Alle Kapitel von The Impostor Heir: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

He led her through a side door off the main room and into a narrow corridor that ran behind the kitchen. The noise of the dinner dropped to a muffled hum behind them. The corridor had no artwork, no marble, just bare walls painted in a grey that was trying to be neutral and wasn't quite managing it. A single overhead light that buzzed faintly.He turned to face her.In the corridor, without the ballroom's careful lighting and the crowd to perform for, he looked different. Still controlled. But the control was doing more work than it had been at the gala. She could see the effort of it."You got the email," he said.It wasn't a question so she didn't treat it like one. "Photograph of me outside my building. One line about leaving the city." She kept her voice even. "So yes.""And your first response was to come back here.""My first response was to research Seraphina Langford." She watched his face. "Then I came back here."Something moved behind his eyes. He leaned back against the wa

The rooftop garden was nothing like she'd expected.She'd expected something corporate, manicured lines, expensive planting, the kind of greenery that was more statement than living thing. What she found when the elevator doors opened onto the top level was wilder than that. Jasmine climbing a trellis that ran the length of the eastern wall, its white flowers small and persistent in the dark. Raised beds with herbs she could smell before she saw them. Olive trees in ceramic pots as tall as her shoulder. A low stone bench along the railing and the city below it, spread out in every direction like something that didn't know it was being looked at.It was warm up here in the way rooftops sometimes held the day's heat long after dark.Damien was already there.He'd changed out of the dinner jacket. Dark trousers, a grey shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, no tie. He was standing at the railing with his back to her and he didn't turn when the elevator opened, which meant he'd heard

She slept for four hours and woke up feeling like she'd done neither.The coffee shop shift started at seven. She got there at six fifty-eight with her hair still damp and her coat buttoned wrong and fixed it in the reflection of the door glass before she pushed through. The morning crowd was the usual, the regulars who needed caffeine before they could form sentences, the ones who ordered complicated things and stood too close to the counter while they waited, the man who came in every Thursday and tipped well and never made eye contact with anyone, which she found restful.She made coffee and cleared tables and smiled with the specific part of her face required for the job while the rest of her ran on its own track underneath. The rooftop. The locket. His voice saying “some things are more complicated than dead or alive.” The way he'd looked at her through the closing elevator doors.She didn't know what to do with any of it yet so she stacked it in the back of her mind and took ano

He'd suggested the library.Not the café attached to it, not the steps outside it, the library itself, second floor, the reading room at the back where people came to sit quietly and not be found. She'd thought that was either paranoid or professional and had decided, by the time she climbed the stairs and saw him already at a corner table with his back to the wall and a clear line to both exits, that it was both.Daniel Park was younger than she'd expected. Mid-thirties, maybe. The kind of face that was easy to forget on purpose, not remarkable in any individual feature, just arranged in a way that wouldn't snag in someone's memory. He was dressed like someone who'd learned that blending in was a tool. He had a coffee in a paper cup and a closed laptop and his hands flat on the table, which she read as deliberate. Look, I'm not recording. Look, I'm not a threat.He stood when she approached. They shook hands across the table."Liora Rhodes," he said quietly. Not a greeting. More like

The firm was on the fourth floor of a building that had a dry cleaner on the ground floor and a physiotherapy practice on the second and a general feeling of being somewhere that wasn't trying to impress anyone. The elevator was slow and the hallway carpet was the colour of something that had given up. Liora found it all deeply reassuring.The woman who'd answered the phone was named Adanna Cole. She was compact and direct, with reading glasses she kept taking off and putting back on, and the specific manner of a person who had heard many complicated situations and had stopped being surprised by any of them. Her colleague, an older man named Sefton who appeared briefly and then retreated to his own office, had the same quality. A two-person firm that had been doing estate law quietly for twenty years and had no interest in the kind of visibility that made people nervous.Liora sat across from Adanna Cole at a desk stacked with folders and explained the situation.She was methodical. S