Chapter Nine: Count to Ten

DOMINIC

One.

I have been threatened by governments. I have had a loaded ledger held over my head by men who mistook my silence for weakness. Not one of them ever made my hands go cold from across a city.

Two.

The photograph on my screen was real. I knew the paper stock, the letterhead watermark, the aging of forty-five-year-old ink. I had read the summary of that resignation letter in our sealed files that very morning. What I had never seen, what no living person should have been able to show me, was the original.

Three.

And the handwriting below it. Elegant. Exact. The looping capital A, the slanted cross of the T. I had a wall of it at home, letters, margin notes, birthday cards in a dead man's hand. I pulled up a scanned page of my grandfather's correspondence and held the two side by side on my screen.

Identical. Someone had written that line in Richard Blackwood's handwriting, twenty-six years after we buried him.

Four.

Unknown number: Relax, Dominic. Breathe. Counting is good for the nerves. Your grandfather taught you that on the stairs at the estate, didn't he? One step, one number, never show them your pulse.

My blood stopped. That was not in any file. That was a memory from a staircase in a house I barely visited anymore, between a man and a seven-year-old boy.

Five.

"Julian," I said into the intercom, and my voice sounded like my own again, which was a small miracle. "Lock down the residential elevator. Nobody enters or leaves the thirtieth floor. Quietly."

"Sir?"

"And pull the building schematics. I want to know every camera, vent, and blind spot in apartment 30B."

Six.

I typed back: Who are you?

The reply came in eleven seconds.

A friend. Ask better questions, Dominic. Don't ask who. Ask WHY. Why would your uncle's office cut a key in your name five months ago? Why did your grandfather keep a forged resignation letter in a vault only three people could open? And why, this is my favorite, does your new assistant own fifty-one percent of your company?

Seven.

The world made a sound like a struck bell.

I read it four times. The words did not rearrange themselves. They sat there on the screen, small and black and absolute, and every fact I had collected in thirty-six hours snapped into a new geometry around them, the panic in her eyes in the elevator, the hand closing around her blazer pocket at the board meeting, the way she had not reacted when Greer said her grandfather's name, because she had known that name was coming. Because she had been waiting for it.

Eight.

Another message.

Check her bookshelf, Dominic. Third shelf, behind the decorative spines. Wuthering Heights. Pages 112 and 113. Ask her why a woman who swears she never met the man in the stairwell is hiding his photocopy in my building. Ask her, carefully. She's better at this than you are. You have fourteen minutes before she leaves her desk for the day. Count them.

Nine.

I stood in my office with the skyline burning gold behind me, and I understood that I was being played, that whoever this was had handed me a loaded gun and aimed it at the one person in my building I had decided, against forty years of training and one night of hot chocolate, to carry something for.

The message was not information.

It was an instruction. And the worst part, the part I would take to bed with me for weeks, was that some traitorous fraction of me did not want to obey it. Wanted instead to call her in, show her the screen, and ask her to explain it to me like I was a man she could trust.

Ten.

I took my suit jacket off the hook. I took the private elevator. And I counted, the way my grandfather taught me on those stairs, one step, one number, never show them your pulse, all the way up to thirty.

NORA

The last hour of my first day, Dominic's office door stayed shut, and the silence coming through it had a texture. Like a held breath. Like weather coming.

At 6:02, my phone buzzed. Unknown number. My whole body flinched before I looked.

You have fourteen minutes. He's coming. Don't run, he'd only chase you, and you know how he loves a chase. Whatever he asks, the truth will hurt less than the lie this time. — a friend

I stared at it until the words blurred. He? He who? My thumb hovered to type back Who is this? and then the elevator at the end of the hall chimed, and Dominic Blackwood stepped out carrying nothing, wearing his coat, and I knew with the cold clarity of a woman who had grown up poor that no CEO visits an assistant's desk at 6:04 p.m. wearing his coat.

"Walk with me," he said.

We walked. The residential elevator, the brushed-steel silence, him standing a careful three feet away, watching the floor numbers the way a man watches an opponent's hands. Thirty. The doors opened onto the hushed hallway of the floor where I lived now, in a home I had not earned, twenty floors below his, and he followed me to my door.

"Ms. Vance." He stopped me with the words, not a touch. His voice was level. Practiced. The midnight voice with the CEO screwed down over it. "This morning I asked you a question, and you looked me in the eye and gave me an answer. I want you to know something before I ask you anything else." He finally looked at me, and what was in his eyes was not anger. It was worse. It was disappointment that hadn't decided what it wanted to become. "I deleted a camera log for you last night. I shredded a guard's report. This morning I told myself it was strategic. That you were a thread to a shareholder, worth protecting." A pause. "Fourteen hours ago I could not have told you why I really did it."

My heart was slamming so hard I was sure he could see it. "Mr. Blackwood—"

"You called me Dominic, once," he said. "Last night. Under your breath, when you thought the doors had closed." He watched that land. I hadn't known I'd done it. "Here's my question, Nora. Just one. And before you answer, remember that I have been lied to by experts since I was eight years old, and I can always tell. The only variable is what it costs."

He stepped closer. Not threatening. Tired, maybe, underneath the control. A man who had counted to ten in an elevator and lost.

"Last night, in my stairwell. Did you take anything from the man you didn't meet?"

And there it was. The trap with my name on it, exactly as the message had promised. The truth will hurt less than the lie. I thought of the photocopy behind the decorative spines. I thought of my brother asleep twenty feet away. I thought of my grandfather's forged signature and the word beneficiary in a Delaware filing, and I opened my mouth to answer—

A sound stopped me.

From inside the apartment. Soft. Deliberate. The click of a door being closed by someone who knew exactly how loudly doors normally closed.

Dominic heard it too. His head turned before mine did. In one motion he moved me behind him, actually put his body between me and my own front door, the same way he had with Preston, as if this reflex of his had no off switch, and drew a slim black keycard from his pocket. His voice dropped to a whisper.

"Is Theo home?"

"No. He's at the university until nine. Library."

"Then your apartment is empty." He held up a hand. Listened. "It was supposed to be."

He swiped the door and it swung open on darkening rooms and the orange glow of the city through thirty floors of glass, and everything looked exactly as I had left it that morning, the blankets on the couch, Theo's sneakers by the door, the kitchen counters sterile and shining, everything except one thing.

The bookshelf.

The decorative books stood untouched, row on row of leather spines nobody reads. But the shelf was wrong by two inches. Someone had slid the whole row aside, removed one hidden paperback, and put the rest back with a neatness so perfect it was itself the fingerprint, because I had shoved my books in behind the others in a hurry, and I would never, in my life, have lined them up again with a ruler.

Wuthering Heights lay on the coffee table. Centered. Open. Facedown on page 113.

And in the middle of the open page, where the photocopy used to be, sat something that had not been in my apartment this morning.

A key. Old, brass, heavy as a secret, with a green paper tag wired to the bow, and on the tag, in that same elegant, looping, impossible handwriting—

For the study. Ask Nora Vance's grandfather where he hid it. — R.B.

Dominic went very still beside me. I watched him read the initials. I watched his face do the thing I had seen once before, in an elevator, the flicker that was there and gone, except this time it didn't go. This time it stayed, and grew, and became something I had never seen on Dominic Blackwood before.

Fear.

"Nora." His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "Why would someone break into my building, dodge my cameras, leave a calling card in a dead man's handwriting—" He turned, and his eyes found mine in the dark, and I watched him ask the question he had come here to ask, the real one, the one the stranger had wanted him to ask all along. "And hide it in your book?"

My phone buzzed in my hand. Unknown number. One line.

Now you both have something to hide. Welcome to the family, you two.