Chapter Five: The Attorney Who Sees Too Much

"Shall we?"

Isolde didn't wait for my answer.

She turned and walked and I followed because standing in that dining room with Damien's last sentence still hanging in the air behind me was not something I could do for another second. The scar comment. The wrist. The way he'd said it without looking up, like he was reading a weather report.

You don't.

Two words. Quiet as a door closing.

I walked beside Isolde and kept my breathing even and my hands loose at my sides and told myself I still had time. He suspected. That was different from knowing. Suspicion without proof was just a theory, and theories could be managed.

Isolde moved through the house like she owned it. No hesitation at any turn, no pause to check a direction. Six years with Damien Cross had given her a map of this place that went deeper than floor plans.

"East gallery," she said, gesturing left without slowing. "The Cross family acquired the original coastal land in 1887. The estate was built in stages. You'll notice the north wing feels older — lower ceilings, narrower windows. Damien renovated the south wing six years ago when he assumed full control of the corporation."

"He told you that story himself?" I asked.

"I was there for the renovation." She glanced at me sideways. "I've been here for most things."

We moved through a corridor lined with more Cross family portraits. I'd started to recognise them — the same jaw across generations, the same quality of stillness in every painted face. A family that had been watching people from walls for over a century.

Isolde stopped suddenly outside a closed door.

"The Chen coastal trade licenses," she said, no preamble. "Three of them. Acquired by your grandfather and held by the family business until your father's decisions between 2014 and 2019 created the debt situation that led to this arrangement." She paused. "I trust that's not new information."

"Of course not," I said.

She looked at me the way Damien had looked at me over breakfast. Flat, patient, reading the gap between what I said and what I meant.

"Good," she said. And moved on.

The ballroom doors opened onto pale marble and tall windows and a view of the back gardens that dropped away to the cliff edge. The kind of room that existed to remind guests they were guests.

"Three events annually," Isolde said, walking the length of it. "The foundation gala in March. The shareholder dinner in September. The family gathering in December. As Damien's wife you'll be expected at all three. Speaking at two. Hosting the third."

"Hosting," I repeated.

"Is that a problem."

"No."

She stopped at the far window and looked out at the gardens. "What's your read on large social events."

"I manage them."

"That's a non-answer."

I looked at her directly. "I don't love them. But I don't collapse in them either. I read rooms quickly and I know when to talk and when to stay quiet."

She nodded slowly. Not approval exactly. More like confirmation of something she'd already suspected.

We left the ballroom. She showed me the formal sitting room, the dining annex, a smaller meeting room she described as the space for conversations Damien wanted off the record but not off the premises. At every stop she added detail — names, dates, family history, corporate context — and watched how I absorbed it.

I absorbed all of it and volunteered nothing back.

She stopped outside the library.

Didn't open the door. Just turned and looked at me with her back against it, arms loose at her sides, green eyes steady. The tour voice was gone. Something quieter replaced it.

"I've worked for Damien Cross for six years," she said.

"You mentioned."

"In that time I've met four people he genuinely respected." A pause. "You have two weeks to decide whether you want to be the fifth."

She held my gaze for one more second. Then she pushed off the door and walked back down the corridor without another word.

No explanation. No definition of what respected meant in Damien Cross's vocabulary or what two weeks was supposed to change.

I stood there and let it settle.

Then I pushed the library door open and went inside because I needed somewhere quiet to think and this was the only room in the house that felt like it belonged to no one specific.

Floor to ceiling shelves. A reading table. Two chairs at the window with the cliff view stretching beyond the glass. The smell of old paper and something faintly like cedar.

I ran my hand along a shelf without looking. Pulled out a book. Set it back. Pulled another — a thick legal text, the kind with a cracked spine from actual use. I slid it back and something slipped from between the pages.

I caught it before it hit the floor.

A photograph.

Black and white. Not ancient but not recent — maybe twenty years old, the quality slightly grainy the way photographs got before everything went digital. Three men at a formal dinner. Dark suits, a long table behind them, the kind of event where everyone knew the real conversations were happening somewhere else.

The man on the left was Damien.

Younger. Maybe twenty, twenty-one. But the stillness was already there, already built into his posture like it had always been there and just needed time to solidify. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was looking at something to the left of it.

The man in the middle was older. Broad-shouldered, heavy-jawed, with the kind of face that had been powerful once and remembered it. He had his hand on young Damien's shoulder in a way that looked friendly and didn't feel it.

The third man was on the right.

His face was gone.

Not worn away. Not faded by time or light. Torn. Someone had taken that corner of the photograph between two fingers and pulled, deliberately and completely, removing that face and leaving nothing but ragged white paper and the edge of a dark suit jacket.

I turned it over.

Nothing on the back. No names. No date. No explanation for why this photograph had been hidden inside a legal book in a private library, or why someone had removed one face and left the other two intact.

I stood there holding it.

Thought about the wardrobe. The self-deleting message. The smiling man at the gate. Damien's hand closing slowly in the car.

This house was full of things that had been deliberately cut away.

And the torn edge of that photograph — that careful, intentional destruction — told me one thing clearly.

Whoever that third man was, someone in this house was very afraid of him.

And somehow, without knowing his name or his face, I was already afraid too.