FAZER LOGINElenaI sat up so fast the blanket fell off my shoulders.New device signed into your account.My thumb hit the screen before my brain caught up. Password. Change it. Now. My hands moved faster than my thoughts, desperate to fix something I already knew was slipping away.The folder wouldn't open.I tried again. A small circle spun in the middle of the screen, going nowhere. I pressed harder. Stupid, I know. Like pressing harder could make it work.Then the folder was gone.I stared at the empty space where it had been, waiting for it to come back. Waiting for my phone to admit it had made a mistake.Not locked. Not hidden. Gone. No trace, like it had never been on this phone at all, like the whole thing had been a story I'd told myself in the dark.I threw the phone onto the bed so hard it bounced off the pillow and hit the floor."No," I said out loud, to no one, to the empty room. "No. No, no, no. This can't be happening.”I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear through this house and
ElenaI found the drawer empty at two in the morning and didn't sleep again after that.By breakfast my hands still hadn't fully settled. I sat across from Marcus, pushing eggs around a plate I had no appetite for, watching him read something on his phone with a small, satisfied look I hadn't seen in weeks."You seem pleased about something," I said."Things are coming together," he said, not looking up. "That's all."I didn't push. I'd learned that pushing only ever taught him more about me than it taught me about him.Sophia came down late, quieter than usual, and sat picking at toast she didn't eat either. When Marcus left for the office she caught my eye across the table, something tight around her mouth, and for a second I thought she might finally say whatever she'd stopped herself from saying in the garden. Then a maid came through clearing plates, and the moment closed itself again before either of us could reach for it.I saw the stranger for the first time that afternoon.I
ElenaHe wore the watch to breakfast again.I noticed it the second he sat down, the way I always seemed to notice it now, that small gold face catching the morning light on his wrist like it belonged there. I remembered the shop where I bought it. A small place, tucked between a bakery and a shoe repair, and the owner allowed me to pay in three parts because I didn't want to touch our joint account for it. I wanted this one thing to come only from me.I remembered the look on his face when he opened the box. A real surprise. Real joy, or something close enough to it that I never once doubted it back then."You're staring," Marcus said, not unkindly, buttering his toast."Just thinking," I said.I didn't tell him what I was thinking. That the woman who bought that watch had believed, completely, in a future that didn't exist. That some small foolish part of me still missed being her, even now, even knowing everything I knew.He left for a meeting an hour later, and the house went quie
MarcusMy father called the marriage an investment. A necessary alliance. One signature to protect the family's future.I'd spent five years living with what that decision actually cost.Five years of dinners and anniversaries and a wedding photo on the nightstand. All of it built on a choice made in a boardroom before Elena ever knew my name.If Elena could just disappear from my life, nothing would stand between me and the life I'd built for myself.It should have been finished by now. The diagnosis should have taken care of the rest. Instead she'd changed. She was asking questions. Looking at me in a different way. Turning into something I hadn't planned for.I sat in my study long after she'd gone up, a drink going warm at my elbow, and turned that thought over the same way I turned over any deal that refused to close on its own.My father used to say feelings get in the way of good judgment. He said it the first time I brought a girl home, seventeen years old, some ordinary girl
ElenaI sat with that name a long time before I could make myself do anything with it.Gerald Whitfield. The old man at the gate. The one who'd pressed a card into my hand and told me his own doctor gave him a number that made him want to clean up his mess. I'd trusted that fear. I believed it. Now I didn't know if it had been guilt at all, or something closer to a man managing exactly how much of the truth I'd get and when.Called Damian before I let myself think about it too long."I need to know everything about Gerald Whitfield," I said. "Not what he told me at the gate. What's actually true."Took him most of the afternoon. He called back with more than I expected."He joined the board young," Damian said. "Twenty-six, twenty-seven. Junior position, mostly paperwork, nothing that would've given him real power back then. George Blackwood liked him, apparently. Keep him close." A pause. "There's no record showing he knew what your father's contract actually was. Not officially. But
Elena"Which one of us," Marcus said again, quieter this time, "should I actually be afraid of right now."I made myself hold his eyes. Heart slamming so hard I thought he'd hear it in the silence between us. The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago, lamp light throwing long shadows across the desk, across the card, across the photo of me standing in that corridor like a stranger caught mid-crime."Maybe neither," I said. "Maybe you should ask who wanted you to find this at all." I nodded at the card, still sitting there under the light. "Someone planted that in Whitlock's office for you to find, Marcus. Doesn't that strike you as strange? Proof against your own wife shows up the same week you start asking questions about a woman named Adaeze?"Something flickered behind his eyes. Just for a second. I'd learned to catch those seconds by now, the small tell before the mask came back down."You don't know that name," he said. But it came out slower than his usual certainty. Less l







