All Chapters of WHAT HE ERASED: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The box wasn't heavy.That was the part I kept coming back to. Not the humiliation of it. Not Viktor's message, delivered by his assistant at seven in the morning like I was a contractor whose contract had quietly lapsed.Not the fact that I'd woken up in this house for ten years and would not sleep in it again after today. What I couldn't move past was the weight of the box. Or the lack of it. Ten years. One cardboard box. The kind you pick up at a grocery store because nobody had thought to send up something sturdier.A few sketchbooks. A USB drive with five years of archived work. The small framed photograph of my mother I'd kept on the studio windowsill because no one had ever told me I couldn't.And the gold pen the one Viktor had pressed into my hand after my first completed collection, a Thursday evening, the workroom still smelling of fabric dye and warm approval. I'd kept it in my desk drawer for years. Couldn't throw it away.Couldn't use it on anything that mattered either

Natalia Volkov picked a bar I'd never heard of.She'd picked somewhere I'd never been. No windows to the street, lighting so dim you had to squint. Deliberate. She was already in the back corner when I got there, coat on, untouched water in front of her.She looked different. Tired in a way that had settled into her face and stopped being temporary. The last time I'd seen her she'd been composed in the way she always was nothing given away, nothing invited.Tonight the composure was still there but it was working harder than usual. I noticed that before I even sat down."Sit," she said.I did.Her eyes dropped to my stomach for half a second. My whole body locked up. I told myself I was reading into it.I wasn't showing. Seven weeks. There was nothing to see."You look well," she said."You called me down here to tell me that?"The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "You were always direct. I used to tell Viktor that was your best quality." She paused. "He said it was your

Rafael Conti died in a boating accident off the Amalfi Coast seven years ago.Survived by his sister, Elara. Private funeral. No body recovered.I read the article four times. Then I found the obituary in an Italian paper and ran it through a translator and read that too. Same story. Same details. Same photograph younger, but the same jaw, the same set of the shoulders as the man in Aleksei's photo.No body recovered.I put the laptop on the bed and pressed both hands over my face.Someone was walking around using a dead man's name. Running the legal arm of one of Europe's largest fashion conglomerates. Structuring the merger that had just tied Viktor's company to the Conti Group for the next twenty years.And Elara knew.R.C. not who he says he is. Elara knows.Viktor was either part of it or he was walking straight into it. Neither option was good.I didn't sleep. Sky outside went grey and I was still on the floor.I found a charger in the kitchen. Stood in the dark. Forty-eight h