Page 1 of Ugly Truths (The Veiled Truths Trilogy #2)

One Month After the Explosion

Silas

T he afternoon summer sun shines through the windows of my office, its heat casting patterns on the carpeted floor. I sit behind my desk, staring at my phone, where Natalie’s text glares back at me. For four days, I’ve left it there, unanswered.

Natalie : Silas, where are you? I just want to see you and make sure you’re still breathing. Leslie won’t even let me into your office. Call me. Please.

I tap my fingers against the desk. What do I even say to her?

She wants to talk about Scarlett. We haven’t told my sister what little we do know about that little snake or the only security footage retrieved from that night at the warehouses; Scarlett surrounded by men with guns, her face almost defiant as she wields a metal rod, smashing open the valve of a hazardous waste truck.

Liquid gushes out, and with almost no hesitation, she lights it on fire.

Natalie doesn’t understand that Scarlett is never coming back–at least, on her own terms. And the woman I thought she was? She doesn’t exist.

She never did.

My phone slips from my hand and clatters onto the desk.

The rage that permanently lives under my skin simmers, waiting for the smallest excuse to explode.

So I force it down, just as I’ve been doing for the past month.

If it’s not the seething hatred I have for her, it’s the mounting frustration with my father and his endless delays.

Every day, there’s some new revelation or crucial piece of information leading up to our executive transition that he’s been “meaning to tell me” or “was going to explain later.” The excuses are never-fucking-ending, and I’m at my limit.

I roll my neck and force myself to focus on my laptop, pulling up the financial forecasts and production schedules for the meeting I have to attend in forty-five minutes.

The numbers blur together at first, my mind still circling back to that damn footage.

Eventually, the metrics and timelines begin to steal my attention, and the endless well of anger starts to ease.

Just enough to take a full breath without feeling like my ribs might crack under the weight of it.

The relief isn’t nearly long enough when a knock at the door cuts through my thoughts.

I’ve been utilizing the privacy feature on the glass wall that separates my office from the rest of the executive floor more often than not recently, the now-frosted glass making it impossible to see who’s on the other side.

Before I can respond, Davey enters.

“What is it?” I ask, my voice unnecessarily sharp.

Davey doesn’t react to the hostility as he crosses the room, laptop tucked under one arm. “We have an update on her ,” he answers.

The emphasis on the last word letting me know exactly who he’s referring to.

I motion for him to sit across from me. He doesn’t. Instead, he walks around to me and places his laptop next to mine before opening it, fingers flying across the keyboard. My hands curl tighter, the violence I’ve been suppressing trying to claw its way to the surface.

“The hair samples from the guest bathroom,” he starts, either oblivious to or ignoring my annoyance. “Our labs extracted enough DNA from the follicles to send to some commercial ancestry testing sites using a fake name. The results came in, and we have matches.”

I don’t say anything. I’m not sure I can .

We’d assumed that Scarlett was an alias since finding her backpack and its contents at the warehouses, which is the reason we brought in experts to search for DNA samples in the guest room.

The specialists had said there was a high probability they wouldn’t be able to use them, but I didn’t give a shit what they thought.

I was willing to turn over every stone, no matter the price.

All I can manage is a nod for Davey to continue.

“Most are distant relatives–third or fourth cousins. But we did find a match for a maternal aunt. Diane Fetton, originally from Arizona.”

A woman’s face appears on the screen from the ancestry website; her eye and facial shape are unmistakably similar to Scarlett’s.

“Diane has one sister, Lydia Fetton,” Davey continues. “She married a man named Darren Cross when she was eighteen. They had a child a few months later. A daughter.”

His fingers tap a few more keys before the next image comes up.

My pulse stutters as I stare at a yearbook photo in front of a standard water-colored dark blue background.

Her yearbook photo. The caramel wavy hair, the light brown eyes.

She looks younger than her years and a little too slender. Innocent.

“Her name is Elena Cross,” he says quietly.

Elena Cross.

The name doesn’t fit–like it belongs to someone else entirely, but it should feel that way. Scarlett was a lie; a carefully constructed facade meant to lure me. And now that I’m staring at the truth, it still does nothing to smother my anger.

Davey clears his throat almost hesitantly. “Grew up in Kingman, Arizona. Poor town. No siblings. Had average grades but high SAT scores. Went to Arizona State University and graduated with a degree in computer science and a 3.8 GPA.”

My eyes narrow. “And?”

“The trail goes cold, except for this.” He clicks on a link before a news article fills the screen .

25-Year-Old Woman Found Murdered in Chandler Apartment in Apparent Robbery Gone Wrong

I skim the article. Drew Bennet was stabbed twenty-six times with one of her kitchen knives while her roommate, Elena Cross, was grocery shopping.

The building didn’t have cameras, and there was no forced entry.

No leads or suspects outside of Elena, who was cleared by surveillance footage showing her at the grocery store at the time of the attack.

Less than one thousand dollars' worth of items were stolen.

There’s a photo of the woman with a big smile and bright green eyes, which are amplified by the camera flash. She’s clearly in a bar, leaning close to a person cropped out of the image. She appears happy and so damn young.

It takes me a moment to process the connection he’s making. “You think she did this?” I ask.

Davey doesn’t answer right away. He’s frowning at the screen, fingers tapping against the laptop’s edge. “It’s possible she planned it, at least. It’d help explain why she went underground.”

I stare at the screen. Twenty-six stab wounds. That’s not a random act of violence. It’s calculated, personal, and not the woman I thought I knew. But then again, what did I actually know about her?

“What else?” I demand, leaning back in my seat.

“Her parents divorced and moved to different states after she graduated from high school. Cill’s trying to figure out if she has any contact with them, but it doesn’t seem likely. We also found a bank account and a safety deposit box connected to her name at a local bank in Arizona.”

Something hot thrums in my chest. “They’ll notify us if there’s any activity?”

Davey nods. “Already in the works.”

“And these details?” I gesture towards his laptop.

“In your personal inbox.”

I tap my trackpad and pull up the email from Davey, skimming through it again while he waits .

“Good,” I finally respond, stopping at the yearbook photo. My stomach churns even looking at her again. “She’ll need money eventually.”

Davey straightens, closing his laptop as he says, “I’ll keep digging.” He only manages to take a few steps toward the door before pausing to look over his shoulder at me. “Silas, are you sure this is what you want?”

I release a long breath.

This isn’t the first time he’s tried to check in on this…

fixation. He’s been concerned about it since I met her.

He was worried that I was moving too fast, especially since I had never acted that way with a woman before.

Davey has always had a good read on people, and I trust his judgment without hesitation almost always, but something in me didn’t want to listen this time.

She was just different, and that was the point, wasn’t it?

Never gave me the time of day, which I wasn’t used to.

Strong-willed, strong physically. Always had a smart-ass remark.

I hadn’t realized how much I liked that in a woman until the first time we spoke and she insulted me almost instantly.

No hesitation or second-guessing. Just cut straight through me like she already decided I wasn’t worth impressing.

It had been a long time since someone looked at me like that, and even longer since I found myself caring, but that was the thing about her.

Scarlett didn’t try to charm me or win me over.

If anything, she was daring me to prove I was worth her time.

And damn it, if that wasn’t the quickest way to get under my skin.

It doesn’t help that she was so goddamn beautiful .

The kind that didn’t just turn heads, it messed with them.

That face, with its sharp cheekbones and full, knowing lips.

Always poised like she was in on some secret the rest of us weren’t clever enough to figure out.

But it was her eyes that hooked me. Light brown and in the right light, they turned gold like whiskey. Or honey.

Since she left, Davey has tried to pull me back from the edge, especially after we combed through local and regional hospitals looking for any woman admitted with injuries consistent with an explosion. Not a single patient fit the description .

Then, there was the official police report that stated an unidentified female body was found during the clean-up. My team was there from start to finish thanks to our law enforcement connections, and there wasn’t any sign of said-body.

And yet, every time I’ve questioned where this supposed body was, not a single person could give me a real answer.

Just a constant loop of half-assed explanations and conflicting stories.

Enough to make it clear that no one actually knows who reported the finding, but they’re all too cowardly to correct it on the off-chance it is true.

Somehow, she managed to get into the police reports and alter the files. She thought she could fake her own death right under my nose and expect me to believe it. She underestimated me, just as I did her. The difference is, there’s nowhere she can run where I won’t eventually find her.

Stupid girl .

Davey thinks we should wait and see if anything surfaces on its own, but that’s not good enough for me. It never will be. Not until I look her in the eyes and demand all the answers she’s denied me.

I hold up my hand to him. “Just get me her location.”

My brother-in-law holds my gaze for another moment before conceding. With a curt nod, he turns back to leave but pauses at the door, his hand on the handle.

“Call Natalie.” His voice is quieter now, but firm. “I know you don’t want to talk about what happened, but don’t shut her out. All she knows is you won’t answer her calls, and it’s killing her.”

The guilt hits instantly, a sharp twist in my gut as the door clicks shut behind him. I drag a hand down my face, cursing.

He’s right. It’s not fair to Nat. I need to grit my teeth and bear it, no matter how much I’d rather gouge my ears than ever talk about that traitorous bitch ever again.

Even as the guilt eventually settles, something else lingers. The gnawing, relentless irritation that a month has passed and we still don’t have a single damn lead on the men at the warehouse that night .

They vanished like smoke. It’s infuriating and the kind of thing that makes me want to rip through my own team and demand to know what the hell they’ve actually been doing.

I handpicked men and women who are trained beyond measure.

They extracted the backpack without the cops ever realizing it was there.

Scrubbed the one clip of surveillance that showed Scar– Elena –and what she did.

But these ghosts? There are still no connections, no trace of where they came from or where they went.

They clearly weren’t working with Elena with how they drew their guns on her, but were they after the same thing?

And if that’s the case, we need to figure out exactly what they wanted before we find out the hard way.

In the silence of my office, my gaze returns to the over-decade-old photo of her on my screen. Elena Cross. Scarlett Page. Two names for the same woman—a woman I don’t know at all.

But none of that matters anymore. Regardless of who she’s pretending to be now, I’ll find her.