Chapter Three: What Was Left Under the Door

NORA

I do not remember standing up.

One moment I was holding the phone against my ear, listening to my little brother's breathing go fast and thin. The next I was halfway to the door of Dominic Blackwood's office, my apron strings tangled around my wrist, saying "Theo, listen to me" in a voice I did not recognize.

"Nora, I'm scared."

"I know. I know you are. Lock the bathroom door. Take your phone and stay on the line with me. Don't open the front door for anyone. Not anyone, Theo."

"What does he mean, he knows who you are?"

"I don't know."

That was the lie I told my brother, and it tasted like metal.

A hand closed around my elbow. Not hard. Dominic was beside me, his face unreadable, already pulling his phone from his jacket.

"Julian," he said into it. "Get a security team to Ms. Vance's address. Now. Nobody touches anything. I'm bringing her myself."

"Mr. Blackwood, you don't have to..."

"I wasn't asking."

Eleven minutes later I sat in the back of a black car that smelled like leather and money, my knee bouncing so hard it rattled the door. Dominic sat beside me with his hands folded, watching the city slide past the tinted glass. He had not said a word since we left the garage.

Then, without turning his head, he said, "Who would come looking for you?"

"I don't know."

"A woman with no enemies doesn't get a visitor who says he knows who she really is."

"Maybe it's a debt collector." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "My father left some debts when he died. They find me every few years."

It was a good lie. It was even partly true. My father had left debts, and collectors had found me. But Dominic's eyes slid to my face and stayed there for two long seconds, and I understood that he had heard exactly what I had not said.

"A debt collector," he repeated.

"Yes."

"Hm."

That was all. The car turned onto my street, and my chest tightened.

DOMINIC

The building was a five-story walk-up in Queens, brick the color of old tea, with a stoop that someone had tried to brighten with a pot of dying geraniums. I had a security team in the lobby before the car stopped moving.

By the time I reached the third-floor landing, the report was already waiting. No one in the hallway. No one on the stairs. The man had been gone for at least twenty minutes.

Nora pushed past me and pounded on a door at the end of the hall. "Theo! It's me, open up!"

The door flew open. A tall boy with her stubborn jaw and a hoodie two sizes too large threw himself at her. She held him like she was holding the last solid thing in the world.

I stood in the doorway and watched, and something inside me tightened in a way I did not enjoy.

"Mr. Blackwood," said the head of my security detail quietly, stepping up beside me. "There was something left at the door."

He held out a plain white envelope. No stamp, no name. Gloved fingers had already opened the flap.

Inside was a single photograph.

It was old, the colors faded to a soft amber. Two young men stood in front of a narrow storefront with a hand-painted sign above the door. I knew the building. It was in the framed archive on the wall of my own boardroom. The first office of Blackwood Global, forty-six years ago.

The man on the left was my grandfather, Richard Blackwood, thirty years younger than I had ever known him, grinning with an ease I had never once seen on his face. He had his arm slung across the shoulders of the other man.

I did not recognize the other man. He was shorter, with kind eyes and a mess of unruly hair, laughing at something outside the frame.

I turned the photograph over. Four words had been written on the back in black ink.

He trusted the wrong man.

My mouth went dry. I turned the photograph back over and studied the stranger's face, searching for a name, a memory, anything.

"Who is he?" I murmured.

"Mr. Blackwood?" Nora had come up beside me, one arm still around her brother. "What is that?"

I held out the photograph. "Do you recognize him?"

NORA

I looked at the picture for exactly one second.

That was all it took. The unruly hair. The crooked smile. The way he held his shoulders, as if the whole world were a joke he was in on. I had seen that face in a single faded photograph on my mother's mantel. I had seen it in a lawyer's file two days ago.

Walter Vance. My grandfather. Standing arm in arm with Dominic Blackwood's grandfather, the two of them barely older than I was.

My blood turned to ice.

"No," I said. "I've never seen him before."

It was the steadiest lie I had ever told. Dominic's eyes searched my face. I kept it perfectly blank, the way I had learned to do in six years of being invisible.

I thought I had gotten away with it.

Then Theo, my sweet, exhausted, terrified little brother, peered over my shoulder at the photograph and said in a small, puzzled voice, "Nora, that's weird. Why do they have a picture of Grandpa?"

The hallway went silent.

Dominic did not move. He did not look at me. He turned his head very slowly toward my brother, and when he spoke his voice was soft, almost gentle, and far more dangerous than anything he had said in the elevator.

"Grandpa," he repeated. "Theo. What was your grandfather's name?"