Chapter Thirteen: The Informant

                  Dominic Steele

"I need everything," I told Lena. "Who knew she was coming, who had access to her contact details, who on the staff has been here long enough to have history with Gerald. All of it."

Lena did not write anything down. She never did. She looked at me with the particular focus she brought to things that mattered, nodded once, pulled her phone from her pocket.

"How fast?" she asked.

"An hour ago," I replied.

She left without another word. That was one of the things I valued most about Lena. She did not require explanation, motivation, or context beyond what was necessary to do the job. She simply moved.

I closed the door to Richard's study, the room I had been using since the gathering ended, walked to the window, stood there without looking at anything outside it.

Sophie's voice in the bathroom this morning was still in my ears. Not the argument, not the part where she told me to get out. The part before that, when her voice had dropped and cracked slightly at the edges, when she said: “I came to find you. The next morning. I came because my wolf was saying things I didn't have words for yet.”

I had been twenty-five years old on a phone call I thought was private.

That was the entirety of it. No malice, no intention, no plan to push her out. Just carelessness, the carelessness of a man who had not yet learned that private spaces in this house were never entirely private, delivering a performance for his uncle that the wrong person overheard.

She had been standing in that doorway.

She had heard it, believed it, made the only decision that felt survivable to a nineteen-year-old who had spent her whole life in this house being told she didn't fully belong in it, got into a car, gone to Los Angeles with nothing, given birth alone, raised a son alone, built an entire life from scratch.

Because I had been careless with twelve seconds of words.

I pressed one hand flat against the window frame.

There was a version of this feeling that wanted to become something loud. I was aware of it. I let it sit without feeding it because loud was not useful and guilt performed for an audience of one was just self-indulgence wearing a serious face.

What I did instead was stay with it plainly. I had caused damage. The damage had a shape, a timeline, a six-year-old boy with my eyes living in Los Angeles who did not know my name. No amount of sitting in Richard's study was going to change any of those facts. The only question worth my attention was what I did from this point.

I pulled out my phone. Rowan had confirmed he was on the first flight to LA. Miriam's number had been forwarded to him already. He would be there by late evening, positioned before Gerald's people could reorganise after whatever the man outside Sophie's building had been sent to do.

The photo of Ethan.

I put my phone face down on the desk.

A knock at the door. "Come in."

One of the younger staff members, Thomas, who had joined the household two years ago. He brought coffee I had not asked for, set it on the desk, and moved to leave.

"Thomas," I said.

He stopped, then he turned. He was twenty-three, polite, eager to do his job without incident.

"How long have you worked here?” I asked.

"Two years, sir."

"Mrs. Harrow hired you?"

A slight hesitation. Not guilt, just surprise at the question. "She processed the paperwork, yes. Mr. Steele, the elder Mr. Steele, he approved it."

"Richard approved your hire directly?"

"I believe so. Mrs. Harrow presented the candidates, he made the final decision." He paused. "Is there something wrong?"

"No," I told him. "Thank you for the coffee."

He left. I did not touch the coffee.

Mrs. Harrow had processed the new staff hires. Which meant Mrs. Harrow controlled the entry points into this household's information structure. Which meant anyone she wanted inside this house was inside it, anyone she wanted to know things knew them, anyone she needed to move information through had been placed deliberately within the flow of daily activity.

Fifteen years. She had been in this house for fifteen years and I had never looked at her carefully because she was efficient, quiet, good at her job, invisible in the specific way that made her indispensable.

Gerald's kind of person exactly.

I heard Lena's footsteps in the corridor before she knocked, the quick purposeful rhythm I recognised. She came in, closed the door, and stood in front of the desk.

"Talk to me," I said.

"Guest list for the funeral went through the main household email system," Lena began, crisp, no preamble. "Mrs. Harrow has administrative access to that system. She has had it for six years." She looked at her phone screen. "Sophie's contact details were in the system because Richard's solicitor submitted them when he sent the funeral notification. Standard procedure." She looked up. "Mrs. Harrow could access all of it within minutes of Sophie's name appearing."

"The second message," I said. "The one sent during the gathering."

"Same number as the first." Lena held her phone toward me. "I ran it, prepaid. Purchased fourteen months ago from a shop in town, registered to no one obviously, but the purchase date is interesting."

"Why?” 

"Fourteen months ago is when Gerald last visited the villa for an extended stay. He was here for three weeks managing some business with Richard." She put the phone away. "I think he brought it for exactly this kind of use."

I sat back in the chair.

Gerald had been carrying a prepaid phone for fourteen months, placed in this house through Mrs. Harrow, available for the precise situation of needing to apply pressure to someone without a traceable line.

That was not a reactive move but an infrastructure, built patiently, maintained quietly, ready to deploy whenever the variable required it.

Sophie had been the variable. She just hadn't known she was one.

"There's more," Lena said.

I looked at her.

She pulled a folded sheet from her jacket pocket, set it on the desk in front of me. I picked it up.

A payment record. Monthly transfers, consistent, going back four years, from an account registered to a property management company Gerald controlled into a personal account.

The personal account belonged to Margaret Harrow.

"Secondary salary," Lena said quietly. "Gerald has been paying her separately for four years. Same month every month. The amount is not large enough to look suspicious in isolation. It only becomes visible when you line it up against Gerald's other outgoings."

I set the paper down.

Fifteen years in this house. Four of them on Gerald's payroll. Every staff hire, every administrative access point, every piece of information that moved through the household structure, flowing through a woman who had been reporting to my uncle the entire time.

"Where is she now?" I asked.

Lena checked her phone. "Kitchen, evening prep."

I stood up.

"Sir," Lena said quickly. "Before you go in there. She sent a third message twenty minutes ago."

I stopped. "To Sophie."

"No." Lena turned her phone screen toward me. "To Gerald."

I read it.

*She knows you're looking for the boy. She's made arrangements. He's been moved.*

I put the phone down on the desk very carefully.

Then I walked to the door, opened it, and went down the corridor toward the kitchen.

Mrs. Harrow was standing at the far counter when I walked in, her back to me, speaking to one of the kitchen staff about tomorrow's breakfast arrangements, her voice as calm as it had been every morning of the fifteen years she had worked in my family's house.

She heard me enter, then turned.

Her face did the thing faces did when they encountered something they had been preparing for, a micro-adjustment, a resettlement of expression into neutral.

"Mr. Steele," she said pleasantly. "Can I help you with something?"

I closed the kitchen door behind me.

The other staff member looked between us once. Then found somewhere else to be.

"I think," I told Mrs. Harrow quietly, "that you and I need to have a conversation you are not going to enjoy.”