Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 41 - Chapitre 50

Damon expected the investigation to take a few days. He had dealt with enough people who tried to hide money, marriages, companies and entire second lives to know that nobody disappeared completely once they had enough records attached to their name. Wren Calloway, however, seemed to be the exception. By the time the first report reached his desk, there were nearly three hundred pages of information about her, and somehow none of them told him anything useful. She had been educated in Geneva. Her business registrations were clean. Her financial records stretched across several European institutions and matched the companies listed under her name. There were customs records for perfume shipments, property records, travel records, contracts with luxury houses and enough documentation surrounding Calloway's growth to satisfy an accountant who had been awake for three nights. Her apprenticeship with Henri Beaumont was there too, along with photographs from industry events and signed agree

Damon dreamed about Mira again.He had stopped expecting her to visit him in his sleep. The dreams had become less frequent over the years, and when they came, they usually left him with the same dull ache that stayed for an hour or two after waking. He had learnt to live with it. He had learned not to reach for his phone in the middle of the night, not to stare at the empty side of the bed, and not to wonder where she would be if she had survived. There were questions he had buried so deeply that he rarely allowed himself to remember they existed.That night, she was standing in the kitchen of their old house.Damon knew the room before he looked around properly. The cream curtains were still there. The little wooden table Mira had insisted on buying even though he had told her they already owned three perfectly good tables. There was a mug beside the sink, the chipped one she refused to throw away because, according to her, it was still capable of holding coffee and therefore had no

Wren knew Damon was getting too close even before he asked another question, because his focus had shifted. He no longer watched her only at meetings or when she was talking to one of his executives. He watched her when he thought she wasn't looking, and Wren had spent too many years learning how people acted when they thought no one was looking to mistake that for coincidence. Damon had known how to make her feel invisible three years ago. Now he is doing the opposite, and somehow that is worse. She sat alone in her office that afternoon with the door closed, a folder open across her desk and a cup of coffee growing cold beside it, while the city moved beyond the windows and she went through the documents Lucian had managed to obtain. He had spent weeks tracing payments through three subsidiaries, following names that appeared harmless until they appeared together. One of those names belonged to a former Wrexley executive who had signed off on the audit that destroyed her father's c

Damon stayed in his office long after everyone else had left the floor, and the photograph on his desk had been there so long that he had stopped noticing the weight of it until that evening. It was an old photograph of Mira, taken before the wedding, before the arguments, before the night at the bridge had turned into the last memory he had of her. She was sitting on the edge of a stone wall with her hair pulled over one shoulder, smiling at whoever had taken the picture. Damon remembered the day because she had spent half of it complaining about the wind and the other half trying to convince him that she looked terrible in photographs. She had been wearing a white blouse, jeans, and the small gold earrings he had bought her in Milan. He had teased her about the way she kept moving her hair because she hated anyone seeing the scar behind her left ear.He remembered the scar clearly.It was small, pale, and slightly curved, almost hidden unless her hair was tied back. Mira had never b

Killian had spent most of the night telling himself that the conversation with Wren had meant nothing, which might have worked if he had been able to stop thinking about it. He had tried sleeping first, then working, then opening a bottle of wine he barely touched before abandoning it on the kitchen counter. By two in the morning, he was sitting at his desk with his phone in one hand and an old cardboard box beside him, staring at photographs he had not looked at in years. Most of them were ordinary. Mira laughing at a restaurant. Mira standing beside Killian at a company function with one hand raised to block the camera. Mira holding a paper cup of tea and complaining about the cold in the Wrexley offices even though everyone else had been perfectly comfortable. He had forgotten how many photographs he had taken without thinking about it. At the time, she had been part of his everyday life, which meant he had never imagined there would come a day when remembering the smallest things