Chapter 8.

He’d added something new. A printed still from the security footage — Victor Reyes’s face, pinned dead center, a red line connecting him to at least four other photographs she didn’t recognize.

“You should be resting,” Damian said without turning around.

“So should you.”

“I don’t rest well when a ghost from ten years ago just resurfaced and put your father in a hospital bed.” He tapped the photograph. “Victor Reyes disappeared the week after my father died. No forwarding address, no paper trail, nothing. I spent two years trying to find him and gave up when every lead ran cold. And now he shows up assaulting Richard Bennett in a parking garage like no time passed at all.”

“Which means someone’s been protecting him. Hiding him. All this time.”

“Which means someone’s still afraid of what he knows.” Damian finally turned to face her, and the exhaustion on his face made him look younger, less like the untouchable CEO from the magazine covers and more like a man who’d been carrying something heavy for far too long alone. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly.”

“Okay.”

“Did your father ever mention the name Reyes? Before tonight — at any point?”

Mia searched her memory, sifting through years of half-remembered conversations, offhand comments she’d never thought twice about. “No. Never.” She hesitated. “But he did say something once, years ago, when I was still in high school. I found him drunk at the kitchen table — this was maybe eight months after everything fell apart with Cross Enterprises — and he said, ‘Some debts don’t go away just because you paid them.’ I asked what he meant and he told me to forget I’d heard it.”

Damian’s expression sharpened. “That’s the same phrase he used tonight. Almost exactly.”

“You think it means something specific.”

“I think your father has known for ten years that the fraud investigation was rigged, that someone besides him walked away clean, and he’s been too afraid to say who.” Damian moved to his desk, pulling out a leather folder Mia hadn’t seen before — older, worn at the corners, clearly handled many times over many years. “This is everything I’ve gathered on the collapse of Cross Enterprises. Financial records, internal memos, testimony from the investigation. I want you to look through it. Not because I think you’ll find something I’ve missed.”

“Then why?”

“Because your father trusts you in ways he’ll never trust me. If there’s a name buried in here that means something to him, you might recognize a detail I wouldn’t.”

Mia took the folder, the weight of it heavier than its size suggested. “You’re asking me to investigate my own father.”

“I’m asking you to help me find out who really destroyed both our families.” His voice softened, just slightly. “I know what I’m asking. I know it’s not fair. But Victor Reyes attacked your father tonight, which means whoever’s protecting him is worried enough to escalate. That’s not a person who’s going to wait patiently while we figure things out on our own timeline.”

She opened the folder at the kitchen table an hour later, Damian across from her, both of them working through pages of financial statements and internal emails by the dim light of a single lamp. Most of it meant nothing to her — corporate jargon, numbers she didn’t have the context to interpret. But two hours in, a name on a shareholder memo caught her eye, and she stopped so abruptly that Damian looked up.

“What is it?”

He turned the screen toward her without a word.

Security footage from Reyes’s last known location just came through. He wasn’t working alone tonight. Second man on the recording — facial recognition just matched him to Marcus Vane’s personal driver.

Mia felt the floor drop out from under her for the second time that night.

“He was at the gala,” she whispered. “A few hours before my father was attacked, Marcus Vane was standing three feet away from me, smiling, shaking my hand — while his own driver was helping put my father in the hospital.”

Damian’s jaw was a hard line, his eyes fixed on the memo still clutched in his hand.

“Then we’re not just fighting Serena for the board vote anymore,” he said quietly. “We’re fighting whatever Marcus Vane has spent ten years trying to keep buried — and now that he knows we’re looking, he’s not going to wait for us to find it before he decides what to do about it.”