Novels by DORIS HARVEY

Kellan stared at the message until the words blurred slightly, Reginald watching him from across the desk with a question he hadn't asked yet."Vivian," Kellan said finally, turning the phone so Reginald could see. "She says she found something in her mother's room. Something with my name in it."Reginald's expression sharpened, all traces of the earlier grief folding back beneath his usual careful composure, though something in his eyes hadn't fully recovered yet. "That's either very good, or very dangerous. I'm not certain which.""Only one way to find out.""Sir." Reginald's voice stopped him halfway out of the chair. "If Vivian has found something real, something that connects to the ledger, or to what her mother told you tonight, then Elias will already suspect it. He doesn't let information move through that house without knowing where it's going." He hesitated. "I'd feel better if I came with you.""No," Kellan said, gentler than he meant to. "If this is real, she's frightened

Kellan didn't run.Running would have confirmed something Elias hadn't proven yet, so instead he stepped out of the treeline slowly, hands loose at his sides, and let the porch light catch his face fully."Evening," Kellan said.Elias studied him a moment, something between amusement and respect moving behind his eyes. "No excuses. No stammering explanation about a wrong turn in the dark. I appreciate that, at least." He glanced back toward the garden room, where Elena had already vanished, the door closed as though it had never opened at all. "Whatever my wife told you tonight, I'd think carefully about how much of it you believe. Elena has always had a talent for rewriting old stories to make herself the victim in them.""Maybe she is the victim.""Maybe," Elias agreed, unbothered. "Doesn't make the rest of what she told you untrue. Just makes it worth remembering that everyone in this house has their own reasons for what they choose to tell you, Kellan. Including her. Including me.

The Sinclair estate looked different at night, less like a monument and more like something waiting.Kellan parked two streets away, exactly as Elena's second message had instructed, and walked the rest of the distance on foot, collar up, keeping to the treeline where the gate's security lights didn't reach. He hadn't done anything like this in three years. He found, uncomfortably, that his body still remembered how, the old instinct of making himself small and unseen rising back up like it had never left.A side door near the garden, the one Odessa had disappeared through twice now, stood open a crack, warm light spilling out into the dark.Elena was waiting just inside, arms wrapped around herself the way her daughter did when she was frightened, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all."You came," she said finally."You said it couldn't wait.""It couldn't." She glanced past him into the dark garden, checking, the same instinctive fear Odessa had shown twice already,

The letter was shorter than three years of imagined conversations had prepared him for. He'd expected pages. Strategy, evidence, the fury of a wronged man handed down like a weapon. Instead, Sebastian Whitmore had left him half a page and something Kellan hadn't expected at all.My grandson,If Reginald has done as I asked, you already know most of what I could tell you about Elias Sinclair. I won't repeat it here. A dying man should spend his last words on something better than hatred.Here is what I want you to know instead. I do not need you to avenge me. Vengeance was the mistake I made twenty years ago, believing I could out-maneuver a man like Elias at his own game, on his own terms. It cost me everything except the one thing he could never take, which was the truth of what he is.Do not fight him as an equal. Build something he cannot touch, and let his own house fall in on him.There is one million dollars set aside separately from the estate, in an account under your name alo

Kellan stood alone in the driveway for a long time after Odessa disappeared through the side door.The rain had eased to something finer, almost mist, and he became aware, slowly, of how cold he'd gotten standing there, the box of forgotten belongings at his feet, the sealed letter suddenly heavier in his jacket than it had been an hour ago. Not heavier in weight. Heavier in what it might mean.He looked up once at the house. The curtain on the second floor had gone still. Whoever had been watching was either gone or careful enough to stay hidden. He thought of Vivian somewhere behind that glass, of Damian's easy laughter still hanging in the wet air near the front steps, and found that neither of them occupied the center of his thoughts anymore.He picked up the box, walked to the car without looking back, and sat in the rear seat with the door closed before he let himself feel any of it.His hands were shaking. Not from the cold."Sir?" Reginald's voice, gentle, from the front seat.

The letter stayed sealed in Kellan's jacket pocket that night. He sat with it in the study of a house he'd inherited only hours ago, rain still tapping against tall windows, and found he couldn't make his hands open it. Not yet. Not while the words someone already knows were still echoing louder in his chest than any question his grandfather's handwriting might answer."You should rest," Reginald said from the doorway, hesitant, the way a man is hesitant around grief he doesn't fully understand. "There will be time for the letter tomorrow.""Who called?" Kellan asked again. "You said a woman's voice.""I said whoever it was disguised their voice. It could have been anyone in that house.""There are only four people in that house who'd have reason to call me at all," Kellan said quietly. "Vivian, her father, her mother, and Damian. Which means one of them already suspects who I am."Reginald didn't answer that. He didn't need to. They both understood that whoever had made that call hel