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78 Capítulos

Chapter Seventy

PuertoThe storage unit on the Bermondsey industrial estate cost sixty pounds a week, and I paid it in cash from the sale of the last cufflinks my father ever gave me.It was a metal box ten feet by eight, with a rolling door that shrieked on its runners and a bare bulb that I had hung from a nail. In the first week I had used it to store the few pieces of furniture that the bailiffs had overlooked, but by the third I had cleared it out entirely and begun to build something else. I told myself that it was a research room, a place to organise the information that the organisation demanded, and I believed this for exactly as long as it took me to pin up the first photograph.Now the walls were solid with her.I had covered every inch of corrugated steel with pictures, arranged in careful grids and linked by lengths of red string that I had bought at a haberdasher’s. There was Isabella at the foundation luncheon and Isabella on the steps of the Lancaster and Isabella at the window of the

Última atualização : 2026-11-02

Chapter Seventy One

LeilanaI told myself that I was not afraid as I rode the lift to the penthouse floor in Isabella’s stolen name, and I held that thought for exactly eleven floors.The black dress had been chosen to make me invisible, with a hem to the knee and a collar to the throat, and I wore a mousy brown wig and a pair of plain spectacles that Eliana had found in a charity shop. My hands were sheathed in thin leather gloves, and the little flash drive lay inside the lining of my handbag where I could feel its edge against my palm. The cloned badge hung from my neck on a green lanyard, and it flashed its small light as I approached the penthouse door.I had not wanted to come. After the message on my laptop, the one that thanked me for arriving so exactly on schedule, I had lain awake for two nights with a dread that no wine could dull. Someone had written our scheme before we devised it, and the thing that terrified me was that I could not tell whether we were being led toward a prize or a pit. E

Última atualização : 2026-11-02

Chapter Seventy Two

HaleDorian Hale had performed a thousand sweeps of a thousand rooms in thirty years, and he had never once dreaded opening a drawer until that evening.It was the routine inspection that he conducted every Thursday at dusk, a ritual he had begun after the second attempt on Travis’s life. He moved through the penthouse with a handheld scanner and a notebook, checking windows and ventilation shafts and the undersides of tables, and the staff had long since learned to step aside with polite blankness. He had saved the dressing room for last, because he disliked intruding on its quiet, and he stood a moment in the doorway before entering, watching the soft light play on a row of folded silks.The guard who had reported the smell of smoke from the closet had come to him an hour earlier, a pale young man named Kellan with a nervous tic beneath his left eye. He had said that he thought something was smouldering, and he had said it in the stiff careful tone of a boy reciting a lesson, and Ha

Última atualização : 2026-11-03

Chapter Seventy Three

IsabellaThe summons came on the second evening after our return from Switzerland, and it was delivered by Hale, who stood in the doorway of the dressing room with his eyes fixed on a point just above my head.I had spent the two days since the storm lifted in a state of brittle calm that frightened even me. The mountain tower above Montreux had led Scott and the guards to an abandoned shepherd’s hut with a stove still warm and a single tin cup on the table, and nothing else except a tiny crescent drawn in the dust of the windowsill. Beatrix had been there and gone within the hour, and Scott had stood in that bare room with his hand pressed flat against the wall as though he could feel her pulse through the wood. I had watched him from the doorway and had understood that grief and hope can wear the same face.Travis had returned from London the day before me, and he had barely spoken since. He moved through the penthouse like a man carrying a full glass across a crowded room, and he s

Última atualização : 2026-11-03

Chapter Seventy Four

TravisThe emerald had not stopped glittering since she left it, and I had not stopped looking at it.I sat at the console table in the dim foyer with my elbows on my knees and the ring in the centre of my palm, turning it so that the facets caught the light and threw small green shards across the ceiling. It was still faintly warm, and I told myself that this was the heat of the lamp, because the alternative was a kind of weakness that I could not afford. The penthouse had never been so silent, and the sound of the lift descending with her inside it had lodged in my ears like a note from a cracked bell.I had done the only thing that I could do, and I had done it with all the grace of a man amputating his own arm. The seal on the cream envelope that Hale carried to a courier an hour earlier bore my father’s falcon, and the message inside it was a lie addressed to the Baron. I had written that I was a broken man with a failing marriage and a traitor in my

Última atualização : 2026-11-05

Chapter Seventy Five

IsabellaThe house in Kensington was so quiet that I could hear the sound of my own blood.It stood at the end of a pale terrace behind a high wall of wisteria, five storeys of cream stucco and tall windows that looked onto a private garden. Scott’s family had owned it since the Regency, and every room bore the faint polish of centuries of care, the soft glow of old wood and the dull gleam of silver that no one had ever needed to display. A housekeeper in a grey cardigan, who introduced herself as Mrs. Pargeter’s niece, had received me at the door with a hot water bottle and a warm and wordless smile, and she had shown me to a bedroom on the second floor where a fire already burned.I had expected to feel safe, and I had expected the safety to be a relief. Instead I stood in the middle of the blue carpet with my case at my feet and a strange hollow ache beneath my ribs, and I realised after several minutes that it was the stillness itself that fright

Última atualização : 2026-11-05

Chapter Seventy Six

The ShowerElianaThe invitations had gone out on cream card embossed with silver storks, and Mrs. Moore had personally written every address in her spidery copperplate hand.The shower was to be held at the Hampstead house on a grey Sunday afternoon, and she had spent four days preparing it with the grim intensity of a woman rallying a failing army. Thirty-five guests had accepted, which she considered a triumph, and which I considered evidence that London’s matrons had missed the drama of a Moore scandal more than they feared its contagion. The drawing room had been transformed with swags of pale yellow tulle and bowls of white freesia, and a table along the window groaned beneath a pyramid of boxes wrapped in pastel paper.I sat in a high-backed chair at the head of the room like a queen receiving tribute, wearing a flowing lemon silk dress that hid the extra weight of the pad at my waist. I had redesigned the apparatus three times since the hosp

Última atualização : 2026-11-06

Chapter Seventy Seven

TravisThe burgundy had sat untouched on the sideboard for an hour after Karina left, and I did not stop looking at it until I had drunk myself past the point where looking mattered.She had refused to say more. She set down her glass, laid two fingers against my sleeve, and told me that a woman who had lived five years in a house with no windows had learned to ration her truths like water in a desert. The body in my mother’s coffin had never been viewed by anyone who loved her, she said, and the person who might still explain why was not yet safe to name. Then she had walked out and left the lift doors sighing shut behind her, and I had poured the first whisky without noticing that my hand was shaking.By eleven o’clock the study smelled of peat and cold ashes, and I sat on the floor with my back against the desk and Isabella’s emerald ring clenched in my fist until its setting bit into my palm. I had told myself that the performance was neces

Última atualização : 2026-11-06

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