Chapter 9

Too Close to the Fire

The black sedan didn't move.

"Inside. Now," Reyes said, already stepping between Vivienne and the street, one hand pressed lightly to her back, guiding her firmly toward the studio door. Damian was right behind them, his own body angled protectively, his eyes locked on the idling car at the end of the block.

They got inside and locked the door. Reyes moved to the front window, staying carefully back from the glass, watching.

"It's leaving," he said after a long, tense minute. "No plates visible. Professional job, whoever it was, knew exactly how to avoid a clean shot from any camera on this street."

The fake fire alert, Vivienne said, her heart still hammering. "It wasn't random. It was to get me outside. In the open."

"That's my read too," Reyes said grimly.

Damian's phone buzzed. He glanced at it, and his face went hard.

"Another email," he said, turning the screen toward Vivienne. "Same address as last night."

The message was short.

Good instincts, staying inside won't save you forever. Ask your husband what his uncle really found in those records. Some debts don't disappear just because you signed a marriage contract, Mrs. Voss. Some debts follow blood.

Vivienne sat down hard on the studio's old workbench, her hands shaking too badly to hold her own phone anymore.

"They're not trying to scare me off the marriage anymore," she said quietly. "This isn't about the deadline or the board vote. This is something else. Something bigger."

"I think," Damian said slowly, "we stopped being two separate targets somewhere around last night. Whoever is doing this wants us both scared, both watching our backs, both too distracted to dig into whatever my uncle found before he died."

"Then we don't get distracted," Vivienne said, lifting her chin, some steel returning to her voice even as her hands kept trembling. "We do the opposite of what they want. We dig harder."

They spent the next two days barely leaving Damian's apartment, Reyes and two additional security men stationed discreetly around both buildings, while Vivienne and Damian pored over everything they could find: old company archives, digitized land records, a box of his uncle's personal effects that Margaux had kept sealed in storage for eleven years and finally, tearfully, handed over.

It was slow, careful, and frustrating work. And somewhere in the middle of the second sleepless night, surrounded by paper and dust and eleven-year-old secrets, something shifted between them that had nothing to do with contracts or deadlines at all.

"You don't have to stay up with me," Damian said around two in the morning, watching Vivienne rub her eyes over a stack of old deeds. Go to bed. I'll keep going.

"I'm not leaving you alone with this," she said simply. "Not after everything you told me on the doorstep. We're in this together, remember?"

Something in his face went soft in a way she was starting to recognize the version of him that only came out when nobody else was watching, the version Claire had probably never fully gotten to see, the version he seemed to be handing to Vivienne a little more freely with every day that passed.

"I keep waiting for you to change your mind," he admitted quietly. About all of this. About me. This isn't what either of us signed up for six days ago. No, Vivienne agreed. "It's not." She reached across the pile of papers and took his hand. "But I keep noticing that every time things get harder, I don't want to run. I want to stay and figure it out with you. That's new for me. I've spent two years handling everything alone. Telling myself that was the only way to prove I could hold my whole world together by myself. She squeezed his hand. "I don't think I want to do it alone anymore. Not with you." He kissed her then, slow and certain, papers forgotten between them, and for a little while, the danger circling both their lives felt very far away.

It didn't stay far away for long.

Vivienne's phone rang at four in the morning. Renata's name was on the screen, and something about the hour made her stomach clench before she'd even answered.

"Renata? What's wrong?"

Vivi, Renata's voice was shaking, breathless, like she'd been running. "Someone broke into the studio. Twenty minutes ago. I was working late on the Whitfield frame. I heard glass break in the front. I hid in the back office and called the police."

"Are you hurt? Renata, are you hurt?"

"I'm fine, I'm okay, they didn't find me," Renata said, her voice cracking. "But Vivi, they didn't take anything. No cash, no equipment, nothing valuable was touched. They went straight for your father's old filing cabinet. The one with the business card. They tore through every folder until they found what they wanted, and then they just left. Like they knew exactly what they were looking for.

Vivienne's blood ran cold. Did they get it? The card. The photograph files.

There was a long pause on the line.

"Vivi," Renata said quietly. "They took everything with your father's name on it. Every folder. Every old invoice. Even his handwritten notebooks from twenty years ago. It's all gone."

Vivienne closed her eyes, her whole body going numb, Damian's hand finding hers in the darkness of the apartment as he watched her face crumble in real time.

"They didn't want to scare us this time," she whispered once the call ended, staring blankly at the wall. "They wanted to erase him. Every piece of proof my father ever knew anything at all."

"Which means," Damian said grimly, already reaching for his own phone, dialing Reyes, "whatever your father knew, it's still dangerous enough, eleven years later, that someone's willing to break into a building at four in the morning rather than risk us finding it first."

Reyes answered on the first ring. Damian didn't even wait for a greeting.

"Get everyone to the studio. Now. And get someone to Renata Cruz immediately; she's not safe alone there." He listened for a moment, his jaw tightening further with every second. "What do you mean the security footage is gone too?"

Vivienne's stomach dropped through the floor.

"They wiped the cameras," Damian said, lowering the phone slightly, his face gone pale. "Whoever did this had access to erase the footage remotely. That's not a random break-in, Vivienne. That's someone with real resources. Someone with access inside actual security systems. He met her eyes, and for the first time since she'd met him, she saw something close to real fear behind his careful composure. "That kind of access doesn't belong to Sabrina Cole. And it's bigger than anything my cousin has ever had the resources to pull off alone."

"Then who?" Vivienne asked, though some cold, sinking part of her already suspected the answer.

Damian's phone buzzed one more time. A new email. Same anonymous address.

He opened it with shaking hands, and turned the screen so she could see.

It wasn't a threat this time. It was a recent photograph, clearly taken within the last hour, timestamped just after Renata's break-in call. It showed the inside of Vivienne's studio, dark and disturbed, drawers hanging open, papers scattered across the floor.

Standing in the middle of the wreckage, caught mid-frame like he wanted to be seen, was a man Vivienne had never met in person, silver-haired, sharply dressed, holding one of her father's old notebooks casually in one hand like a trophy.

Underneath the photograph, a single line of text.

Your father kept better notes than either of you realize, Mrs. Voss. I finally have what I came for. Ask your husband if he's ready to find out what his family really did to mine and what it's going to cost both of you now that you know where to look.

The signature beneath it made Vivienne's blood run completely cold.

Weston Hale.