جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 27

MAYASara called us both in Thursday afternoon, her voice tight enough over the phone that I knew before we arrived it wasn't good news."I found the server." She waited until we were seated. "Derek's father's hedge fund used a private server to generate the forged communications tied to your father's firm. I have the digital fingerprint. Not enough yet to take to the SEC.""How much more do you need?""Two weeks. Maybe less if the next layer confirms what I expect." She turned her laptop screen toward us. Rows of server logs, timestamps, routing data I couldn't fully interpret. "This is careful work. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. That's not Derek. That's his father's people.""But Derek knows." I said it quietly."Derek almost certainly knows." Sara's expression stayed grave. "Which brings me to why I called you in. The threat level has shifted. Whoever's behind this knows you're being investigated now. That changes their calculus."

MAYALiam showed up outside my dorm at six thirty the next morning without being asked, leaning against his car like waiting for me at that hour was the most ordinary thing in the world."You didn't have to come this early." I climbed in."Practice starts at seven. I checked your schedule." He pulled out into the quiet street, the campus still mostly asleep around us. "This is the new normal for a while. I hope that's okay.""It's more than okay. I just don't want you exhausting yourself over my schedule.""I've survived worse than early mornings." He glanced at me, something warm cutting through the vigilance he'd carried since the parking lot. "Besides, I like the quiet drive. Nobody's performing for anyone at six thirty."I didn't tell him not to stop. Some part of me had expected to resist the protectiveness. To insist on independence the way I usually did. But the fear from the broken car window still sat close enough to the surface that his presenc

MAYA I had never seen a house like the Cross family's east wing. It sat at the back of the estate, behind a group of old maples and a gate that clicked softly open for Liam's car. It was low and long and made of pale stone, with tall windows that looked out over a frozen garden. It didn't look like a hospital. It looked like someone had tried very hard to make sure it never would. "She picked everything," Liam whispered as he parked. "The windows, the floors, the paint. My father wanted something smaller. She wanted light." "It's beautiful." "It's her." He came around and opened my door. I climbed out holding a lemon cake in a white box and a bunch of yellow tulips against my chest, trying not to shake. Liam had doubled the guards at the gate after I showed him the text. Sara had checked the car, the cake box, my phone, and even my shoes. We had almost canceled. In the end, Elena had refused, through her nurse, in four words. Bring the cake anyway. "Ready?" Liam asked.

MAYA "Your cousin," I repeated. "Camille." Liam sat down at the far end of the bench, leaving a careful foot of space between us. "My mother's sister's daughter. She flew in from Geneva in early September for one weekend." "You never mentioned a cousin." "I didn't think it mattered. It was two months before the Greystone meeting. I didn't know you. I didn't know any of this would happen." I stared at the stone path. The chapel bell began to toll the half hour, slow and low. "She had just broken up with her boyfriend," he continued. "She showed up at my door at eleven at night, crying. I took her out for a drink so she wouldn't sit alone in my apartment. That's the bar. That's the walk home. She grabbed my arm because she'd had two glasses of wine and the sidewalk was icy." "And the booth?" "She was telling me how he ended it. Over text. Her head was practically on the table." His voice cracked on the last word. "I leaned in because I couldn't hear her over the music."