Chapter Three: Midnight..

Elena

“You seem far away,” Marcus said at the dinner table.

“I’ve just been tired,” I said, playing with the beef on my plate.

“You’ve been tired a lot lately.” He reached out and held my hand. “Maybe we should get you checked out properly. Not just a GP — someone serious. I know a specialist at St. Catherine’s.”

I looked at his hand on mine and smiled. “I’m fine, Marcus.”

“You’re allowed to not be fine, you know. You don’t always have to manage everything alone.”

His phone buzzed. I watched that look of tension cross his face.

“You should get that,” I said.

“It can wait.”

“Marcus.” I squeezed his hand and smiled. “Get it. It’s fine.”

He stepped out and his voice dropped immediately to something low and private. He was gone for more than an hour.

I had already finished eating and the headache had returned — the familiar pressure behind my left eye I had stopped pretending was stress. I found the stairs and climbed slowly, every step an effort, and lay down on the bed.

I didn’t know how long I was out, but when I woke, I heard something.

The door clicks. So soft and careful. The kind of care that only happens when someone is trying not to be heard.

Marcus’s side of the bed was empty.

The corridor was dark except for the thin strip of light under Sophia’s door. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched it. Voices in low tones, his and hers overlapping. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I know it was long enough for every single justification I had ever made to line up in front of me like evidence at a trial.

Then I heard her laugh. And then his voice, low and warm in a way I had not heard directed at me in longer than I could honestly remember —

“Stop, you’ll wake her.”

Her.

Me. I was her. The inconvenience. The wife asleep down the hall while the real life happened without her.

And then:

“Hope you gave her the dose expected for her to go faster.”

I went completely still.

There is a particular kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature. The difference between a thing happening to you and a thing being done to you. Between a body failing and a body being helped to fail — quietly, carefully, by the hands of someone who called you love while doing it.

I had been murdered. Slowly. Politely. Over candlelight.

I pressed my back against the wall and slid down to the floor, knees pulled to my chest, the cancer pressing behind my left eye like a thumb, and I thought: this is it. This is where I either fall apart or I don’t.

I’m definitely not going to fall apart.

Marcus’s study. His laptop. The password.

05_11_20.

Our wedding day. He had never once thought to change it, because this password belonged to a version of me he had already written off — the wife who organised his calendar and never asked questions he didn’t want answered.

That was the one thing power could never protect a man from. The person he had already decided didn’t matter.

I opened the financial directory and went straight to the middle.

The Blackwood Empire was enormous — real estate, tech, finance, its name on buildings in four cities. On paper, untouchable. But I had lived in this house for five years. I had been in the room — ignored, underestimated, considered furniture — while decisions were made. I had heard names. Dates. Numbers that didn’t appear in any public filings.

I copied everything I could find. Names. Dates. Amounts. Offshore accounts. An environmental report altered before the Cross Street development was approved. A planning official who had come to dinner twice and left with an envelope both times.

Two hours without stopping.

I saved it all to a USB drive I had bought for cash three days ago, waiting for this moment. Then I cleared the browser history, closed the laptop, and put everything back exactly as I’d found it.

The alarm clock made a small sound. I looked at it and smiled.

12:00am. Saturday.

The address would come in the morning.