Standing at the altar in front of four hundred guests, Jonathan Duncan squeezed my fingers until the wedding rings bit into my flesh and leaned in to whisper that from that second forward I belonged to him and I’d better learn my place fast—so I smiled right back and told him he’d asked for a wife, and now he was about to meet my witness.

I didn’t sleep that night.

I sat at the kitchen table of the small safe house Cole had arranged for Clara and me, the lights off, going through every file I had on the Duncan empire.

My laptop was open to my dad’s old case file.

I’d pulled it from the county records office six months earlier, when I’d first started suspecting Jonathan’s fraud went deeper than just forged loans. Back then, I’d only been looking for connections between my dad’s old company and Duncan Apex.

I’d never found any.

Until now.

Because I’d never been looking for Arthur Duncan.

I’d been looking for Jonathan.

But Arthur had been running the company back then.

Jonathan had only taken over after Arthur died, six months after my dad.

Two deaths.

Six months apart.

Both ruled accidents.

Both men had been working on the same hundred-million-dollar construction project.

Coincidence didn’t happen that often.

Not in my line of work.

Clara came into the kitchen at three in the morning, holding two mugs of tea.

She set one down in front of me.

“You’ve been staring at that screen for four hours,” she said. She pulled out a chair and sat down across from me. “Talk to me.”

I turned the laptop toward her.

On the screen was a photo of my dad.

He was smiling, holding me when I was seven, covered in sawdust from the construction site.

“That’s my dad,” I said. “Tom Carter. He owned Carter Construction. Twelve years ago, he won the contract to build the new Duncan Apex headquarters. It was the biggest job he’d ever gotten. He thought it would make his company. Three months later, the company went bankrupt. The banks said he’d embezzled two million dollars from the project. A week after that, his car went off a bridge. The police said it was suicide.”

I paused.

My throat felt tight.

“I never believed it,” I said. “My dad wasn’t perfect, but he was honest. And he loved me and my mom more than anything. He would never have left us. Never. But I was eighteen. I had no money. No connections. No one would listen to me. So I went to college. I studied accounting. I became a forensic accountant. I spent ten years learning how to follow the money. How to find the lies people hide in spreadsheets. All because I wanted to prove my dad didn’t kill himself.”

I pointed at the photo of Arthur on the screen.

“Today, I saw his portrait in the Duncan house,” I said. “He was the CEO of Duncan Apex when my dad got that contract. He was the one who signed off on every payment. If the money went missing, he had to know about it.”

Clara was quiet for a long time.

She stared at my dad’s photo, her fingers tapping the side of her mug.

“I remember Arthur,” she said slowly. “He was my cousin. Weak. Easily led. But I never thought he was a thief. And I remember your dad, too. Tom Carter. He came to see me a week before he died. He was upset. He said someone was siphoning money from the construction project. Falsifying invoices. Paying for materials that never arrived. He had a folder full of proof. He said he was going to the police.”

My heart stopped.

“What?” I said. I leaned across the table, my hands shaking. “He came to you? Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“Because I didn’t connect the dots until now,” Clara said. Her voice was gentle, but her eyes were sad. “Elena, the week after Tom came to see me, Arthur died. Then Tom died. Then Rosalind came to me and told me the board was voting to make Jonathan CEO. When I said I’d run the company myself, she smiled at me and said, ‘That’s not going to happen, Clara.’ Two days later, Jonathan drugged my wine. I woke up in the cabin. I didn’t know Tom was dead until you told me. I thought... I thought he’d just moved away. That he’d given up.”

I fell back in my chair.

It was all connected.

All of it.

The stolen company.

Clara’s kidnapping.

The forged loans.

My dad’s death.

Rosalind.

It had always been Rosalind.

“She killed them both,” I whispered. “Arthur and my dad. She killed Arthur to get control of the company. She killed my dad because he found out she was stealing from the construction project. Then she used Jonathan to do the rest. To kidnap Clara. To run the fraud. To be the face of the empire while she pulled all the strings from the shadows.”

My phone buzzed on the table.

It was a text from an unknown number.

Open the door.

I frowned.

Cole had said the safe house was secure. No one but the four of us—me, Clara, Maya, and Cole—knew where it was.

I stood up, grabbing the heavy cast-iron skillet off the stove.

Clara grabbed a knife from the block.

We crept toward the front door.

Through the peephole, I saw nothing.

Just the dark porch.

And a small, cardboard box sitting on the doormat.

I unlocked the door, the skillet raised.

I looked left.

Right.

The street was empty.

No cars.

No people.

I knelt down and picked up the box.

It was light.

Too light.

I carried it back to the kitchen, setting it on the table.

Clara and I stared at it for a second.

Then I opened the lid.

Inside was a dead rat.

Its neck was broken.

Taped to its stomach was a single sheet of notebook paper.

I pulled it off.

The handwriting was neat, precise, the letters slanted slightly to the right.

I’d seen that handwriting a hundred times.

On the notes Rosalind left for the staff.

On the memos in Jonathan’s study.

On the pages of the private ledger.

Stop digging, Elena.

Or the next dead rat won’t be the only thing I leave on your doorstep.

I know where your sister lives.

I know where your mom goes to church.

One more step, and you’ll lose them both.

The paper slipped out of my hand.

My sister.

My mom.

I’d spent a year making sure Jonathan and Rosalind never found out where they lived. I’d told them my family was dead. I’d created fake social media profiles, fake addresses, fake phone numbers. I’d done everything I could to keep them safe.

And Rosalind had found them anyway.

I grabbed my phone, dialing my sister’s number.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

“Elena?” she said, her voice sleepy. “It’s three in the morning. Is everything okay?”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“Everything’s fine,” I lied. My voice was shaking. “I just... I missed you. That’s all.”

“You’re a liar,” she said, but she laughed. “But I missed you too. Are you okay? I saw the news. Everyone’s talking about you. They’re saying you took down the Duncans.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Lily, listen to me. For the next few days, don’t go anywhere alone. Don’t open the door for anyone you don’t know. If you see anything weird—any cars parked outside the house, anyone following you—call the police. Call me. Immediately. Okay?”

Lily was quiet for a second.

“Okay,” she said, slowly. “Elena, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just want you to be careful. Please.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise.”

We hung up.

I leaned against the counter, my legs shaking so bad I could barely stand.

Clara picked up the note.

She read it, her face hard.

“She’s trying to scare you,” she said.

“It’s working,” I said.

Clara put the note down.

She came over and put her hands on my shoulders, forcing me to look at her.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Rosalind is in jail. She has no money. No power. She’s sending these threats through a friend because she’s desperate. She wants you to back down. To drop the case. To let her walk away. If you do that, she wins. And your dad died for nothing. And I lost ten years of my life for nothing. And Jonathan will get away with everything he did to you.”

She squeezed my shoulders.

“We don’t back down,” she said. “Not now. Not ever. We finish this. For your dad. For us. For everyone Rosalind has ever hurt.”

I looked at her.

At the scar on her eyebrow.

At the strength in her eyes.

I nodded.

She was right.

I’d come too far to stop now.

“Okay,” I said. “We finish this.”

I picked up my laptop again.

I opened the file with the offshore account Rosalind had moved the fifty million into.

If she thought she was going to run with that money, she had another thing coming.