THE DEAD MAN WALKS IN

Alessia called Julian four times before nine in the morning.

The first two calls rang out. The third went straight to voicemail. On the fourth, a clipped assistant's voice informed her that Mr. Sinclair was unavailable and unable to say when he might return calls, and something in the careful neutrality of that sentence made the back of Alessia's neck go cold.

She tried Dr. Rowan next — the physician who had signed off on the Sinclair family's arrangements after the explosion, whose name she still remembered from a stack of condolence paperwork five years old. His office told her he was traveling. No further information available.

She sat at her desk with her phone in her hand and the vanished message still burning behind her eyes. *Your husband wasn't on that plane.* Five years of certainty, and in less than a day it had turned to sand between her fingers, and no one — not one single person who might actually know something — would answer her calls.

She told herself it was nothing. A cruel prank, maybe, or worse, some stranger who'd found her file, her name, her tragedy, and decided to make sport of it. She told herself this while getting dressed for the board meeting she couldn't reschedule, while fixing her hair in the mirror with hands that wouldn't quite stop trembling, while rehearsing, uselessly, the version of herself who would walk into that room today and be nothing but competent, nothing but composed, nothing but the woman the world had built out of the wreckage of five years ago.

The boardroom was full by the time she arrived — twelve members of the Bellamy Atelier board, two representatives from the client securing the largest commission in the firm's history, and Rafael at her right hand, already deep in conversation with the head of the client's legal team.

"We're finalizing phase two," Sienna murmured beside her, sliding a folder across the table. "This is the biggest signing we've ever had. Try to look like you slept."

Alessia managed something close to a smile and opened the folder, forcing her attention onto numbers and timelines, onto the one language that had never once betrayed her.

She almost managed it.

The doors at the far end of the room opened without a knock, without an assistant announcing anyone, without any of the small courtesies that governed every other interruption in this building.

Every head at the table turned. Twelve board members rose to their feet on some instinct older than protocol, some reflex toward the kind of presence that didn't need an introduction.

Alessia didn't stand.

She couldn't. Her body had gone rigid in her chair, every part of her locked around a single impossible thought, because she knew that outline in the doorway. She had memorized it across a decade of doorways just like this one, had turned toward it a thousand times over a thousand dinners and mornings and ordinary unremarkable days that she would have given anything to have back.

Older. Harder — something in the set of his jaw that hadn't been there before, some new permanence to how still he held himself. Dangerous in a way she couldn't have named five years ago, because five years ago she hadn't understood danger was a shape a person could grow into rather than be born with.

The watch on his wrist caught the light. She recognized it immediately — the same one he'd worn the night she signed the papers, the same one that had supposedly gone down with him somewhere in the Atlantic.

Her lungs had stopped taking instructions from the rest of her.

He didn't look at the board. He didn't look at the client's legal team frozen mid-sentence, or at Sienna, who had gone white beside her, or at Rafael, whose hand had found the edge of the table like he needed something solid to hold onto.

He looked at her. Only her. As though the twelve other people in the room were furniture he'd already accounted for and dismissed.

"Alessia."

Her name, in his voice, after five years of silence, undid something in her chest she'd spent half a decade carefully welding shut.

She rose from her chair without deciding to, some part of her still convinced that standing might prove this was real, might prove her own legs still worked, might prove she hadn't simply lost her mind somewhere between the vanished message and this room.

"You're dead," she whispered. It wasn't a question. It was the only sentence her body had left in it.

Nikolia held her gaze, and for one unguarded moment something moved behind his eyes that looked almost like grief, almost like five years' worth of things he had no right to say to her in a room full of witnesses.

"I know," he said.