Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 101 - Chapitre 110

Seraphina's POVI didn't sleep well.By seven a.m. I was already in the kitchen, coffee in hand, replaying the night. The way he'd said we're not finished with this conversation like it was a promise and a threat stitched into the same sentence.I set the mug down and reached for my bag.I had a meeting to survive. Whatever Lorenzo and I were not finished discussing could wait.Heller & Crane Group / 10th Floor Conference RoomThe building's lobby was all polished marble and understated money. Heller & Crane occupied three floors of it, and I'd spent the last eight months navigating its corridors well enough to stop feeling like a trespasser. I knew the assistants by name. I knew which conference rooms ran cold. I knew that my project lead, Davies, always arrived twelve minutes late and expected everyone else to be early.What I didn't know, stepping off the elevator, was that everything was about to

Lorenzo's POVShe came to me before breakfast.That was unusual enough that I paid attention. Vivienne operated on her own schedule, and her schedule rarely included anything before ten. But she was at my study door by eight-fifteen, still in her silk robe, her hair pulled back in the careful dishevelment she deployed when she wanted to appear unguarded."I want to explain something," she said. "About last night. About Sera."I set down my coffee. "Come in."She sat across from me. Folded her hands in her lap with the practiced composure of someone who had rehearsed the opening and was uncertain about everything after it."You asked me what's between us." She looked at her hands. Then up. "I'll tell you."I waited."When we were young." She paused. As though the memory cost her something. "At Santa Maria. Sera and I were close, the way children are when they don't have anyone else. I trusted her." Another pause

Seraphina's POVThe business card was still in the drawer.I knew because I'd checked twice that morning, which told me more about my state of mind than I wanted to acknowledge. It was just paper. Embossed letters on heavy stock. It wasn't going to do anything on its own.I closed the drawer and went to make coffee.The new deadline landed in my inbox at eight-fifteen.One day. The Alderton secondary exposure report—the same document I'd already spent two late nights restructuring—needed to be finalized, formatted, and submitted to the senior review panel by close of business Friday. Today was Thursday. The original timeline had been Monday.I read the email three times to make sure I was reading it correctly.Then I read the name in the cc field. Sebastian Reyes's assistant. Copied, not sending—just present, just watching, just making sure I understood where the pressure was coming from and who was

Seraphina's POVThe drawer was empty.I opened it once, closed it. Opened it again, the way you do when you've already processed the information but your body refuses to accept it. The folder was gone. Not pushed to the back, not slipped beneath the drawer liner---gone. Gone as cleanly as if it had never been there. No scuff marks on the wood from a hasty grab. No displaced pens, no disturbed paperclips. Whoever had come for it had known exactly where to look, and they had taken their time.I called building security from the kitchen, one hand wrapped around a mug I hadn't drunk from. The guard on duty---a heavyset man named Dermott who'd been covering the overnight shift when I first moved in---told me what I'd already suspected. The lobby camera had gone dark for two hours, starting at eleven forty-two p.m. and resuming at one fifty-seven. No record of unauthorized entry. No record of anything."Technical fault," Dermott said, with the

Seraphina's POVI'd been inside the Vitale estate once before, briefly, moving through rooms that announced themselves in the language of old money and deliberate intimidation—marble, dark wood, the kind of silence that had been engineered rather than allowed to develop naturally. The main rooms were built to make people feel the weight of who lived here before they'd said a single word.The study was different. Smaller. A desk that had actually been used, its surface carrying the faint geography of work—a pen left uncapped, a stack of folders with a legal pad wedged beneath them, a coffee cup that hadn't been cleared away. Bookshelves that held books that had been read, their spines creased and uneven. One window looking out onto the back garden, light coming through it at an angle that had nothing to do with aesthetics.Lorenzo was standing when I came in. He didn't move to meet me, just watched me cross the room with that particul