CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ADRIAN’S POV

The name appeared in my security team’s report at six forty-three in the morning.

I was already at my desk by then, which had become usual lately. Sleep had grown difficult in the weeks since the Hargrove Summit.

Though, I wasn’t lying awake staring at ceilings. It was more that I kept waking at four or five in the morning with the alertness of someone whose mind had continued working without them even knowing.

I read the report twice before setting it down.

AVA BENNETT RETURNED TO CITY APPROXIMATELY TWO WEEKS AGO. CURRENT ADDRESS: SHORT-TERM RENTAL, LOWER MERIDIAN DISTRICT.

ACTIVITY: MULTIPLE VISITS TO CITY RECORDS OFFICE, WESTBRIDGE MUNICIPAL ARCHIVE, AND THE OFFICES OF A PRIVATE INVESTIGATIVE FIRM ON CALLOWAY STREET.

I sat back slowly.

Ava Bennett. The name had lived in a particular locked compartment of my mind for four years. Not because I had ever disliked Ava, she had always been direct and loyal in a way I found both irritating and quietly admirable. But because Ava was the last person who saw Serena alive, and in the months following the accident, her name had kept appearing in places that made my security team suspicious.

Asking questions, requesting documents, talking to people connected to the bridge investigation.

And suddenly, she left the country quietly.

And now she was back and she was visiting the same municipal archive where my own team had spent the past three weeks trying to reconstruct a complete picture of events.

I stood from the desk and walked toward the window, peeped out to the city below.

The city was beginning its morning. Delivery vehicles, early commuters, the grey-gold light of the financial district before the day fully established itself.

I had stood at this window more times than I could count over the years, usually while thinking about things that got harder to solve. There were more of those lately than at any previous point in my life.

Celeste was out of town on a business reconciliation trip. She was trying her best as I am to get Laurent Group back on a better feet. She had been gone for two days.

A knock interrupted my thought, I opened the door and my head of home security, Floyd, walked in. He closed the door gently behind him as I returned to the desk.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Sir, we did some findings on the investigative firm she visited on Calloway Street.”

By she, I already knew who he meant.

Ava Bennett.

“And?” I asked, looking up to him from my seat.

“It was a small operation. Two former police officers, and they specialize in cold cases and suppressed investigations.” He paused. “One of their known clients over the past three years is a former officer named Martin Reeves.”

I was completely stunned.

Martin Reeves. The same name Damien had mentioned once in passing during a recent conversation we had… a former investigator connected to the Westbridge accident report, the one that had allegedly been suppressed before it reached official channels.

“Martin Reeves used the same firm?” I asked again.

“Yes. But as a contact, not a client. He passed information through them to people he considered trustworthy.” Another pause. “We believe Ava Bennett may have been attempting to reach him.”

I reasoned over that carefully.

Martin Reeves trying to resurface a suppressed report. Ava Bennett back in the city after nearly four years, visiting the same investigative firm. Victor Hale dead under suspicious circumstances forty-eight hours after the Hargrove Summit.

These were not separate threads anymore.

“Is she being watched?” I asked.

“Loosely for now. We don’t have close surveillance without authorization.”

“Keep it loose,” I said immediately. “Don’t move any closer.”

Reeves nodded once.

“And Martin Reeves… where is he?” I asked again.

“That’s the complication.” Floyd shifted slightly. “He dropped off our radar four days ago. Last confirmed location was a hotel near the port district. He checked out and hasn’t been spotted since.”

Four days ago. That was around the same time Victor Hale’s death hit the news.

Someone was moving fast and the pattern was becoming unmistakable.

Information was being sealed, sources were disappearing, and the people trying to uncover the truth about that bridge were being quietly removed from the board before they could reach anything useful.

“Ava Bennett doesn’t know any of this,” I said, more like a question.

“She appears to be operating independently,” Floyd confirmed. “No indication that she was aware that Reeves had gone dark.”

Which meant she was investigating with four-year-old information only, heading toward a thread that had just been cut off.

I sighed slowly.

Four years ago I had been too consumed with everything; the accident, the company, the investigation that went nowhere, the grief I hadn’t been able to properly processed. I had no time to think clearly about Ava’s sudden departure from the city. Her leaving had felt like abandonment at the time, another person walking away from the wreckage of Serena’s death.

It hadn’t occurred to me until much later that the timing of her departure was strange. And now, sitting here with this report in my hand, it occurred to me with uncomfortable force that Ava Bennett leaving the city three months after the accident hadn’t been coincidence any more than the traffic camera failure had been coincidence.

More like someone had moved her out of the way.

“Sir.” Floyd’s voice was careful. “There’s one more thing.”

He crossed the room and placed a second document on the desk beside the first. A printed screenshot, slightly grainy, time-stamped from two days ago.

I looked at it.

Ava Bennett was standing outside a building I recognized immediately. Not the investigative firm on Calloway Street, nor the municipal archive.

It was Arden Tower.

My chest cringed with a feeling I couldn’t name.

“She was outside Arden Tower?” I asked evenly

.

“For approximately twenty minutes. She didn’t go inside. She stood across the street and watched the entrance.” Floyd paused. “We don’t know why.”

I stared at the photograph for a long moment.

Ava Bennett standing outside Selene Arden’s building.

I thought about Selene at the Hargrove Summit, the careful way she had said look closer to your own circle, more as something deliberate, and aimed at a specific understanding she wanted me to reach on my own.

I suddenly thought about Serena’s last months. Her unhappiness had been a guilt I couldn’t wash off me. The loneliness of a marriage that had slowly become two people living separate lives inside the same house. How often I had come home to find her already asleep, or sitting quietly in a room I hadn’t expected her to be in. The truth is, I had not been good to her.

That truth had lived in the same locked compartment as Ava’s name for four years. Hers was something more complicated.

The recognition that I had allowed things to happen through inaction that I would never have permitted if I had been paying proper attention.

I had been too distracted by ambition to notice what I was losing until it was already gone.

And now something kept pulling at that recognition from a direction I couldn’t fully identify.

But the confusing part is every time I stood near Selene Arden, that locked compartment developed another crack. Something underneath kept registering a familiarity I couldn’t explain and couldn’t dismiss.

I picked up the photograph and looked at it again.

What had she been looking for? I asked myself silently.

“Sir.” Floyd was still waiting.

I set the photograph down. “I want to know everywhere Ava Bennett goes from today. Morning, afternoon, evening.”

“Understood.”

“And get me the relevant informations on Martin Reeves.”

“We’re still—”

“Find him.” My voice came out with more edge than I intended. I moderated it. “He has information that connects to the accident investigation. If he’s gone dark, it’s because someone pushed him there. I want to know where he is before whoever pushed him decides to take it further.”

Floyd nodded and moved toward the door.

“One more thing,” I said.

He stopped and looked back.

“Selene Arden.” I kept my voice completely even. “Has she had any contact with Ava Bennett? Any connection between the two of them at all?”

Floyd considered the question for a moment. “Nothing confirmed. But Miss Arden did visit the same restaurant in the Lower Meridian district where Ava Bennett had a reservation two weeks ago. They were there at the same time.”

The same restaurant, at the same time.

“Was that a coincidence?” I asked.

Floyd looked at me with bare expression. “Unknown, sir.”

I nodded once and dismissed him with a hand gesture.

I stood alone in the room for a long moment after the door closed, the two documents side by side on the desk in front of me.

I picked up my phone, then I set it back down almost immediately.

I looked at the photograph one last time.

Ava outside Arden Tower, watching the entrance. Almost like she was trying to decide something.

I tossed the photograph to the inner end of the table and walked into the bathroom.