LOGINAnastasia’s POV:The house was smaller than I expected.Lucas had built an empire out of glass towers and seventy floor headquarters, and somehow I had absorbed the assumption that everything connected to him would carry that same scale, but the house on Linden Street was a modest two story brick building with a small front garden gone wild from years of neglect, the kind of house a successful but not yet wealthy man bought for his young family before the world decided he was going to be something larger.Lucas stood at the gate for a moment before he opened it.“I’ve not been inside since the week after the funeral,” he said. “I come and stand outside sometimes. I’ve never gone further than the garden.”“You don’t have to go in tonight,” I said.“I do,” he said. “I think I’ve been waiting for a reason for fifteen years and this is it.”He opened the gate.The key still worked, which told its own story about a man who paid someone quietly to maintain a house he could not bring himself
Anastasia’s POV:Marcus’s voice on the phone was tight in a way I recognized from childhood, the particular careful evenness he used when something had shaken him and he was not yet ready to let it show.“What did you find?” I said.“A box,” he said. “Dad’s handwriting on the lid. I never opened it because it was taped shut and I assumed it was old tax records, the kind of thing you keep because throwing it away feels wrong even though you will never look at it again.” A pause. “I opened it tonight because Elena asked me to find her winter coat and it was sitting on top of the box I needed to move.”“Marcus.”“There are letters, Ana,” he said. “Between Dad and a man named Edmund. No last name on most of them. They go back almost twenty five years.”I looked at Lucas across the study.He had heard enough of the call to understand and his face had the particular focus of a man who had spent his entire adult life believing his father’s history was a closed book and was now watchin
Anastasia’s POV:Edmund Salvatore’s study had not been touched in twenty years.Victoria told us this as Diane wheeled her down the hallway toward a door at the back of the house, and I understood as we walked that this wasn’t simply a room she had left alone out of grief. It was a room she had sealed, the way you sealed something you were afraid to look at directly, and the dust on the door handle told its own story before she even turned it.“I come in twice a year,” she said. “To clean. I don’t move anything. I’ve not moved anything in twenty years.”The room smelled like old paper and cedar and the particular staleness of air that had not been properly circulated in a long time. Lucas stood in the doorway for a moment before he stepped inside, and I watched him take in the space the way you took in a place that belonged to someone you had lost before you had any real say in how you would remember them.A heavy wooden desk. A leather chair, cracked now with age. Bookshelves on thre
Anastasia’s POV:Victoria’s house wasn’t the penthouse.I had forgotten that. In six years of marriage, I had been to this house perhaps a dozen times, a stone property on the quiet northern edge of Harlow City that Victoria had kept from before her marriage to Lucas’s father and refused to sell despite every argument that it was impractical for a woman who entertained as much as she did. It had always struck me as the one part of her life that was entirely her own and I had never understood why until I was standing on her front step at night having just climbed through a window an hour earlier.Diane opened the door before we knocked.She looked at me and then at Lucas and stepped back to let us in without a word and the house smelled like the particular combination of old wood and fresh flowers that I remembered from the handful of times I had been invited here rather than to the formal dinners at the penthouse, and something in my chest loosened slightly at the familiarity of it.V
Anastasia’s POV: I did not move for thirty seconds after the call ended. I sat on the couch with my phone in my hand and my sketch notebook open on the cushion beside me and I looked at the door and I thought about the woman who had driven me here, quiet and plain clothed and unremarkable in the specific way of someone trained to be forgotten, and I ran back through every moment of the drive with the particular focus of a woman trying to find something she might have missed. She had not spoken unnecessarily. Had not taken a route I could second guess. Had used a keycard to access the building rather than a key which meant she had access that had been arranged in advance. Had shown me the apartment with the economy of someone who had been here before. All of those things were consistent with a professional doing her job. All of those things were also consistent with someone who knew exactly where she had brought me and who she had brought me for. I looked at the door. The handle
Anastasia’s POV:Simone and I walked out of Salvatore Enterprises into the late morning air and neither of us spoke for half a block and then she said what do you know and I told her about Adrian’s message and she stopped walking entirely in the middle of the pavement and stood there for a moment with her eyes closed and her face doing something I didn’t try to interpret.Then she started walking again.“He didn’t know about the mole?” she said.“No,” I said.“So when he sat in your kitchen and read that folder and told us not to go to Patricia, he wasn’t protecting the senior investigator,” she said. “He was protecting himself from a completely separate exposure.”“Yes,” I said.She walked for another half a block.“That doesn’t fix fifteen years,” she said.“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”“But it’s a different fifteen years than the one I was carrying this morning.”“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”She was quiet for a moment.“I ignored his call,” she said.“I know.”“I’m going to have to talk
Anastasia’s POV:I didn’t sleep a wink.I lay in the dark after Simone finally drifted off on my couch and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about the folder sitting on my nightstand and the phone call and the fake account and the thirty days and at some point around four in the morning I stopp
Anastasia’s POV:I had been staring at my ceiling for three hours when my phone rang.Not Simone, who had called twice already and left one voicemail that I had listened to four times without responding to because I did not have the words yet and Simone deserved better than half of them. Not Marcus
Anastasia’s POV:I read the folder in my car.I did not go home first. I did not call Simone. I sat in the Salvatore Enterprises parking structure on level two with the engine off and the overhead light on and I read every single page while Adrian Cole sat in the passenger seat beside me and said n
Anastasia’s POV:Simone called at exactly eight forty three the next morning while I was standing in my kitchen in my pajamas staring at the coffee machine like it had personally offended me.“Tell me everything,” she said before I finished saying hello. “And I mean everything. Dean told me Lucas c







