CHAPTER 10

“We can't go to the mill,” Adrian said. “It's a trap.”

“It's my sister's life.”

“It's both.” He crossed into the study, close enough now that Amelia could see the exhaustion carved into every line of his face. “If we walk in blind, we lose everything. The folder, Olivia, you. Whoever sent that message doesn't want a negotiation, Amelia. They want everyone who knows the truth in one place.”

“So what do we do? Nothing? Just let the deadline pass and hope for the best?”

“No.” His voice dropped, low and certain. “We go in smart. We go in together.”

Amelia looked at him for a long moment, searching his face for the cold, careful stranger who'd married her in her sister’s place three weeks ago. She couldn't find him anymore. Something had shifted since the car, since the hallway, since the message glowing accusingly on her phone screen.

“Why does this matter so much to you?” she asked quietly. “Olivia isn't your wife. I am. This isn't your family blood on the line.”

Adrian was quiet for a beat long, long enough that Amelia felt silence itself become an answer.

“It stopped being about Olivia a while ago,” he said finally.

Amelia’s breath caught somewhere in her chest.

“Adrian…”

“Don’t.” He stepped back before she could reach for him, before either of them could say something neither was ready for yet, something too large for the twenty-four hours currently pressing down on both of them. “Not now. We don't have time for this.”

Amelia swallowed the words she hadn't said, the ones she wasn't sure she was ready to say either, and let the moment pass because he was right.

They spent the next hour bent over the study desk, mapping out what little they knew. The mill sat on the edge of Kingston-owned land, abandoned since before Adrian was born, close enough to the original factory site that Amelia suspected the choice wasn't random at all; whoever had orchestrated this wanted the exchange to happen somewhere already soaked in the family’s oldest sins. Adrian sketched the perimeter from memory, marking two entrances, a loading dock, and a stretch of tree line where a car could wait unseen.

“If we bring people,” he said, “we bring people we trust completely. Which, right now, is a shorter list than I'd like.”

“You. Me.” Amelia hesitated. “Sofia, maybe, if it comes to it.”

“Not my father’s security. Not anyone connected to this house.” Adrian’s jaw tightened. “Which means whatever happens at that mill, it's mostly going to be the two of us.”

Amelia studied the rough map he'd sketched, the loading dock circled twice, the tree line marked with a small, uncertain question mark. “And if it's a trap the moment we walk in? If they take the folder and don't give her back at all?”

“Then we don't walk in without leverage of our own.” Adrian tapped the edge of the desk, thinking aloud. “Copies, not just photographs on your phone, real, physical copies, hidden somewhere they'll never find, with instructions to release them publicly if anything happens to either of us. We make ourselves more valuable alive than dead.”

“You're talking about blackmailing your own father.”

“I'm talking about surviving him,” Adrian said quietly, and something in the flatness of his voice told her exactly how much that admission had cost him.

Margaret had arrived at the villa an hour earlier, unannounced, insisting on seeing the folder for herself before she'd say another word about what she'd found. She'd sat with them in the study for the better part of that hour, quiet and uncharacteristically subdued, before admitting the real reason she'd come.

“I have a lead on the inspector who signed the original safety report,” she'd said. “The real one, before it was altered. If he's still alive, he's the only witness left who could confirm any of this without a single Kingston or Carter fingerprint on it. I'm going to find him myself, tonight, before either of you does something reckless at the mill tomorrow.”

Adrian had argued against it. Amelia had too. Margaret had listened to both of them, thanked them for their concern, and left anyway.

Downstairs, a door opened and closed. Quiet and careful, the way a person moves when they don't want to be heard moving.

Amelia crossed to the window. Below, Margaret’s car pulled slowly out of the driveway, alone, taillights disappearing into the dark.

Nearly an hour passed before Amelia’s phone rang again. She and Adrian had spent it finishing the plan for the mill, the earlier tension between them folded carefully back down and set aside, both of them too aware of the clock now running on two separate emergencies at once.

Not the unknown number.

Margaret.

Amelia answered, hands cold. “Grandma? How did it go? Did you find him?”

“I found him, “ Margaret said, breathless, frightened in a way Amelia had never once heard from her. “The man from the factory records. The inspector who signed off on the original report before it was altered. He's alive, Amelia. He's willing to talk.”

Relief flooded through her first, sharp and dizzying. “Grandma, that's…”

“There's no time for that.” Margaret's voice dropped suddenly to a whisper, urgency bleeding into something closer to fear. “There's a car. It's been parked across the street since I arrived, engine running, and someone just got out of it.”

Amelia’s stomach dropped. “What? Grandma, lock the doors, call the police…”

“I don't think I can outrun them,” Margaret said, and for the first time in her granddaughter’s memory, she sounded genuinely, helplessly afraid. “Amelia, listen to me. If anything happens to me tonight, the inspector’s name is…”

The line went dead.

Amelia stood frozen, the phone still pressed to her ear, the dial tone humming emptily into the silence of the study.

“Adrian.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper. “Something’s happened to my grandmother.”

He was already reaching for his keys.