Chapter Eleven

"Run from what?" my mother says, in the particular sharp voice she uses when she's decided a situation has become her business. "Who are you? Celeste, do you know this man?"

Celeste hasn't moved from the stairs. She's staring down at Tobias like he's a ghost, one hand gripping the banister hard enough that her knuckles have gone white, and for a long, terrible second nobody in the hall says anything at all.

"He's nobody," Celeste says finally, too fast, her voice pitched to sound casual and landing nowhere close to it. "He's — he works with the company, Mom, he's confused, he's had a bad day—"

"I am not confused." Tobias's voice cracks again, higher this time, closer to panic than I've heard from any adult in a very long time. "Celeste, I sent you three messages an hour ago and you didn't answer, and then Marcus's assistant called my direct line and asked me very specifically about a data pull I never logged, which means somebody already found the gap in the records, which means—"

"Stop talking," Celeste says.

"They know," Tobias says anyway, ignoring her completely now, wild-eyed, past the point of caring who's listening. "They know someone accessed the trial files outside normal channels, and there's a very short list of people with that level of access, Celeste, and I am on it, and so are you—"

"I said stop talking!"

My mother's hand comes up to her mouth. "Celeste. What is he talking about. What trial files."

I watch my stepsister's whole face come apart in real time, watch twenty years of careful invisibility collapse in front of our mother's eyes in the space of about four seconds, and for one strange, unwanted moment I feel something that isn't quite satisfaction and isn't quite pity, something closer to recognition — I know exactly what it feels like to have the version of yourself you've been protecting suddenly stripped bare in a room you can't leave.

Headlights sweep across the front windows before anyone can say anything else.

Tobias goes rigid. "That's not — I didn't tell anyone I was coming here, I swear to you, I didn't—"

"Get away from the door," I say, already moving, already pulling my mother back by the arm, because whatever's pulling into our driveway right now, I don't think it's a car full of people who came to ask polite questions.

Through the sidelight window I see two black SUVs pull up at the curb, doors opening before they've fully stopped, four men in plain dark suits moving toward the house with the unhurried, coordinated ease of people who do this often enough that hurrying has stopped being necessary.

"Company security," Tobias whispers, backing away from the door like it's already breached. "Oh God. Oh God, they tracked my phone, they must have tracked my phone—"

"Celeste." My mother's voice has gone thin and frightened in a way I've genuinely never heard from her before, not once in seventeen years of living in this house. "What have you done."

Celeste doesn't answer her. She's staring at the door, at the shapes moving up the front walk beyond the glass, and something in her expression shifts from panic into something colder, something I recognize because I've been wearing it myself for three days — the specific, ugly clarity of a person realizing there's no version of the next five minutes that doesn't cost her everything.

"Ivy," she says, and it's the first time in this entire conversation she's looked directly at me instead of past me. "Please."

I don't know what she's asking for. I don't think she knows either. But I know that in another life, standing on the other side of a locked gate, this same sister watched me die and said two words instead of opening it, and some old wound in me wants very badly to let her feel exactly what that helplessness costs.

The doorbell rings, once, sharp and formal, and every single person in that front hall goes completely still.

"Ms. Sterling." A man's voice, muffled through the door, pleasant in the specific, practiced way that's somehow more frightening than shouting would be. "We have reason to believe an individual connected to an internal Ashford Biotech matter is currently inside this residence. We'd appreciate your full cooperation."