Chapter 3 - The Name Damon Never Knew
Damon knew Sloane as Sloane Mercer.
That was how she introduced herself the first night they met at a charity event Victor’s foundation hosted at the Grand Harlow Hotel. She was poised, brilliant, and dryly funny, and she had treated Damon like a man rather than the son of a powerful one. She worked in brand strategy, she said. Independent contracts. Event consulting. Select clients.
She never mentioned a sister.
Never mentioned the name Hart.
Never once gave Damon a reason to question that the life she described was real.
Now, standing in Victor’s penthouse with water still dripping from his sleeves, Damon felt memory begin to rearrange itself.
Small omissions.
Deflections.
Questions Sloane had asked about the family’s older businesses, older venues, older scandals.
He had once thought it was curiosity about the world she might marry into.
Now he wasn’t sure what any of it had been.
“Who is Lena Hart?” Damon asked.
Victor walked to the windows and stood with his back half-turned, looking out over the city as if the answer might be written in the rain across the glass.
Tristan answered first.
“She was Sloane’s older sister.”
“And?”
“She died six years ago.”
“That still tells me nothing.”
Tristan glanced toward Victor, then back.
“She died after leaving one of your father’s clubs.”
Damon stared.
Victor finally spoke.
“A traffic fatality.”
The controlled phrasing made Damon’s skin crawl.
“Whose traffic fatality?” Damon asked.
Victor did not answer quickly enough.
Tristan did it for him.
“One of Victor’s convoy vehicles hit her.”
Damon’s head snapped toward his father.
Victor turned at last, expression iron-hard.
“It was investigated.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Victor said, “No one was charged.”
Damon took one step forward.
“And Sloane thinks I covered it up?”
“She thinks more than that,” Tristan said.
Damon looked at him.
Tristan’s split lip curved bitterly.
“She thinks you were there.”
For a second the room dissolved into pure disbelief.
“I was in Chicago the week of—”
He stopped.
The date. He didn’t even know the date.
He hated that.
Victor, noticing, said, “You were traveling frequently that year.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
Damon let out a sharp breath and looked at Tristan again.
“How do you know all this?”
“Because Sloane told me.”
“You expect me to believe the woman sleeping with you just sat there and confessed her revenge plan?”
Tristan’s jaw flexed.
“No. I expected to use her first.”
Victor glanced over.
That admission shifted the room.
Damon’s laugh came out ugly and cold.
“At least that part sounds like you.”
Tristan didn’t flinch.
“I thought she wanted access to company records. I thought she was after leverage. Money. Something simple.”
“And then?”
“She talked in her sleep once.”
Damon actually recoiled in disgust.
Tristan kept going.
“She said Lena’s name. Said she finally had the man who ruined her family close enough to break.”
Damon held his stare.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I watched first.”
“Of course you did.”
“Yeah.” Tristan swallowed. “I did.”
Victor cut in before Damon could step toward him again.
“Sloane accessed older internal files two weeks ago.”
Damon turned.
“What files?”
“Transport logs. Security dispatch records. Closed incident reports.”
“And you let her?”
Victor said nothing.
That was answer enough again.
“You knew,” Damon said quietly. “You’ve known this whole time.”
“I knew someone was looking into old records.”
“You knew it was her.”
Victor’s silence sharpened.
Damon’s voice rose. “And you let me keep sleeping beside her.”
Victor’s expression did not change, but something colder entered it.
“I let you choose how much of your life you intended to examine for yourself.”
Tristan gave a short incredulous laugh.
“There he is.”
Damon didn’t look away from Victor.
“This is about more than an affair and a gun under my seat.”
“Yes.”
“What’s under my name?”
The question landed.
Victor’s gaze, just for a second, shifted away.
Damon saw it.
That one break in control told him more than any speech could have.
Something from six years ago—something involving Sloane’s sister, Victor’s vehicles, and those old records—had been placed under Damon’s name.
Before he could force the next answer out, Victor’s private phone vibrated.
One of the bodyguards brought it.
Victor listened for less than thirty seconds, then ended the call.
“The police searched your sedan,” he said. “They found the gun, cash, and a burner phone.”
Damon went still.
“What cash?”
“Twenty thousand in bundled hundreds.”
“For what?”
Victor looked straight at him.
“The phone contained one text thread,” he said. “A meeting arrangement with someone listed only as ‘L.H.’”
Tristan muttered, “Jesus.”
Victor continued.
“The conversation implied payment for silence.”
Damon felt the room tilt.
Sloane had not tried merely to embarrass him, or scare him, or even arrest him on a weapons charge.
She had built something older around him.
Something already waiting for a prosecutor to believe it.
And she had used initials that belonged to her dead sister.
At last Damon understood the shape of the trap.
May you like
Sloane had not come into his life to ruin a romance.
She had come into it to build a case.
