beatrice’s eyes narrowed.
Khloe stepped closer to the table.
“There’s more.”
For the first time, Silas looked surprised.
Khloe turned over the photograph she had placed facedown earlier.
It showed Arthur leaving a Romano-owned office building with Silas’s father several years before both men were gone.
On the back, Arthur had written a date.
The same date as one of the largest suspicious transfers.
Silas studied it.
Khloe explained that her father had apparently met Silas’s father that evening to show him what he had found.
Arthur disappeared three days later.
Afterward, the suspicious transfers stopped for nearly a year.
Then they began again.
Two years later, Silas’s father died violently.
Silas sat down.
For the first time since Khloe had known him, he looked less like the feared head of an empire and more like a son discovering that the story of his family had been written for him by someone he trusted.
“Why didn’t you bring this to me sooner?”
Khloe looked at him.
“Would you have believed a seventeen-year-old girl accusing Beatrice Romano?”
He had no answer.
“Would you have believed a waitress six months ago?”
