Chapter 18 - The Truth in the Ashes
The room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
The papers trembled in my hands as the puzzle pieces of the last six months—no, the last six *years*—violently slammed into alignment.
The way Gabriel had known my name at the gala. The way his security team had locked down St. Jude Pavilion within minutes of the news breaking. The way he had known my exact financial strain down to the cent.
He hadn't stumbled upon me at the Astor Grand.
He hadn't picked a random, broken girl out of convenience for a corporate inheritance deadline.
*He had been watching me all along.*
"You weren't supposed to find that yet," a low, gravelly voice broke the silence.
I gasped, spinning around.
Gabriel stood in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing a pair of dark slacks, his chest bare, his hair rumpled from sleep. But his eyes were completely alert, filled with a complex, terrifying mixture of vulnerability and steel.
"You knew me," I whispered, clutching the folder against my chest like a shield. "Six years ago. The trauma ward."
Gabriel walked slowly into the sitting room, his footfalls silent on the Aubusson rug. He stopped three feet away, his gaze never leaving mine.
"Six years ago, my uncle Marcus tampered with the brakes on my car," Gabriel said, his voice flat, stripped of all evasion. "My father was murdered two days earlier. I was twenty-six years old, bleeding out in an underfunded public ward under a fake name to stay alive while my loyalists secured the city."
He looked down at the paper in my hands.
"I had three fractured ribs, internal bleeding, and a fever of a hundred and four. I was convinced I was going to die in that bed. And then... you walked in."
A vivid memory flashed behind my eyes—a cold November night, a young man with bandages covering half his face, burning with fever, thrashing against the coarse hospital sheets, whispering broken words into the dark.
"I read you poetry," I whispered, the memory rushing back with stunning clarity. "From an old paperback I had in my coat pocket."
"You held my hand for seventy-two hours, Ava," Gabriel said, stepping closer, his voice cracking with an emotion I had never heard from him before. "You wiped the blood from my forehead. You told me that no matter who had hurt me, I had to survive to make them answer for it."
He reached out, his hand gently covering mine where I held the folder.
"When I woke up, the ward was clear, my security arrived, and you had finished your shift. You were gone. It took my investigators four years to find you again—and by the time they did, you were living with Damian Cross."
My breath hitched. "You knew about Damian?"
"I watched him bleed you dry," Gabriel said, his jaw tightening into iron. "I watched him take your money, your time, your light. I was going to tear his life apart six months ago, but then he dumped you. I waited for you to come up for air. And then Bellmere Events took the contract for the Astor Grand."
"The orchid," I realized, my voice shaking. "You planned the entire thing."
"I placed myself in that ballroom, Ava," Gabriel confessed, stepping into my personal space until his chest was brushing against mine, his gaze searing into my very soul. "I was never going to marry Victoria Langford. I was never going to let the board control me. I went to that gala for one reason, and one reason only."
He reached up, cupping my cheek in his warm, rough palm.
May you like
"I went there to bring you home."
***