Free Web NovelChapter 369: Missing Piece
The back room held the kind of hush that settles in when no one wants to be the first to speak.
Arianne’s hands were wrapped around her glass of lemonade, the condensation dripping down her fingers and onto the scarred wood of the table. She hadn’t moved since Nate spoke. The words were landing in the room like stones dropped into calm water, their ripples spreading outward. Beside her, Gilbert was frozen with his whiskey halfway to his mouth, his dark eyes fixed on Nate’s face. Julian had stopped swirling his bourbon, the glass resting forgotten on the table, the amber liquid catching the harsh overhead light.
"Who?" Arianne’s voice was steady. Controlled. The voice she used in boardrooms when someone presented her with information she hadn’t anticipated and she was already mapping her response.
Nate met her eyes. There was something in his expression — reluctance, maybe, or the grim satisfaction of a man who had spent months hunting and had finally found his prey. "Rafael Summers. Stuart Summers’ illegitimate son. A child he had before he married."
The name landed in the room and everything changed.
Arianne’s expression didn’t change. It never did, not when she was working through something, but something behind her eyes moved. Recognition. Reassessment. The rapid, unspoken work of a mind taking in new information and fitting it into a framework she hadn’t examined in years. Her fingers eased around the glass.
"Rafael," she said. "I know him."
Julian set his glass down with a soft clink. "You know him?"
"He’s my cousin. Stuart’s firstborn, though not by his wife." Arianne leaned back in her seat, her hand moving to rest on the curve of her belly. "Our grandfather acknowledged him as a Summers when he was young. It was unusual, the old man having never acknowledged most of the illegitimate children. He considered them stains on the family name, reminders of his sons’ indiscretions. Rafael was different. He was intelligent. Promising. The kind of child who made the family look good even if his parentage was complicated."
She paused, her gaze turning inward as she moved through memories she hadn’t touched in years. "When I was a child, there were discussions. Hushed ones, held behind closed doors where the servants couldn’t hear. My father considered taking Rafael in, raising him alongside me, grooming him as a potential heir. Rafael had the mind for it. The ambition. The same kind of sharp, analytical intelligence that Gabriel valued above almost everything else."
"What changed?" Gilbert asked. His whiskey was untouched, his full attention fixed on Arianne.
"I did." Her voice was flat, uninflected. "My father saw my potential. He understood I was more capable than anyone had expected, more than Rafael, more than any of the sons his brothers had produced. The comparisons started then. Rafael and Arianne. The legitimate heiress and the acknowledged bastard. He was two years older than me, and technically, he was the first grandchild. The first male. By all the old rules of inheritance and succession, he should have been the one Gabriel chose to groom for leadership."
"But he chose you."
"Yes. He chose me. And Rafael was left with Stuart." She paused. "Stuart and Rafael never had a good relationship. From what I remember, Rafael looked more to my father than to his own father. He admired my father. Wanted to be like him. Stuart was never the father Rafael wanted, and Stuart knew it. When my father chose me instead of Rafael, it must have felt like a second rejection. First by his father, then by the uncle he admired."
Nate leaned forward, his forearms resting on the scarred wood of the table. His expression was intent, focused. "What’s his position? Within the Summers Corporation?"
"He’s been working there for years. He never made waves. Never challenged me directly. He stayed under Stuart’s shadow, building his influence piece by piece. I haven’t thought about him in a long time. There were always more urgent problems to deal with." She looked at Nate. "You said he owns the restaurant chain."
"Yes. The parent company traces back to him through several layers of holding companies and offshore accounts. It took months to untangle. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to hide the connection, with shell companies registered in different jurisdictions, nominee directors, the kind of setup that requires professional help and significant resources. If I hadn’t been specifically looking for the link, I would never have found it."
"Does he have any direct connection to Dominic? Or to the shell companies tied to Blackwood?"
Nate shook his head, the gesture reluctant.
"No direct link that I’ve found yet. I’m not done. There’s something else you need to know." He paused, choosing his words with the care of someone delivering information that mattered. "Rafael’s power and influence within Summers Corporation is much deeper than anyone on the outside understands. He’s spent years building alliances. Securing loyalty from key executives. Positioning himself in every critical department. If he wanted to, he could remove his own father from his seat and take the company as his own. Tomorrow. No warning. Stuart wouldn’t be able to stop him."
"That’s a lot of power for someone who never made waves," Julian said.
"Exactly," Arianne said. "He’s been waiting. Building. Watching. The boy I knew was patient. He understood that the best victories were the ones no one saw coming." She was silent, her thumb moving in slow circles over her belly. "That makes him dangerous. Not out of loyalty to Stuart or to anyone else. He’s been playing a long game. And I don’t know what his end goal is."
Julian rubbed the back of his neck, his brow furrowed. freewёbnoνel.com
"So what do we do? Do you want to confront him? Find out what he knows? If he owns the restaurants, he must know something about the Blackwood connection. He might even know who Howard Brennan is now."
"No." Arianne’s answer was immediate and firm. "I don’t want anyone to know we’re investigating. If Rafael is involved — if he’s working with Howard Brennan, or if he has his own separate agenda. The last thing we should do is tip our hand. The moment he knows we’re looking at him, he’ll disappear. He’ll bury everything. And we’ll lose whatever advantage we have."
"So we just wait?"
"We stay silent. We watch. We gather more information." She looked at Nate. "Keep digging. The connection to Dominic. The shell companies. Anything that ties Rafael to the larger scheme. I want to know everything before I sit down across from him."
"I’ll keep looking. It’s slow work. Every time I find something, it opens up three more questions."
"You’re bound to run into him eventually," Gilbert said. "The Summers family isn’t going to stay out of your life forever. Especially not with the baby coming. The news will reach them eventually, if it hasn’t already. The legitimate heiress, producing the next generation. The family will want to stake a claim."
"I know. I’ll meet Rafael when the time comes. And when I do, I need to know more than he does. I need to understand his position before he understands mine."
Gilbert set his whiskey down, his expression thoughtful and troubled. He’d been holding back for most of the conversation, working through the information in his own way.
"I don’t think Rafael is part of the scheme. Not directly. If he was working with Howard Brennan, there would be a clearer link. Money trails. Communication. Something we could trace through the shell companies. The fact that Nate can’t find a direct connection suggests it doesn’t exist." freewebnoveℓ.com
"Or that it’s been hidden even better than the rest," Julian said.
"Possible. My read is that Rafael is a third player. Someone with his own agenda. His own reasons for watching. Someone who might benefit from the chaos without getting his hands dirty."
"Someone else who wants to see how this plays out," Arianne said. "Someone who’s been waiting, the same as we have. Watching the pieces move. Positioning himself for whatever comes next."
"Exactly."
Julian let out a frustrated breath and leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking under him. "This is getting harder to understand. Every time we find something new, it doesn’t answer questions. It creates more of them. We’re trying to solve a puzzle, but half the pieces are missing, and the ones we have don’t fit together the way they should."
"That’s how investigations work," Nate said. "You follow threads. Most of them lead nowhere. The ones that lead somewhere take months or years to untangle. And even when you find something, it’s usually the first layer of something bigger."
"I know. I’m just saying it’s frustrating."
"It’s supposed to be frustrating. If it were easy, someone would have solved it years ago."
Arianne said nothing, her hand resting on the curve of her belly. The baby moved — a small flutter, barely perceptible, like a fish turning in deep water. She turned Rafael over in her mind. The boy she’d known as a child, serious and watchful, always observing. The young man who had been compared to her at every family gathering, who had watched Gabriel choose her instead of him. The man he had become — patient, strategic, accumulating power within the company that should have been hers.
She hadn’t thought about him in years. She’d been too busy surviving.
And all that time, Rafael had been in the background. Building. Waiting. Watching.
Now he owned a chain of restaurants positioned near every Blackwood shell. It wasn’t a coincidence. She didn’t believe in coincidences. She never had.
"We stay silent," she said, her voice steady and certain. "We watch. We wait. When the time comes to meet him, I’ll be ready."
The drinks had gone warm on the table, the ice in Julian’s bourbon long since melted, the condensation on Arianne’s lemonade glass a small puddle on the wood. Outside, the autumn night pressed against the walls of Nate’s bar, dark and cold and full of unanswered questions.
The investigation had gotten larger. And somewhere out there, a cousin she hadn’t seen in years was waiting, watching, holding pieces of a puzzle she was only beginning to understand.
