Chapter Five

Celeste pov 

My hands don't stop shaking until I'm back in my room with the door locked.

She heard me. I know she heard me, I saw it on her face before she even said a word, that same look she used to get as a kid when she caught me lying about something small and stupid and decided to file it away instead of saying anything — Ivy's never been a girl who confronts you in the moment. She's a girl who remembers.

That should scare me more than it does. I've spent twenty years counting on Ivy not noticing things. It's the one skill I've always been better at than her — noticing, and making sure nobody notices me noticing.

I call Tobias back the second I've got the door locked.

"You said you'd call back," he says, before I can get a word out, and there's an edge in his voice I don't like, thin and fast, the voice of a man who's been standing somewhere with a phone in his hand for twenty minutes working himself into a state. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. My sister walked in on the end of the call, that's all."

"That's all." He laughs, short and ugly. "Celeste, this isn't a game where 'that's all' is a category of outcome. If Ivy Sterling repeats one word of what she heard to her father, or God forbid to Julian—"

"She won't." I say it with more certainty than I feel, sitting down hard on the edge of my bed, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that used to be in her room before she got moved up to the west wing to be closer to her fiancé, closer to the family that actually matters. "She doesn't even understand what she heard. She thinks it's boring company stuff."

"Does she."

"Yes."

"Because from where I'm standing," Tobias says, and I can hear him pacing now, the particular rhythm of a man in a lab coat who's spent his whole adult life around things he can control and has just discovered something he can't, "Marcus moved the audit up. Two weeks. Somebody on the board got nervous about early trial data and wants everything reviewed before the next investor call, which means the files I pulled for you, the ones that show exactly how bad the early numbers actually look, need to be back in the system and looking untouched inside of fourteen days, or we are both finished. Not embarrassed. Finished."

The room tilts a little. I press my free hand flat against my knee to stop it from shaking. "Fourteen days."

"Fourteen days."

I think about the account I opened under my mother's maiden name, the one with the modest, careful, entirely legal-looking transfers into three biotech shorts that are going to look like genius the second this data goes public and everyone else finds out how bad the early trial numbers really are. I think about how none of this was supposed to be complicated — Tobias needed the data buried a little longer to protect his own position at the company, I needed enough runway to make sure I wasn't broke and dependent on whatever scraps Ivy's marriage left for me, and neither of us was supposed to need fourteen days to turn into four months of careful patience.

"I'll handle it," I say.

"You said that last week."

"I'll handle it," I say again, harder, because I need to believe it more than he does. "Ivy doesn't know anything. She's getting married in three months, Tobias, she's picking out flowers, she is not somehow going to unravel an insider trading position from one half of a phone call she overheard on a terrace."

He's quiet for a second. Then: "You sound very sure for someone who was shaking hard enough ten minutes ago that I could hear it over the phone."

I don't answer that, because it's true, and because some small ugly part of me has spent twenty years learning that the fastest way to survive a conversation with a man who's more scared than you is to sound less scared than he is, even when it isn't true.

"Fourteen days," I say instead. "I'll have it handled."

I hang up before he can say anything else.

*

I don't sleep either, though I'd never tell Ivy that. There's a version of tonight where I go find her, tell her the truth, throw myself on whatever's left of twenty years of being raised as sisters and ask her to just let this go, to not tell her father, to not tell Julian, to let me get through fourteen days and disappear the whole mess before anyone else ever has to know it existed.

I don't do that. I've never been the sister who asks for things directly. I've always been the sister who takes them and hopes nobody notices until it's too late to matter.

Julian texts me at two in the morning. You up?

I stare at the message a long time before I answer it, the way I always do, the small ugly thrill of it never quite wearing off no matter how many times we've done this — the particular electricity of being wanted by the man who's marrying my stepsister in three months, the specific, private, terrible pleasure of being the one he texts at two in the morning instead of her.

Yeah, I type back. Can't sleep.

Me neither. Thinking about the wedding.

Something in my chest goes very still and very cold, reading that, because I don't know which wedding he means, mine or hers, the one everyone in this family thinks is happening in three months or the one I've let myself imagine in the two years since he first looked at me like I mattered more than the merger my father engineered.

What about it, I type.

Nothing. Ignore me. Go to sleep, Celeste.

He doesn't say anything else. I sit there in the dark with my phone glowing in both hands, feeling the particular vertigo of a man who can turn his attention on and off like a light switch, and I think about fourteen days, and files that need to disappear back into a system before an audit finds them, and a stepsister who noticed something on a terrace that she was never supposed to notice at all.

I'm still sitting there when the knock comes at my window.

Not my door. My window, second floor, the one that looks out over the side garden where nobody's supposed to be able to reach without a ladder, and I go so still my whole body locks up at once, phone still glowing uselessly in my hand.

The knock comes again. Soft. Deliberate. Someone who knows exactly which window is mine.

I cross the room on legs that don't feel like they belong to me, and when I pull the curtain back, there's a face on the other side of the glass I recognize immediately and never, not once in fourteen years of knowing him, expected to see outside my bedroom window at two in the morning with an expression like the whole world's about to end.

Tobias.

"Let me in," he mouths through the glass, and even through two panes of window I can see that his hands are shaking worse than mine were an hour ago. "Celeste. Now. It's already started."