Page 119 of Stolen Harmony

“This is what she would have supported, Elias. Real contribution to the community instead of whatever artistic masturbation you call honoring her memory.” His finger traced the outline where my studio currently stood. “But your little monument to dead wives keeps getting in the way of permits and zoning approvals. Rowan is the key to breaking your resolve. Once you're properly motivated—once you understand that you don't deserve to keep what should have been mine—you'll sell.”

“You'd burn your own family for a building?”

Victor's eyes glittered with something cold and pure. “I'd burn the entire town if it meant getting what I want. But this isn't about the building, brother. This is about justice. About making sure you finally pay for taking what was never yours to begin with.”

The casual malice of it stole my breath. This wasn't just greed or ambition—this was something fundamentally broken, a corruption that ran soul-deep. My brother had become something monstrous, and I was just now seeing the full scope of what that meant.

“You'll break him,” I whispered, thinking of Rowan's fragile sobriety, his careful reconstruction of self-worth, the trust he'dslowly begun to extend to me despite every reason to protect himself.

Victor's reply was calm, almost gentle, like a doctor delivering terminal news. “Better me than the town. Better a clean break than death by a thousand cuts. The gossip, the whispers, the gradual erosion of reputation—that's the slow torture, Elias. What I'm offering is mercy.”

“Mercy?” The word came out like a snarl. “You call destroying an innocent man mercy?”

“I call it efficient.” Victor returned to his chair, every movement calculated for maximum impact. “He's not innocent, brother. None of us are. But he's young enough to recover, to rebuild somewhere else. You, on the other hand...” He shrugged elegantly. “Well, at our age, scandal tends to stick.”

I stood abruptly, the chair scraping against the polished floor. My whole body shook with the urge to violence, to smash every piece of expensive furniture in this sterile office, to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he understood what real fear looked like. But that was what he wanted—evidence of instability, proof that I was a man who couldn't be trusted around vulnerable people.

“You disgust me,” I said, the words carrying all the venom I could muster.

“Yet here you are,” Victor murmured, completely unaffected by my rage. “Still playing by rules I stopped acknowledging years ago. Still hoping that love and good intentions will somehow triumph over power and preparation.”

I grabbed the envelope, the documents, the evidence that felt like acid burning through my fingers. The weight of it was crushing—not just the physical papers, but the lives they represented, the futures they could destroy, the love they were designed to poison.

“You have twenty-four hours,” Victor said as I reached the door, his voice carrying the casual authority of a man announcing the weather. “After that, the story takes on a life of its own. I'll be forced to let events unfold naturally, and we both know how these things tend to go in small towns. The rumors, the speculation, the gradual destruction of reputation—it's really quite predictable.”

I paused with my hand on the door handle, every muscle in my body screaming with the need to turn around and fight. But the envelope in my hand reminded me of what was at stake, of who would suffer if I gave in to the violence Victor was so clearly hoping to provoke.

“He trusted you,” I said without turning around.

“Trust is a luxury I can't afford,” Victor replied smoothly. “Neither can you, anymore. The clock is ticking, Elias. Twenty-four hours to make the right choice.”

I walked out with my jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth, the weight of Rowan's future dragging at my shoulders like chains. The municipal building's hallways felt endless, every step echoing with the sound of my own defeat. Harbor's End looked different through the glass walls—streets that suddenly seemed hostile, windows that might all be watching, a town that had become a trap closing around everything I loved.

The drive home passed in a blur of autumn colors that looked like dried blood in the fading light. Victor's words circled in my head like vultures, each threat more devastating than the last. The careful life I'd built, the trust I'd slowly earned, the fragile connection growing between Rowan and me—all of it balanced on a knife's edge, ready to topple at Victor's whim.

Back home, I didn't turn on the lights. I sat in the dark with Max pressed warm against my leg, the envelope heavy on the coffee table like a loaded gunwaiting to go off.

And for the first time in years, I found myself wishing Elaine were alive—not to forgive me for the impossible situation I'd stumbled into, but to tell me what the hell I was supposed to do now that love had become a weapon pointed at the heart of everything I held dear.

Chapter 23

Crescendo

Rowan

The text came at seven in the morning, simple and unexpected:

Elias

Want to get breakfast?

I stared at my phone for a full minute before responding. Elias had never texted me before, never reached out first, never suggested anything that resembled a normal social interaction. The invitation felt like stepping into unknown territory, dangerous and promising in equal measure.

Rowan

Yeah. Where?

Elias