Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 80

Serena’s POV

The cruelest wars are fought by people who shake your hand before they draw the knife.

The name hangs in the kitchen like smoke. Bennett & Associates. My father says it once, and the silence that follows presses against my eardrums with the weight of deep water.

Catherine's shoulders fold inward, her fingers going white around the edge of her chair. The woman who has spent three years rebuilding herself from the wreckage of Simon Thornton shrinks back into the shape of someone who knows what it feels like to be hunted.

Caleb's hand tightens around mine beneath the table. Not reassurance — reflex, the grip of a man whose body understands the threat before his mind catches up.

"How do we know it's connected to Richard?" Caleb's voice is too controlled, the kind of calm he manufactures when the alternative is breaking furniture. "Bennett & Associates is a big firm. Could be coincidence."

"It's not." My father slides a folded document across the table. "My attorneys traced the referral. Simon didn't walk into that firm cold. Someone with enough pull got a man with no income fast-tracked to a senior associate named Daniel Whitmore."

"And Whitmore reports to Richard," I say.

My father nods. "Not directly on paper. But Whitmore has handled sensitive cases for the Bennett family before. The kind of work that doesn't show up on the firm's official roster."

‘Richard stood in front of us and promised he wouldn't protect his son from consequences. Looked my father in the eye and said he'd let justice take its course.’

And then he found another way to destroy us.

"This is retaliation." I pull my hand from Caleb's, not because I don't need the contact but because I need my hands free to think.

I press my palms flat against the table, grounding myself on the cold surface. "If our family is buried in a bigamy scandal and a custody war, the focus shifts away from Lucas. Every headline becomes about the Thornton marriage instead of what his son did to me and to Rachel and to the other women."

"That's exactly the play." My father's jaw tightens. "Simon gives them the ammunition, and the Bennetts provide the weapon."

Catherine presses her knuckles against her mouth, and I can see the way her whole body trembles with the effort of not falling apart again.

"This isn't your fault, Catherine." I hear myself say it before I've decided to, and the surprise on her face tells me she expected anything from me except kindness. "Simon made his choices long before any of us were sitting at this table."

Caleb looks at me. The gratitude in his eyes is fierce and private and entirely for me.

"I need to call Mia," I say, pushing back from the table. "She's been tracking the Bennett fallout since the party. If anyone can map the connections between Simon's representation and Richard's involvement, it's her."

***

Mia arrives in forty minutes, laptop bag slung across her chest and dark hair still damp from a shower she clearly cut short.

She takes one look at my face and doesn't bother with pleasantries.

"How bad?" she asks, dropping onto the couch and pulling her laptop open.

"Richard Bennett funneled his father-in-law's ex-husband into legal representation through a back channel at his firm,"

"Can you build a timeline?" I lean forward. "Everything — the engagement, Richard's promise to cooperate, Simon's reappearance, and now this. If we can show the sequence of events, the pattern speaks for itself."

"Already on it." Mia cracks her knuckles. "By morning, I'll have a full map. Every connection, every date, every suspicious payment if there is one."

Caleb stands, crosses the room, and stops behind the couch. His hand finds my shoulder, thumb tracing a slow line along my neck.

The touch is deliberate, anchoring — the physical language of a man who needs me to know he's still here without interrupting the work that needs to happen.

"We didn't survive everything we've been through just to let them win by proxy," he says, and his voice carries the low, steady certainty that has become my favorite sound in the world.

I tilt my head back to look up at him. "No. We didn't."

My phone buzzes on the coffee table.

The screen lights up with a number I don't recognize — no name, no contact photo, just ten digits and a message that rearranges every assumption I've been operating under.

"Your stepbrother isn't the only secret your family has been keeping. Ask your father about the life insurance policy."

The room goes on without me. Mia keeps typing. Caleb's thumb keeps its steady rhythm on my neck. My father and Catherine murmur to each other in the kitchen.

And I sit perfectly still, staring at the screen, feeling the ground shift beneath me for the second time tonight.