Chapter 10 - The Night She Saw the Real Louis Butler
Louis didn’t sleep.
Corrine found him at three in the morning sitting alone beside the penthouse windows.
No jacket.
No tie.
No intimidating expression.
Just a man holding an empty envelope box.
She sat beside him.
“Tell me about her.”
“My mother?”
“Yes.”
Louis was quiet.
“She hated my father’s world.”
“Did she know everything?”
“More than he thought.”
“Did she want you out?”
“Yes.”
Corrine smiled faintly.
“Then she got what she wanted.”
“Not completely.”
“You’re not your father.”
“You don’t know everything I’ve done.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“But I know what you didn’t do.”
Louis frowned.
“You didn’t make Dawson disappear.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“How do you know I considered it?”
“Because I’ve met you.”
That almost earned a smile.
“You could have decided for me,” Corrine continued. “You didn’t.”
“I investigated you without permission.”
“Him.”
“What?”
“You investigated him.”
Louis remembered their argument.
Corrine did too.
“I’m still angry.”
“Good.”
“But you stopped when it mattered.”
She leaned back.
“My whole relationship with Dawson was choices slowly disappearing.”
Louis listened.
“He didn’t hit me at first. He criticized things. Clothes. Friends. Work. Then he borrowed money. Then he needed money. Then somehow refusing him became cruelty.”
Her voice weakened.
“The first time he shoved me, he cried afterward.”
Louis’s hand tightened.
“I believed him.”
“That doesn’t make you foolish.”
“It felt foolish.”
“It makes him practiced.”
Corrine looked at him.
“How do you know?”
Louis stared toward the city.
“Because my father was practiced too.”
That was the first time he told her.
Not everything.
Enough.
A childhood in a house where affection and fear lived side by side.
A father who could buy anything except trust.
A mother who taught Louis that power meant nothing if it required someone else’s helplessness.
When he finished, Corrine’s hand found his again.
Neither spoke.
Then Louis’s phone rang.
Security had traced Victor.
But that wasn’t the surprising part.
They had also recovered a photograph of the stolen letter.
Louis opened it.
His mother’s handwriting filled the page.
At the bottom was one sentence.
If Victor ever comes for my son, look beneath the place where he buried his first betrayal.
Corrine frowned.
“What does that mean?”
Louis knew.
His face changed.
“There’s a cemetery outside the city.”
“Whose grave?”
May you like
Louis stood.
“My father’s.”
