Chapter five

CHAPTER FIVE

Her eyes are the worst part.

Not cold. Not threatening. Pitying. The kind of look you give someone standing on a ledge who doesn't know it yet.

"Who are you," I say.

"Bianca." She doesn't move from the doorway. "I worked for him for two years. Before I became inconvenient."

I look at the scar on her jaw.

She lets me look.

"He collects women," she says. "That's the word I'd use. Broken ones, specifically. Women with enough damage that they'll trade anything for the resources to fix it." She nods at the photograph still in my hand. "He had someone photograph you while you were unconscious. That's not protection, Rose. That's inventory."

My grip tightens on the photo.

"Why are you telling me this."

"Because you're smarter than the last one." She takes one step into the room. "And because you deserve to know what game you're actually in before you lose it." She pauses. "Go back to the Meridian file. The one you used on Moretti."

"I read it."

"Read it again. Page nineteen. The subsidiary shell registered in 2016." Her eyes don't move from mine. "Cross-reference the registration date with your father's accident."

Everything in my body goes very still.

"My father died in a car accident."

"Yes." Her voice is quiet. "He did."

She holds my gaze for three seconds. Then she turns and walks out and I hear her footsteps go down the hall and then nothing.

I look at the photograph in my hand.

Then I open my laptop.

---

I don't sleep.

I read the Meridian file three times and on page nineteen I find the subsidiary and I find the registration date and it is four months before my father's brake line failed on the highway outside Toronto on a Tuesday morning in November.

I don't have proof. Not yet.

But I know what I'm looking at.

I tape my ribs myself in the bathroom mirror at five-thirty. Two cracked, the doctor said. Nothing punctured. I pull the tape tight until breathing is something I have to think about and then I put on the suit Alfonso's team brought in yesterday.

Black. Structured. The kind that means business in the oldest sense of the word.

I look at myself in the mirror.

*You're going to walk into that meeting and they will see a ghost. A missing woman. A liability.*

*Show them something worse.*

---

Alfonso's office is set up for the call when I arrive.

Twelve screens. Seven board members, their names and files open in front of me, everything I memorized in the last two days organized into a sequence I've run through enough times that it lives in my hands now, not just my head.

Alfonso stands against the far wall. He doesn't sit. He watches.

I sit down, straighten the folder, and connect the call.

Six faces appear. Then a seventh.

Ryan.

He looks terrible. Good. Dark circles, a suit that was slept in, and behind his eyes the specific panic of a man who has been building a story he can no longer control.

He goes first. Of course he does.

"Rose." He does the voice. Soft. Concerned. The one that used to make me feel like I was overreacting to everything. "I am so relieved you're alive. We've all been so worried. Given everything you've been through, the stress, the instability—"

"Mr. Angelo." I cut him off clean. "You're not a board member. You're here as a courtesy. Speak again without being addressed and I'll have you removed from the call."

Silence.

Gerald Whitmore, Chairman, clears his throat. "Miss Alexander, given the circumstances of the last few weeks, the board has serious questions about your capacity to—"

"Mr. Whitmore." I open the first folder. "On March fourth of this year, you co-signed a document approving a preliminary asset transfer of fourteen million dollars out of Alexander Co. holdings into a private account registered to Angelo Consulting." I look up. "That account belongs to my former fiancé. You signed it eight days before I was reported missing."

His face goes white.

"That's not—"

"I have the document." I turn it to face the camera. "I also have the email chain authorizing it. Your personal email, Mr. Whitmore. Not your board account." I let that sit for exactly two seconds. "You're fired. Legal will be in contact by end of business today."

Nobody speaks.

I turn to the remaining six.

"I want to be very clear about what happens next." My voice doesn't shake. My ribs are screaming and my hands are ice cold and my voice does not shake. "Rose Alexander is not missing. Rose Alexander is not unstable. Rose Alexander is sitting in front of you with documentation of every fraudulent transaction that has moved through this company in the last fourteen months."

I look at Ryan on his separate screen.

He has gone the color of old concrete.

"I'm coming home," I say. "And I suggest everyone in this call decide very quickly which side of that they want to be on."

I close the call.

The room is silent.

---

Alfonso doesn't speak for a moment.

Then he crosses to where I'm sitting and reaches down and adjusts the diamond choker at my throat. His fingers are light. Precise. Like he's straightening something that belongs to him.

"You're ready for the next phase," he says.

"What's the next phase."

"We go public. Full press. You and I, confirmed. It neutralizes the instability narrative before Ryan can weaponize it further." He steps back. "By the end of the week you're not a missing heiress. You're a Tommaso."

I nod.

And then I look past him at his desk.

The corner of a black envelope is visible under a folder. The same size. The same color. The same texture as the one delivered to my room.

He's watching my face.

"Something wrong," he says.

"No." I smile. "Nothing."

But I file it. Behind my back teeth where I keep everything that I'm not ready to use yet.

He had the photo taken. Which means Bianca was right. Which means every move I've made in this house has been watched and measured and stored by a man who collected me the same way he collected Moretti's weaknesses and Whitmore's signatures.

The difference is I know it now.

---

My phone hits the desk between us.

A global news alert. Reuters. Associated Press. Six others in the same thirty seconds.

*BREAKING: Canadian heiress Rose Alexander allegedly held against her will at Italian villa. Former fiancé Ryan Angelo provides medical documentation suggesting psychological breakdown. Local authorities en route to Tommaso estate.*

I look up at Alfonso.

His jaw is set. His eyes have gone to that temperature that means something is about to be dismantled.

From somewhere below us, deep in the body of the house, I hear it.

The gates.

Then the sirens.