Novels by Fave

Marcus was surprised by how quickly the number traced back, and slower than either of them wanted it to. At eight the following morning, Marcus read from his screen, "It's registered to a residential address in Pasadena," his voice still rough from lack of sleep. "Gerald Whitfield is the owner. However, the address is a home that has been rented out to short-term tenants for the past six years, and Gerald Whitfield has been dead for eleven years. Gerald Whitfield is not the person using this number. His name is being used because it leads nowhere.""Someone careful.""Someone very careful. Marcus rubbed his eyes. But there was one thing I did discover. In the past month, the number has only made two calls. My office. Three days prior to that, a landline registered to Nathaniel Vale's estate."Ethan stilled. our Nathaniel Vale.""Yes, your decoy. Marcus's voice had gone careful in the particular way it did when he was about to hand Ethan something he wasn't going to like. This indicat

Adrian hadn't believed his very own relief for more than a day .That changed into the part he did not say out loud to anyone, not to his uncle at the party, not to Preston, not even to himself in any way he'd admit to in daytime. He'd made the apology call because the proof had demanded one, A named guy, a face, a press launch, the entire equipment of the public file insisting he'd been incorrect. but some thing approximately the timing had stayed lodged in him like a splinter too small to dig out cleanly, and three sleepless nights later, he was still turning it over.The Aurelius filing appeared on his screen once more, the same four-shells-deep surname staring back at him as he sat in his office long after everyone else had gone home. He had informed Isabella that the case was over. He had kept the investigator on retainer, but he hadn't told her. "Anything new," he asked when the man eventually returned his call at around midnight. Depending on what you mean by "new.". "Paper

He did not answer her question in the car.He chose not to respond at the registrar's office either, because he was on the phone for forty minutes with people whose names she had never heard, undoing whatever Victor had set in motion before five o'clock that he couldn't do anymore. She sat in the lobby the whole time with her coat on, watching him work with a focus that frightened her a little not because it was unkind, but because it was so completely unlike anything she'd expected from a man she'd first mistaken for harmless.They also did not chat in the car on the way to her place. She let him go in because she had no mental capacity left to even contemplate the question and he stood in her kitchen like a man who had arrived at a verdict he already knew to be undesirable."You can sit down," she said finally, the first thing either of them had said in an hour. "I'm not going to yell at you standing in my kitchen like you're about to get fired.""I don't know what I'm about to get.

"Ethan." Isabella's voice was gentle but commanding, the tone she assumed when she was on the verge of ordering for them all to get the hell out of her face. "Who sent you a message?""Marcus.""What was his message?"He weighed it, the way he always weighed things with her lately, and felt for the first time in weeks that weighing itself was a far more serious complication than anything else. "He said the timing of the story was no coincidence. It was devised to fall at this very moment.""Orchestrated by whom?""I don't know yet." That much, at least, was true. He didn't know why. He was starting to suspect, with a cold certainty settling low in his stomach, that he already knew who.Before she could ask another question, his phone rang yet again and, this time, he decided to answer the call in front of her as a small token of the honesty he was unsure how to express otherwise."Speak to me," he said."Victor was the leak," Marcus's voice came suddenly, fast and intense like that of

Ethan called his best friend Marcus before he got to the car."Tell me you're exaggerating."I wish I were." Marcus voice was steady, all the careful control of a man trying not to say the wrong thing out loud. "Cole's editor moved it up. It's live in twenty minutes, not six a.m. I couldn't buy you guys any more time than that.""Twenty minutes to do what.""Decide how you want to survive the next twenty four hours," there was a pause, and a different tightness in his friend's tone, all the careful planning of another man already in motion. "Or, Ethan. Twenty minutes to let me handle it the way we always planned to, if it ever came to this."Ethan closed his eyes, because he knew what exactly Marcus meant, because they had written it out together years ago, when it had seemed a very far off hypothetical rather than a twenty four hour countdown."Do it," he said"You're sure."Do it, Marcus. Now."He hung up the phone to find Isabella watching him from across the car, her expression care

"You said this was urgent," Isabella said, not moving from where she stood. "So say it.""I intend to." He finally met her eyes, all the politeness drained away, leaving something more calculating in its place. "I received a very interesting phone call this afternoon from a gentleman who was able to, with a great deal of certitude, inform me about the fact that my daughter's future husband is not, in fact, a consultant." He glanced over at Ethan. "In fact your full-time client, Mr. Ethan. That's an arrangement you've been making with my father."The room stilled.Ethan didn't relax, not the way he'd been doing in hundreds of similar meetings before this one, only a cold and steady pressure blooming in his chest, a slow awareness of being on thin ice."Who called you," Isabella asked, her tone measured."He didn't give a name. He didn't need to." Her father set his glass down. "I've led this kind of life for forty years, Isabella. I know when you're passing an enemy weapon along to a b

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