Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 31 - Chapitre 40

Isla POVCamille didn't want to sit in the coffee shop anymore after that. She asked if we could walk, and I understood the impulse, some conversations need your legs moving or they get unbearable to sit still through,so we left our drinks half-finished on the table and walked the block around the shopping center like two women killing time between errands, except neither of us was pretending that's what this was."The loan thing was first," she said, hands jammed into her sweatshirt pocket. "Before the transfer you found. Years before, actually. I don't even think you and Julian were married yet, or maybe you'd just gotten married, I genuinely can't pin the timing down anymore.""What loan?""He said it was for some equipment financing. Construction stuff, I don't know, cranes or scaffolding or whatever you people need at the start of a project like that. He needed a co-signer and said using me instead of you would be cleaner for some tax reason, keep it separate from marital assets

Isla POVPriya's office wasn't built for three people plus a stack of folders the size of a phone book, so we ended up crowded around her desk instead of the small client chairs, Dorian standing because there wasn't a fourth seat and nobody had thought to ask the dry cleaner downstairs if they had a spare."I want to be clear about something before we start," Priya said, looking mostly at Dorian. "I don't know you. I know you brought her to me, and I appreciate that, but I represent Isla. Not Ferncroft, not your father's estate, not whatever you're trying to untangle on your own side of this. If those interests ever split apart from hers, I walk away from your part of it without blinking.""Understood." He didn't seem bothered by it. If anything, something in his face eased slightly, like her bluntness was a relief after weeks of people either flattering him or resenting him for what his name carried. "I'd expect nothing less.""Good. Now that we'

Isla POVI put off calling Margo Feldman for almost two weeks after I first thought about it, which told me something about how long certain doors stay shut even after you've decided, in theory, to open them.She mentored me straight out of school, back when I was twenty-four and terrified and convinced every drawing I turned in was going to get laughed out of the room. She ran a small firm then, six people total, and she used to make us redraw the same detail four times before she let it near a client, not because the first version was wrong, she always said, but because the fourth version was usually the one that actually meant something.I called her number not knowing if it even still worked."Isla Renwick." She said my maiden name like no time had passed at all, like I hadn't vanished out of that world for a decade. "Well, I'll be damned. I was wondering if you'd lost this number on purpose.""I didn't lose it on purpose.""I know. Life does that sometimes without asking permissi

Isla POV I didn't wait for Julian to bring it up again. I brought it up myself first thing the next morning, buttering toast with my back half to him, voice pitched exactly the way you'd talk about anything that didn't matter. "Margo wants me to help sort through old clippings for some anniversary thing the firm's doing. Mostly an excuse to gossip, honestly. She's been retired from actually running the place for two years and still shows up every day like she owns it." "Does she own it?" "Technically, yes. She just lets the younger partners think otherwise." I slid a plate toward him. "Anyway, that's probably what people are seeing. Me wandering in and out of her studio with a coffee, looking very important." "Makes sense." He took a bite of toast, already reaching for his phone, already somewhere else in his head. "I wasn't trying to interrogate you last night, by the way. Legal just flagged something weird and I asked. Forget I brought it up." "I already forgot." He lau

Isla POV"Say that again," Dorian said. "Slower."We were in his temporary office, door shut, the paper nameplate still taped crooked to the glass. I called him the second I hung up with Priya, skipped the small talk entirely, and now he was standing instead of sitting, one hand braced on the edge of his desk like he needed it to hold still."Someone tried to pull records on the account the same day I opened it. Priya's contact caught it before anything actually got through. But they tried. Less than twenty-four hours after I signed the paperwork." I was pacing a short line between his window and his desk, three steps one way, three steps back. "Nobody knew, Dorian. I used a name I haven't used in a decade. I told you, I told Priya, and the teller who processed it. That's it.""Renata has access to a lot of accounts through Julian's financial setup. Could she have…""How. Explain the mechanism to me, because I've been trying all afternoon