MARRY YOUR KILLER
Chapter Four: The Truth Between Them
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He took her to the rooftop.
The house had a terrace on the top floor, a garden of potted plants and string lights and furniture that looked comfortable enough to sleep on. The city spread out below them, Manila glowing in the darkness, and above them the sky was clear enough to see stars.
She hadn't been on a rooftop in years. Not like this. Not sitting on something soft, looking at something beautiful, pretending for one moment that the world wasn't waiting for her to fail.
Keifer handed her a glass of wine. She took it. She didn't drink.
"You don't trust me enough to drink my wine," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I trust you enough to hold it."
He smiled. He sat across from her, leaving space between them, giving her room. She noticed that. She noticed everything.
"How long have you known?" she asked.
"About your uncle? Two years. About you?" He paused. "Longer."
She waited.
"I knew there was more to you than the magazines showed. The way you ran your business. The way your competitors seemed to... encounter bad luck. The way your father handed you control when you were nineteen and no one questioned it." He swirled his wine. "People don't question you, Jay. That's not normal for a twenty-one-year-old woman in our world. People question because they think they can break you. But no one questions you. That means they're afraid of you."
She said nothing.
"I started asking questions about a year ago. Quietly. Carefully. I found out about the shipments that go missing when they're supposed to go to your competitors. I found out about the men who work for you who used to work for other people, before those other people had accidents. I found out about the name they call you, in the places where people know."
He looked at her. His eyes were steady.
"Hipag."
She didn't move. Her hand was steady on her wine glass. Her face was calm. Inside, she was deciding whether to kill him or not.
"You've known for a year," she said. "And you didn't use it."
"I told you. I wanted a partner, not an enemy."
"You could have destroyed me. My family. Everything we built."
"I could have." He set his glass down. "But then I would have been alone. And I've been alone long enough to know I don't want to stay that way."
---
She looked at the sky instead, at the stars that were barely visible through the city lights. No one saw her. That was the point. She had spent years learning to be invisible, to move through the world as a mask. But Keifer Watson had looked, and he had seen, and he had kept looking.
"You said you've been investigating for two years," she said. "What else did you find?"
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook. Worn. Filled with handwriting. He held it out to her.
She took it.
She opened it to a random page. Names. Dates. Transactions. Connections. A web of information that stretched back decades, connecting her uncle to people she knew, people she trusted, people who had died in the war between their families.
Page after page. Year after year. The shape of a conspiracy that had been building since before she was born.
"He's been collecting," she said slowly. "Power. Money. Allies. He's been waiting for my father to die."
"Your father is the only one who can stop him. The only one who knows the full truth. As long as your father lives, your uncle can't move openly. So he's been preparing. And now—"
"Now my father is dying." Her voice was flat. "And my uncle has arranged a marriage that will weaken both families at the exact moment he's ready to strike."
Keifer nodded. "He's counting on us to be enemies. He's counting on our families to keep fighting. He's counting on us to be so focused on each other that we don't see him coming."
She closed the notebook. Her hands were steady.
"He underestimated you," she said.
"He underestimated both of us."
She looked at him. The string lights made his face soft, golden, almost gentle. She could see the exhaustion in his eyes, the weight he had been carrying alone for two years.
"Why me?" she asked. "You could have gone to your mother. Your father. You could have handled this yourself."
"I tried," he said quietly. "My mother is too close to it. My father is too sick. My brothers are too young. I've been handling it myself for two years, and I've been losing."
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loose between them.
"I found the truth, but I couldn't use it. Every time I got close to exposing your uncle, something happened. Witnesses disappeared. Evidence was destroyed. People died. He's always one step ahead because he's been playing this game longer than I've been alive."
"And you think I can change that."
"I think two people who have been trained their whole lives to fight can do what one person alone can't." He met her eyes. "I think you're the only person in the world who understands what this feels like. The weight. The masks. The loneliness of being the one everyone looks to when everything falls apart."
She looked away. The city lights blurred, just for a moment.
"You're asking me to trust you," she said.
"I am."
"And if I say no? If I walk out of here and pretend this conversation never happened?"
He sat back. His face was calm, but she saw something flicker in his eyes.
"Then I'll keep fighting alone," he said. "And maybe I'll win. Maybe I won't. But either way, our marriage will go forward. The war will continue. And one day, your uncle will make his move, and we'll both be too busy fighting each other to stop him."
She stared at him for a long moment.
He didn't look away. He didn't plead. He didn't push. He just sat there, in the warm light of the rooftop garden, and waited for her to decide.
She thought about her father, bedridden and silent. She thought about her mother, arranging flowers and pretending this was a wedding. She thought about her uncle, smiling at the engagement party, congratulating her on her good fortune.
She thought about the war. The bodies. The funerals. The years of her life that had been stolen by a lie her uncle had built before she was born.
She looked at Keifer Watson. The enemy. The stranger. The only person who had ever looked at her and seen something other than a pawn.
She set down her wine glass.
"Tell me everything," she said.
---
He did.
They sat on the rooftop until the stars faded and the sky turned gray, and he told her everything. The names of her uncle's allies. The locations of his operations. The weaknesses in his network. The evidence that had been collected, and the evidence that had been lost, and the evidence that was still out there, waiting to be found.
She listened. She asked questions. She took the notebook and added her own information, her own observations, her own suspicions that she had never voiced to anyone.
When the sun rose over Manila, they were still sitting there, the notebook open between them, a plan taking shape.
"Your engagement party," Keifer said. "In three weeks. He'll be there. Everyone will be there."
"You want to move then?"
"I want to be ready. I want to have everything in place. And I want—" He hesitated.
She waited.
"I want us to be seen together. As a couple. As something real." He met her eyes. "He's watching us. Waiting to see if we'll fight or fall in line. If we give him what he expects—distrust, distance, the same old hatred—he'll move sooner. But if we give him something he doesn't expect—"
"A united front."
"Exactly."
She thought about it. The engagement party. Her family. His family. The press. The cameras. Everyone watching.
"You want us to pretend," she said.
"I want us to give him nothing to use against us. If he thinks we're happy, if he thinks we're in love—"
"He'll be confident. Confident people make mistakes."
Keifer smiled. It was tired, but it was real.
"You're very good at this," he said.
"I was trained."
He held out his hand. Across the notebook, across the evidence of a conspiracy that had been building for thirty years, across the space between two people who had been raised to be enemies.
"Partners?" he asked.
She looked at his hand. At the calluses on his palm, the scars across his knuckles, the signs of a life that matched her own.
She thought about her girls. They would tell her not to trust him. They would tell her this was a trap. They would tell her to find another way.
But she had been looking for another way for years. And there was none.
She took his hand.
"Partners," she said.
His grip was warm. Steady. The grip of someone who had held weapons and held people.
She held on.
---
The sun was fully up now, painting the city gold. Manila stretched out below them, waking up, starting another day.
Jay stood at the edge of the rooftop. Keifer stood beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
"We're going to have to tell people," she said. "My girls. Your people. We can't do this alone."
"I know."
"My cousin. Angelo. He'll need to know. He's been watching you like a hawk since the engagement was announced."
"He's protective."
"He's paranoid. There's a difference."
Keifer smiled. "I like him."
"You'll like him less when he threatens to kill you again."
"He already did. At the engagement party. In the garden, while you were talking to my mother. He was very thorough."
She turned to look at him. "He threatened you and you didn't tell me?"
"You had enough to deal with." He shrugged. "Besides, I respected it. He loves you. That's rare in our world."
She looked away. The sun was in her eyes now, bright and warm, making everything soft.
"He's going to hate this," she said. "The alliance. The trust. He's going to say it's a trap."
"Is it?"
She thought about the question. About the man standing beside her, who had handed her the truth about her own family, who had been fighting alone for two years.
"No," she said. "I don't think it is."
"Then we'll convince him. Together."
She nodded slowly. "Together."
---
She left his house at eight in the morning. The security guards at the gate didn't look at her. The neighbors' curtains didn't twitch.
She drove home with the notebook in her bag and Keifer's number in her phone and a plan forming in her mind that would either save her family or destroy everything she had ever known.
Her penthouse was empty when she arrived. She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the space that was hers, the space where she had spent so many nights alone.
She walked to her desk and pulled out the notebook. She opened it to the first page and started reading again.
Her phone buzzed.
Did you get home safe?
She stared at the message. Three words. The same number as before. Keifer.
She typed back: Yes.
A pause. Then: Good. Get some sleep. We have work to do.
She almost smiled. Almost.
She set her phone down and looked at the notebook. At the truth that had been hidden from her for twenty-one years. At the man who had given it to her, who was asking her to trust him.
She didn't know if she could trust him. She didn't know if any of this was real.
But for the first time in years, she didn't feel alone.
And that, she thought, was a start.
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END OF CHAPTER FOUR