Chapter 6

I didn't sleep on it.

I pulled up Dr. Reeves on my phone at eight in the morning with cold tea going stale on the nightstand and found almost nothing. A profile on the Ashford Group's medical staff page — removed, but cached. Credentials from a private medical college. One published paper, co-authored, seven years ago, on neurological recovery protocols in long-term unconscious patients.

That last part sat wrong.

Not because it was unusual for a coma specialist to have published on coma recovery. Because the paper was co-authored with a researcher at the Ashford Medical Research Initiative.

My mother's foundation.

I put the phone face-down on the bed and looked at the ceiling and counted the things I knew for certain. Nora Voss, twenty-eight, former contract analyst, currently sitting in an estate in Velmoor in the same clothes she'd worn yesterday because she hadn't planned on staying the night. Mother dead six years. Fiancé — ex-fiancé — apparently a surveillance asset. The man she'd been hired to care for apparently did not need caring for in any conventional sense.

That was it. That was the complete list of certainties.

Everything else was a door with no handle on her side.

I got dressed and went looking for Dr. Reeves.

---

She wasn't in the study I'd found her in. The door was closed, locked — I tried it without being subtle about it, because I'd spent enough of my life being subtle and it hadn't protected me from anything. The corridor was empty in that particular Ashford House way, where the emptiness felt staffed.

I found her in the medical wing, writing notes at a small desk outside Adrian's room. She looked up when I appeared. The smile came quickly — practiced, warm, the kind of warm that was a choice rather than a reflex.

"Miss Voss. Did you sleep well?"

"What's your relationship with the Ashford Medical Research Initiative?" I said.

The smile didn't drop. That was the tell. A real smile, surprised, would have shifted — would have done something involuntary. Hers stayed exactly where it was, like something nailed in place.

"I'm sorry?"

"The research initiative. You co-authored a paper with one of their researchers. Seven years ago." I kept my voice even. The tone I used in meetings when I'd found a discrepancy in an import document and needed the other party to know I'd found it before they'd decided what to do about it. "I was curious how that relationship developed."

She set her pen down. "I wasn't aware you had a background in medical research."

"I have a background in reading."

A beat. Something moved behind her eyes — not quite calculation, something faster than that. "It was a collegial collaboration. Academic circles are small."

"The researcher you co-authored with worked directly under my mother."

Nothing. Absolutely nothing crossed her face.

Which was, itself, something.

A person who didn't know my mother, hearing that, would have said *your mother?* Would have asked a question, or expressed some version of mild interest. Dr. Reeves said nothing because she already knew. Because the information wasn't new.

"I wasn't aware of that connection," she said.

She was lying. She was lying and she knew that I knew and she was doing it anyway because she'd calculated I couldn't prove it yet.

"Of course," I said. "My mistake."

I walked back down the corridor and felt her watching me until I turned the corner.

---

I needed to see the file she'd been holding.

Not the one on Adrian's desk — the one she'd had in the study. Face-down. The one she'd replaced very carefully before I could read the header.

The study was locked. I'd tried it. But the housekeeper — Mrs. Alcott, sixty-something, the kind of efficient that had stopped requiring thought decades ago — moved through the east wing on a predictable schedule. Seven-fifteen, linens. Eight, the sitting rooms. Nine, anything that needed actual attention.

At eight-fifty I positioned myself near the east corridor with a book I wasn't reading.

At nine-oh-three Mrs. Alcott came through with her key ring.

She unlocked the study to check the windows — they all got checked in the morning, something about the old frames warping — and I followed her in at a distance that I hoped read as vague rather than purposeful.

The desk was clear.

The file was gone.

But the cabinet behind the desk — the one with the drawer not fully closed when I'd come in this morning — that drawer was fully closed now. Locked, I assumed. But the cabinet was old, the kind with a simple bar lock, and the bar lock was on the outside.

Mrs. Alcott went to the windows. I went to the cabinet. I lifted the bar, pulled the drawer open a careful six inches, and looked at the folder inside.

*Patient: Ashford, A. — Medication Administration Log. Q4.*

I photographed every visible page with my phone. Slid the drawer closed. Replaced the bar.

Mrs. Alcott was still at the windows, her back to me.

"Draughty this morning," I said.

"Always is," she said, without turning.

---

I went through the photographs in my room with the door locked and the curtains half-drawn out of some instinct toward caution that had arrived recently and showed no signs of leaving.

The medication log was standard for the first several pages. Dosage, timing, attending signature — Dr. Reeves's initials on every line. Nothing that looked wrong if you didn't know what to look for.

But I'd spent three years processing pharmaceutical import documentation.

I knew what the compounds were. Not all of them — some were standard sedative-adjacent medications used in long-term care. But on the sixth page, appearing first in the third month of the log, was something that didn't belong.

A compound I recognized from my mother's research notes.

Not the antidote compound. The other one. The one Margaret's notes had referred to only by a letter designation — *Compound V* — with a margin note so small I'd almost missed it.

*Do not administer continuously. Progressive neurological suppression. Irreversible above threshold.*

It was in Adrian's medication log.

Small doses. Consistent. Beginning three months after his hospitalization and continuing — I counted the entries — until six weeks ago.

Six weeks ago the entries stopped.

Six weeks ago, I calculated quietly, was approximately when Adrian would have stopped accepting certain medications of his own initiative.

My hands were not steady.

I put the phone down and pressed both palms flat against the desk and breathed through my nose and thought about Dr. Reeves's smile staying exactly where it was. About Elliot's voice going tight on the phone. About a compound in a medical log that my mother had flagged as a neurological suppressant and that someone had been administering to Adrian Ashford for months.

Someone was keeping him down deliberately.

Not just passively benefiting from his condition. Actively maintaining it.

I picked my phone back up and opened my messages and typed to the unknown number that had warned me about the doctor.

*I found the log. Who are you?*

Three minutes.

Five.

Then: *Someone who knew your mother.*

And then, before I could respond: *She was trying to finish something. So are we. But Reeves knows you found the file. You have less time than you think.*

The door handle moved.