I didn't sleep the night Karen called. I sat in my office long after Markus had gone home, turning the threat over from every angle I could think of, the way I turned over every problem that actually mattered to me.
She wanted me to delay the wedding. On the surface, it was almost a reasonable request — small, even, compared to what she could have asked for instead. But underneath it sat something far more dangerous than a delayed date: the precedent that she could threaten me whenever she wanted something, and I'd fold, over and over, for as long as the threat held weight.
I thought about complying. For one long, exhausted hour around three in the morning, I genuinely considered it — push the wedding back, buy myself time to figure out a better solution, keep the peace a little longer. It would have been easier. It also would have meant living the rest of my life with Karen holding a leash she could yank whenever she felt forgotten again.
I called Markus before I'd fully decided what I was going to do, mostly because I needed to hear someone else's voice before I trusted my own judgment on something this large.
"She's threatening to expose the cover-up," I told him. "The theft. Everything. Unless I delay the wedding."
Markus was quiet for a long moment. "I warned you, sir."
"I know," I said. "You don't have to say it again."
"What are you going to do."
"Tell Alex," I said, surprising myself with how easily the decision came, once I'd actually said it out loud. "Tonight, if I have to wake him up to do it. I'm done managing this alone. It's how we got here in the first place."
"And if telling him destroys what's left of his relationship with her," Markus asked, "the way you were trying to avoid the first time around?"
"Then that's the cost of her own choices," I said, "not something I get to keep protecting her from by lying to the one person who deserves the truth more than anyone."
I drove to Alex's place — our place, I corrected myself, the way I'd been slowly learning to think of it — a little after midnight, and he opened the door already half-asleep and immediately alert the second he saw my face.
"What happened," he said.
I told him everything. The phone call, the threat, the discrepancy in the casino's books that Karen had apparently spent weeks quietly investigating until she found exactly the leverage she needed. I watched him go pale, then furious, then something quieter and more devastated than either of those, somewhere in the telling.
"She's blackmailing you," he said finally. "The same way you blackmailed me."
The comparison landed like a slap, accurate enough that I didn't try to argue it away. "Yes," I said. "Except I had a reason that at least made sense on paper. I don't know what reason she thinks she has, beyond wanting something she's decided she's owed."
"What are you going to do," Alex asked, echoing Markus's question from earlier, his voice tight with something that sounded dangerously close to breaking.
"I'm not delaying the wedding," I said. "And I'm not letting her control either of us through fear. But I need you to decide how you want to handle your sister, because I think whatever happens next is going to hurt her badly, and I don't want to make that call without you."
Alex sat down hard on the edge of the bed, head in his hands, and I watched him absorb the full weight of what his sister had become capable of — not the woman who'd apologized through tears weeks earlier, but someone willing to threaten the people she claimed to love in order to get what she wanted.
"We need to confront her," he said finally. "Together. Tonight, if we have to. Before this gets any worse than it already is."
I agreed, and called Markus to bring the car around, neither of us knowing yet just how much worse it was already about to get.