CHAPTER 12

Sophia's POV

The six o'clock meeting never happened.

At five forty five Dominic got a call that made him go very still in the way that meant something had shifted and not in a direction anyone had planned for. He cancelled the meeting with two words texted to everyone. Not tonight.

No explanation.

I was in my room when the text came through. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it and thought about page twelve and Alesta Holdings and the look on Damien's face when he said he'd look at it before the meeting.

Something had happened between that conversation and now.

I got up and went to find him.

He wasn't in his office. Not in the kitchen. Not in the tech wing where he usually disappeared when things got complicated.

I found him on the roof.

The Black estate had a roof terrace that I hadn't known existed until now. Glass panels on three sides, open to the sky on the fourth, the whole city spread out below like a circuit board with the lights on. Damien was standing at the open edge with his hands in his hoodie pockets looking out at it.

I walked over and stood beside him.

He didn't look surprised that I had found him.

"The meeting," I said.

"Dominic cancelled it," he said.

"I know. Why."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Because I asked him to," he said. "I needed more time before putting everything in a room together."

I waited.

"Page twelve," he said. "Alesta Holdings. The director is R. Black."

I looked at him. "A relative."

"My father," he said. "Richard Black. Who the world thinks disappeared twenty years ago is apparently sitting in Monaco running a holding company connected to my mother and Victoria Vale."

The city hummed below us.

"Both of them," I said slowly.

"Both of them. Together. Which means this was never just our mother opportunistically finding Victoria. This was coordinated. From the beginning." He paused. "And someone inside this estate has been sending them money from our accounts for almost a decade."

I turned to look at him properly.

"Someone in the house," I said.

"Yes."

"One of your brothers."

"Or someone close enough to them to have access," he said. "Which narrows it significantly."

I looked at the city and thought about five brothers who had built everything together from nothing and the specific kind of damage that a betrayal from inside that did.

"You don't know which one," I said.

"No."

"That's why you cancelled the meeting."

"I can't sit in a room with all of them knowing one of them might be the reason my parents have been funded for a decade," he said simply. "Not until I know which one. I don't have the face for it."

That surprised me. Not the logic. The honesty of it.

Damien Black admitting he didn't have the face for something was not nothing.

"Zane," I said. "You trust him."

"Zane found it and called me immediately," he said. "If it were Zane he would have buried it."

"Elijah."

"Elijah has been managing our legal structure for twelve years. He's had access to everything for twelve years. If he wanted to skim money to a Monaco account he could have done it without leaving a trail."

"Which means the trail was left by someone who didn't fully understand what they were doing," I said.

He looked at me.

"Someone who had access but not expertise," I said. "Someone who knew enough to move money but not enough to hide it properly from someone like Zane."

He was quiet.

"Remy," I said carefully. "He handles real estate. Property transactions. He would have account access but tech isn't his world."

Damien said nothing.

Which was itself an answer.

"You already thought it was Remy," I said.

"I didn't want to think it was Remy," he said. "That's different."

I looked at the city.

Remy was the one I knew least. Quiet in a different way to Zane, warmer on the surface but careful underneath. He had looked at me since I arrived with an expression I had read as skepticism but was now reconsidering.

"What does Dominic know," I said.

"That something is wrong and I need time," he said. "He didn't push. He never pushes when I ask him not to."

"You need to tell him."

"I know."

"Tonight Damien. Not tomorrow."

"I know Sophia."

I looked at him standing there with the city behind him and his hands in his pockets and twenty one years of a story that kept getting worse the more layers came off it.

"When your parents left," I said. "Was Remy old enough to remember them."

He thought about it. "He was nine. Old enough."

"Old enough to miss them," I said. "Old enough to want them back."

Something moved in his face.

"If someone contacted him," I said gently. "If Diana found him before any of this started. If she told him she wanted to come home and just needed help and he was nine years old inside a twenty year old and he said yes without understanding what yes meant…"

"Don't," Damien said quietly.

"I'm not excusing it," I said. "I'm just saying there's a difference between a traitor and someone who got lost."

He was quiet for a long time.

Below us the city moved and glowed and did its enormous indifferent thing and up here two people stood in the cold air and sat with the particular weight of families that broke in ways that didn't have clean edges.

"I need to talk to him," Damien said finally.

"Yes."

"Alone. Before Dominic."

"Yes," I said. "That's right."

He looked at me. "How are you this certain about things."

"I'm not," I said. "I'm just certain about people. My mother taught me that too."

He held my gaze for a moment.

Then he looked back at the city.

"She would have liked you," he said quietly. "Your mother."

I felt that land somewhere in my chest.

"She would have had opinions about you," I said. "Loud ones."

"Good or bad."

"Undecided for about a week," I said. "Then completely in your corner. That was how she worked."

Something in his face softened in the specific way it did when he wasn't paying attention to keeping it from doing that.

My phone buzzed.

I looked at it.

Unknown number. Text message.

I stared at the screen.

You're looking in the right place but at the wrong person. It's not Remy. Check who introduced Diana to Victoria four years ago. Check who made the first call. You already know him. He's been in this house the whole time.

I read it twice.

Then I handed the phone to Damien.

He read it.

His face went through something I couldn't follow, too fast and too complicated and landing somewhere I didn't have a name for.

"Who is this," I said.

He looked at the number for a long moment.

"I don't know," he said. But his voice had something in it that said the opposite.

"Damien."

He looked at me.

"You know who this is," I said.

He handed the phone back and looked at the city.

"There were six of us," he said quietly. "Five brothers and one other person who knew everything about this family. Who was there from the beginning. Who Dominic trusted completely because he had no reason not to."

I waited.

"His name is Carter," Damien said. "He was Dominic's best friend from university. He helped us build the estate legal structure in the early years. He had full access to everything." A pause. "He left four years ago. Dominic said it was personal. I never knew why."

Four years ago.

The same time Diana's connection to Victoria began.

"He's been feeding them information," I said. "Not Remy. Carter."

"And someone just told us," Damien said. "Someone who knows enough to know it was Carter and knows we were looking at Remy."

"Someone on the inside," I said.

"Someone who wants us to find it," he said. "Before Carter knows we're looking."

We stood on the roof in the cold city air and I thought about layers inside layers and a war that kept revealing new rooms the further in you went.

"We need to tell Dominic," I said.

"Yes," he said. This time without hesitation.

He took out his phone and called his brother and I stood beside him and looked at the city and thought about a text from an unknown number and someone inside all of this who was pointing us in the right direction.

And thought about who in this story had a reason to want the truth to come out.

And landed on an answer that made the city feel very small and very close all at once.

I didn't say it yet.

Some things needed to be more certain before they were ready to be said out loud.

But I kept it.

And I watched Damien talk to his brother in the cold night air and thought that whatever came next, whatever new room this war opened into, we were walking into it together.

And that was the first time since the bus stop that together had felt like enough.