Novels by Fave

Isabella wanted him to stay home."You showing up looks defensive," she said, pacing her office at seven in the morning while her coffee grew cold on the desk and she waited. "It shows that you have something to hide.""I do have something to hide." Staying home looks worse. It looks like I'm afraid of the question.”He said it evenly, simply, the way most people did when they had taken the time to decide what they were and not likely to waver from it because he had already decided, mostly in spite of himself, that what Adrian had wasn't enough. A man with actual proof wouldn't have asked for the floor. He would've come into the room and taken his place with ease. Adrian asking for the floor meant that Adrian, despite having been here for weeks, still had a theory but it was not yet an answer, and theories survived in rooms heavy with skepticism if the accused didn't take exception to the accusations themselves.The fourteenth floor had a colder presence than was strictly necessary, a

Ethan called Marcus back within the minute."Tell me he's okay.""He's fine. Shaken, but he's fine. He wasn't even there when it happened." Marcus sounded, if anything, more detached than usual, almost as if he were forcing himself to calm down. "Whoever did it knew precisely what they wanted. Didn't touch his computer, anything with value. Just the physical copies on the Veyron brief. In and out in under six minutes according to the building's security log, which, conveniently, has a gap in exactly that window.""Someone who has access to the cameras.""Someone that has access to very good things, apparently." He exhaled. "Ethan, this isn't Adrian's approach. Adrian operates under a low profile. This person was looking for an answer here tonight and never stopped to consider if anyone might catch them kick the front door open.""Victor.""That's my assumption as well." A paused. "Which means he's not just curious about the situation anymore. He's worried. Curious men wait. Worrying m

"Nothing," Ethan said. "I'll think of something."It wasn't nothing. It was a whole, honest truth, sitting warm and round against his tongue, waiting to be spat out, but he had swallowed it all the same, the same way he had swallowed it when he stood at his mother's kitchen table, and the same way he had swallowed it across his coffee cup from Isabella's father, the roomful of spectators all too familiar. Some habits didn't care how much they cost you. They just kept working.Isabella regarded him a second too long, as if she heard the slippage, the shift between everything he said and what he needed unspoken, but a board vote in three days did not account for the time it took to repair the damage.She squeezed her arm, distracted, already turning towards the thing in her day awaiting her decision, and Ethan watched her go and hated how easy it would be if he only let it.He went home and placed yet another call."Marcus. I need Whitlock."A pause on the line, the length of which sugg

Ethan stared at the text for a long time before responding.Does that mean you're ready to hear whose handwriting it was, or do you want to pretend you haven't already guessed?He sent three texts, each one different, before hitting delete on all of them. He finally sent a reply of four words: Tomorrow. Not tonight. He was disappointed in the cowardice of it, but he had spent the morning carefully balancing the entire staff of a company that wasn't his own, and he had little to spare for whatever Marcus was about to throw at him.Isabella texted him twenty minutes later. Thank you. For today. I mean it.He read it three times before allowing himself to smile.They fell into something, over the following days, that neither of them named. She texted him things unrelated to the engagement, a picture of a dog she'd seen on her walk, a rant about her assistant's coffee order, a one-sentence story about a board member's tie that had somehow made him laugh out loud in an empty apartment. He

Marcus's message went unreturned until midnight because Ethan didn't trust himself to write back anything shorter than a full conversation, and he felt the long conversation with an entire table of Laurents was not the appropriate time to do that.He read it four more times on the drive home. I know whose handwriting matches it instead. He didn't call. He needed time to be himself before he let himself be a dead man's son.The day that he learned began when his phone rang at six in the morning, Isabella's name on the line, no morning wishes attached."I need you at the office.""It's six a.m.""I know what time it is." Her voice carried the particular tightness of someone who should have been already up. "Kessler Manufacturing pulled their contract renewal overnight. Forty percent of our remaining supply chain comes through them. If the contract fails us, the board doesn't wait for the quarter end. They'll vote Blackridge in by Thursday.""Why call me.""Because you said whatever's ne

The gate opened before Ethan finished giving his name, which meant someone had been watching for his car since he turned onto the street.Isabella stood in wait in her dark green dress, and for a while neither of them spoke."You look as if you're about to enter a deposition," she noted finally."Feel about right.""My father will ask what you do. Say investment consulting and let him assume it's a small firm. He loses interest quickly once he thinks there isn't a serious amount of money involved." she told quickly, quietly, as if it had been rehearsed in a mirror somewhere and she had trouble convincing herself it would do any good. "Do not correct him. Whatever he says tonight.""I wasn't going to.""I mean it. Whatever he says."Already seated as they entered the room, her father was handsome in his way but the charm had curdled slightly over the years into something colder; he did not rise to meet them but offered his hand across the table, a small test of who was going to have to

Delphine waited until her father's attention had drifted toward the clinic's growing knot of security staff before she approached the desk again, alone this time, her voice pitched too low for the rest of the lobby to catch."I'm not going to make a scene like the rest of my family," she said to the nurse. "I just need the name. Please."Something about the quiet, the absence of threat in it, finally moved where volume hadn't. The nurse glanced once toward the far end of the lobby, confirming Warrick was occupied elsewhere, then back to Delphine."Marrow," the nurse said, barely above a breath. "The reservation was arranged personally by Wren Marrow, for her grandfather's care."The word landed in the lobby the way a dropped glass lands in a quiet room, small in itself, but loud enough that everything around it seemed to pause. Delphine didn't react outwardly, but something behind her eyes reorganized itself instantly, pieces sliding into place she hadn't known were loose.She turned

Warrick Castor arrived at Northgate within the hour, summoned by three increasingly frantic calls from Odalys that had escalated from irritation to something closer to panic by the third. He came through the lobby doors already talking, his voice pitched to carry, the practiced volume of a man who'd built half his fortune on the assumption that a loud enough complaint eventually became someone else's problem to solve."Get me whoever manages patient admissions," he said to the first staff member unlucky enough to be standing near the door. "Not the front desk, the actual administrator. I want this floor situation resolved in the next ten minutes or I want to know exactly who I'm filing a formal complaint against."The nurse who'd been fielding Odalys's demands for the better part of an hour repeated, with visible patience wearing thin, that the reservation could not be discussed or overridden. Warrick pulled out his phone, threatening lawyers, threatening the clinic's board, threateni

While Wren made calls to arrange safe transport for the amulet, two guards assigned to accompany the courier and a third stationed at the study door until it left the estate, Roman found the clinic's head of restricted stores, a quiet older man named Corwin who didn't blink at any of the items on the list handed to him."Iron filings," Roman said. "Not the powdered kind, the raw shavings, still rough at the edges. Grave salt, if you have any this season, and if you don't, ordinary salt cured over a burial won't do, I need the real thing. Black thread, silk if you have it, cotton if you don't, but it has to be unbleached."Corwin didn't write any of it down. He simply nodded and disappeared into a back room lined with cabinets that bore no labels a casual visitor would recognize, returning several minutes later with small paper packets weighed and sealed with a precision that suggested this wasn't the first unusual order he'd filled that year, or that week."The binding you're working

Northgate Sanatorium didn't look like a hospital from the outside. It looked like a private club that had simply decided, at some point in its long history, to also keep people alive. Stone facade, unmarked entrance, a discreet brass plate the only indication of what the building actually was. Roman had heard of it before prison, the way anyone in his grandmother's circles eventually heard of it, a place that treated the wealthy with equal parts modern medicine and older knowledge nobody printed in a brochure.Wren didn't slow the car as they approached. A gate lifted for them without anyone checking a name, and by the time they reached the private entrance, two staff members were already waiting, holding the doors open before the engine had fully stopped."The wing's been cleared," one of them said to Wren as they walked in. "Full floor, per your instructions. Nobody else has access until you say otherwise."Roman noted it without comment. An entire floor of one of the most exclusive

Odalys didn't wait until they reached the county road. She had Preston's ruined wrist propped against a folded jacket in the back seat and her phone already pressed to her ear before the driver had finished pulling out of the gravel lot, her hands trembling badly enough that she nearly dropped the phone twice dialing a number she knew by heart."Warrick." Her voice cracked on the single syllable, and she let it, understanding instinctively that a cracked voice would move faster than a composed one. "Warrick, we've been attacked. Preston's wrist, it's broken, maybe worse, we need a doctor the moment we're home.""Attacked by who." Warrick Castor's voice on the other end was already sharpening, already reaching for the shape of an enemy before he had any facts to hang one on."Roman." The name came out with practiced tremble. "He had men there, hired men, they grabbed Preston the second we walked in, over some misunderstanding about the property. I tried to reason with them and they wou

Preston's hand had barely tightened around the ring before one of the men in dark coats crossed the porch and closed a grip around his wrist, not violent, just absolute, the way a door closes on a hinge built for exactly that purpose. Preston froze, more from surprise than pain, his fingers still curled around gold he could no longer move.Odalys found her voice before her son found his balance. "This is a family matter," she said, drawing herself up, the old reflex of a woman used to rooms bending to her volume. "Whoever you are, you have no business here. I'll ask you and your men to leave immediately.""Wren Marrow," Wren said, offering the name the way one offers a coat check ticket, flat, unbothered, already certain of what it would do once it landed.It landed hard. Odalys's face, composed a breath before, went through a fast, silent collapse, color draining from it in a way no gossip column headline could have caused. Odalys didn't know the Marrow name from society pages or cha