The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 26

Chapter 26 A Way Out

She thought of his cold hand in hers in the garden. The way he’d talked about the painting. The quiet respect in his texts. Was it all part of the narrative? A more sophisticated performance than Xan’s?

She couldn’t afford to wonder. She had to act.

That evening, she told her father she was going for a drive to clear her head. Instead, she went to the Vex Industries campus. She didn’t call ahead. She used the credentials Drakonius had given her, and the night security let her pass.

She found him not in the medical suite, but in a small, private office overlooking the garden. He was at his desk, lit by a single brass lamp, frowning at a stack of papers. He looked up when she entered, and genuine surprise flashed across his face.

“Elera.” He stood, a little unsteady. “Is everything alright?”

“Your sister called me,” she said bluntly, closing the door behind her. She didn’t sit.

All expression drained from his face, leaving it a pale, tired mask. “Lyra.”

“She knows who I am. She says you’re building a narrative. That you’ll use me up and discard me.” She forced herself to hold his gaze, to watch for the lie. “I need to know. Is this,” she gestured between them, “just a longer, more complicated con? Am I just a more sophisticated tool than the ones in your lab?”

He didn’t look away. He didn’t get angry. He just looked… profoundly weary. He sank back into his chair.

“My sister,” he began, his voice rough, “is an expert on my failures. She catalogues them. This… alliance… is the latest. In her eyes, it proves my selfishness, my willingness to drag a stranger into my ruin.” He looked down at his hands, at the faint tremor. “She is not entirely wrong. I am selfish. I want to live. And I saw in you a chance. That is the truth.”

It was not a denial rather it was a confession.

“But,” he continued, looking up, his gray eyes burning with an intensity that pinned her to the spot, “you are not a tool. A tool has no will. You walked into my penthouse with your eyes open. You negotiated terms. You are holding my life in your hands, not the other way around. If anyone is being used here, it is me, by my own disease and my desperation.” He let out a short, harsh breath. “Lyra wants you to see a puppet master. She does not understand that the man behind the curtain is dying. There is no grand narrative. Only a… a partnership of mutual need. And perhaps, if we are very lucky, a little dignity.”

The raw honesty of it disarmed her completely. He wasn’t offering pretty lies. He was offering the ugly, complicated truth. It was more than anyone else had ever given her.

A helpless, slightly hysterical laugh bubbled up in her throat. She turned to face him. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

An exit. Not just from Xan, but from the life that had suffocated her for years. She looked at him, this pale, dying man offering her a backdoor out of hell.

“Thank you,” she said, and the words felt inadequate for the enormity of what he was giving her.

She drove home in a daze. The doubt Lyra had sown was still there, it was like a whisper in the back of her mind. But it was overshadowed by the memory of his exhausted honesty, and the startling realization that she believed him.

She was not a tool. She was a partner. And in two days, on the most public stage of her life, she would have to break the heart of one man to fulfill a promise to another.

And then she would disappear, leaving Elyrian Nethys behind forever, and stepping into a new, uncertain life as the wife of a man who was as much a mystery as the disease she was trying to cure.