MasukNatasha's POV He came home at ten past six, and I knew before the door finished closing. It wasn't anything he did. Ace walked into rooms the way he always did, jacket buttoned, shoulders squared, as if the air had been informed he was coming. It was what he didn't do. He didn't look for me first. He stood in the foyer with his keys still in his hand, staring at the console table like it had said something to him. "Ace." "I told you I'd tell you everything." His voice was careful, the way you carry a glass filled to the brim. "I've done something first. You should hear that before I start, so you don't think I decided it after." "Okay." "I called a man from the car. Reuben Hale. Twenty-two years in homicide, retired, doesn't speak to anyone with a camera. I'm having him look into what happened to Vivienne. Properly this time. Outside the company, outside the family." He finally looked at me. "Marcus hands over what he has, and then he steps back." "Quietly," I said.
Ace's POV I almost believed her. That was the first problem. Noel stood just inside my office door with her bag on her shoulder and let the sentence sit. She didn't repeat it. She didn't dress it up. She had Natasha's face, every line of it, the same mouth, the same jaw, and none of it moved the way Natasha's did. Natasha's face told you things whether she meant it to or not. Noel's gave you only what she'd decided to hand over. "You don't say her name in this building," I said. "I haven't said it yet, sweetheart." Mild as milk. "I said your fiancée." "Then say what you came to say." "Not here." Her eyes went past me to the wall behind my desk, the one my office shared with Marcus's. "There's a man on the other side of that who'd record me breathing if he thought it might help. Tomorrow, four o'clock, the tearoom at the Alder. Alone, Ace. If I see Marcus, or Felix, or some stranger with his phone propped a little too carefully against a laptop, I'll finish my tea and go
Noel's POV Her name was Rosa Delgado, and she'd worked in the Stone household for eleven years before she finally gave her notice and left on her own terms, nobody pushing her out, four years after the night that still, by her own admission, hadn't fully let her sleep. It took me three weeks to find her. Not because she was hiding — she wasn't, she was simply old, and small, and living in a modest apartment two hours outside the city that nobody with real money had any reason to ever drive to. Cassandra's household contacts got me the name. The rest was patience, the one skill I'd genuinely developed these past difficult months, whether I'd wanted to or not. I brought cash the first visit. She didn't take it. I brought groceries the second visit, along with a patience I didn't know I still had in me, and sat with her two hours talking about nothing — her grandchildren, her knees, a garden she could no longer kneel down to tend — before I ever once said Vivienne's name out loud.
Natasha's POV The smoke alarm went off at seven-forty on a Tuesday, which was how I knew, with total certainty, that Ace Stone had never once in his life attempted to make French toast. "It's fine," he said, waving a dish towel at the ceiling like he was negotiating with it. "It's supposed to do that." "It is not supposed to do that." "Char adds flavor." "Char is not a flavor, Ace, char is a warning." I grabbed the broom from behind the pantry door and jabbed the alarm's button with the handle end, laughing too hard to actually hit it on the first three tries, and he stood there holding a spatula like a man defending a position he already knew was lost, egg-soaked bread smoking gently in the pan behind him. The alarm finally quit. The silence that followed had a ringing quality to it, ears still adjusting, and I looked over at him — genuinely one of the most powerful men in the country, standing in his own kitchen in a T-shirt with a flour handprint on one hip, looking pers
Noel's POV The casting director was mid-sentence about a spring campaign — something about "clean, editorial energy" and "not overworking the smile" — when the door at the back of the studio opened without a knock. I noticed him before anyone else did, because noticing things before anyone else did was the entire skill set that had kept me employable for a decade in a business built on being looked at. Gray suit, cheap in a way that didn't try to hide it, a manila envelope held flat against his side like he'd done this exact walk a hundred times and had stopped finding it interesting somewhere around walk forty. "Noel MaCarro?" Twelve heads turned. I felt every single one of them land on me at once, the specific weight of a room's attention shifting all at once from professional to personal, and some old, reliable instinct told me to smile before I'd even decided to. "That's me," I said, light, easy, already half-convinced I could turn this into nothing at all. "You've been
Marcus's POV "You're going to want to sit down for this." Ace didn't sit down. He never did when I said it like that — if anything, saying it made him stand straighter, the particular readiness of a man who preferred to take bad news on his feet. He set his coffee down on the counter without looking at it and folded his arms. "Just tell me, Marcus." "I have someone in place watching Noel MaCarro. Have for a while now." I said it plainly, because there wasn't a version of this conversation where softening the setup helped either of us. "Since the blocked text traced back four blocks from her apartment, I didn't like leaving that as a coincidence. I put a contact on her — nothing invasive, just eyes, in public, wherever she went. Last week, that contact was in a coffee shop when Noel sat down with a man named Devon Ackerly. Former Bloom and Co. intern." Ace's jaw shifted, filing the name. "Go on." "He left the company eight months ago. Deep in debt. My contact recorded the wh







