CHAPTER 9

“Say that again.”

Amelia’s voice came out steadier than she felt. Adrian stood across the study, the black security card still pinched between two fingers, turning it over as though a second look might change what was printed on it.

“Kingston Holdings private security,” he said again, quieter this time. “That's not a card anyone outside the company could have. Which means whoever ran you off the road tonight didn't just work for someone dangerous. They work for me.”

Amelia sank into the chair by the desk, the adrenaline of the crash finally draining out of her and leaving something colder behind. “Your father.”

“Maybe.” Adrian set the card down carefully, as if it might still be dangerous to hold. “Or someone closer than my father. Someone with enough access to pull a security team without him ever signing off on it.”

Neither of them said the word out loud, but it hung in the room anyway.

A sound came from the hallway. Soft. A voice, low, careful not to carry.

Amelia held up a hand. Adrain went quiet.

They moved to the study door together. Through the gap, Amelia saw her.

Delphine stood near the end of the east hallway, phone pressed to her ear, her back half turned toward them. The corridor lights were dimmed for the night, and she hadn't bothered turning them up, as though she'd chosen this hour, this hallway, this particular shadow on purpose.

“…no, she doesn't know yet,” Delphine was saying, her voice pitched low. “Give me more time. I can manage her.”

Amelia’s stomach dropped. Manage her. Not reassure her. Not talk to her. Manage, the way you managed a problem, a liability, something that required containing.

Adrian pulled the study door shut before Delphine could sense them there, his hand steady on the handle even as his face had gone pale.

“She’s talking about me,” Amelia whispered.

“We don't know that for certain.”

“Who else would it be?”

Adrian didn't answer. His face had gone pale in a way Amelia hadn't seen before, not even the night his father showed up unannounced.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number. Again.

Amelia’s hand trembled as she opened it. A single line of text filled the screen, no greetings, no explanation.

Bring the folder to the old mill by midnight tomorrow, or your sister doesn't come home at all.

Amelia looked up at Adrian.

“They know about the folder,” she said, turning the phone toward Adrian. “Adrian, they know.”

He read it twice. “That's not possible. No one knew you found it except…”

He stopped mid-sentence.

Both of them turned, at the same moment, back toward the closer study door, toward the hallway where Delphine had just been standing, a phone in hand, promising someone she could manage the wrong bride a little longer

“I only told you,” Amelia said slowly, the realization settling over her like ice water. “I photographed it in her room. I didn't tell anyone else. Not Sofia, not my grandmother, not…”

“Not anyone in this house,” Adrian finished quietly. “Which means whoever sent this message either followed you to the estate, or someone here has been watching you far more closely than either of us realized.”

Amelia looked down at the message again, at the deadline glowing on her screen, at the casual cruelty of or your sister doesn't come home at all, typed as easily as someone might type instructions for a delivery.

“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “That's all they're giving us.”

Adrian crossed the room and took her hands in his, his grip firm, grounding, the kind of touch that asked nothing and simply held steady. “Then we have twenty-four hours to figure out who's been feeding them information from

Inside my own house. Starting with my aunt.”

Amelia nodded, whatever Delphine knew, whatever she'd been protecting all these years behind her warm smiles and careful stories about “you and Adrian,” she wasn't just an unwitting bystander in this family’s twenty-five-year silence.

She was one of its keepers.

Adrian was already moving toward the door, his earlier hesitation gone, replaced by something harder. “I'm not confronting her to fight. Not yet. If she suspects we know, she'll warn whoever’s on the other end of that message, and we lose whatever advantage we still have.”

“So we just… watch her? Pretend nothing’s wrong?”

“We watch her,” Adrian said. “And we find out exactly who she's protecting, before the deadline forces our hand.

Amelia’s phone buzzed again in her palm, and for one terrible second she thought it might be a second message, worse than the first. It wasn't. It was Sofia, a single text asking if she was okay, sent hours ago and only now catching a signal.

She didn't answer it. She couldn't, not yet, not with the weight of tomorrow’s deadline pressing down in every second between now and midnight.

And somewhere out there, in a mill Amelia had never seen, her sister was running out of time to find out whether that silence would finally break or bury one more Carter woman before it did.