The taller agent's name was Farida Osei. She ran the search the way Dominic imagined she ran everything — methodically, without commentary, without the performative aggression some federal agents used to signal authority. She didn't need to signal it. The warrant in her hand was enough.Her partner was younger, quieter. He moved through the apartment behind her taking photographs of surfaces before they touched anything."You're welcome to sit," Osei said to Dominic."I prefer to stand.""Suit yourself."They started in the study. Dominic watched them work from the doorway with his arms loose at his sides. Celeste stood behind him. Harrison had already slipped out, quietly, because Harrison understood the geometry of rooms and who needed to be in them.The folder was on the table where Adaeze had left it.Osei found it in four minutes. She picked it up, turned it over, opened it to the first page, and looked at Dominic across the length of the apartment."Do you want to tell me about

Harrison read the email twice.He held Dominic's phone with both hands, which was unusual. Harrison was a man who handled things with one hand, casually, the way people handle objects they are accustomed to. He read it once, and then he read it again, and when he set the phone down on the table between them his face had lost something it normally carried."How long ago did you receive this?" he asked."Two hours.""And you came here first. Not to the police.""The police sent federal agents to my apartment yesterday. I'm not especially eager to give them more material to work with."Harrison nodded slowly. He picked up his glass of water and put it down without drinking from it. The sitting room of his house was book-lined and warm, the kind of room built over decades rather than decorated in an afternoon, and it usually suited him. Tonight he looked wrong in it."I need to tell you something," he said.Dominic waited."I have been on the Whitmore Museum accreditation board for twenty

The first image held for ten seconds.The email. Castellane's name in the header. Eleanor Hale referred to as "the complication." The question of whether she had been resolved.Five hundred people read it in silence. Dominic could feel the room processing, the collective recalibration of an audience that had arrived expecting a pleasant evening and was being handed something else entirely.Then he moved to the second file.The authentication certificates came up side by side with the forgery analyses. Three paintings. Three signatures from Richard Castellane attesting to provenance and authenticity. Beside each certificate, the independent analysis conducted after Vivienne's arrest, clinical and precise, documenting exactly how each forgery had been constructed and why a qualified expert should have identified them immediately."These are the certificates," Dominic said. His voice was even, unhurried, the tone of a man presenting information rather than performing outrage. "Mr. Castel

The press conference started at ten and ran for forty-seven minutes.Dominic watched it on his laptop at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that went cold beside him. Celeste was on the couch with her own screen. Neither of them spoke much during it. There was not much to say while it was happening because what was happening was being done very well, and watching something being done well when it is being done against you requires a particular kind of focused silence.Castellane wore a dark suit with no tie. That was the first decision Dominic noticed, the deliberate informality of it, the suggestion of a man too sincere and too shaken to bother with formality. His hair was slightly less composed than it usually was. That was probably also a decision. He stood at a podium in a room that looked like a private event space, not a corporate setting, warm lighting, wooden panels, the visual language of authenticity and craftsmanship rather than institutional power. Behind him stood two

Patricia Vance did not die.That was the first update, coming through on Dominic's phone while he was still in the Whitmore's entrance hall, people moving around him in the particular urgent confusion that follows something unexpected in a public space. Paramedics had reached her within four minutes. She was conscious by the time they got her onto the stretcher. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital she was stable, and by early evening the statement from her family confirmed that she had suffered a cardiac event but was expected to make a full recovery.Dominic read that statement three times and felt something loosen slightly in his chest that had been very tight since the moment she went down.Then he opened the rest of his notifications and felt it tighten again.The footage was everywhere before he had even left the building. Multiple angles, multiple phones, the moment captured from enough perspectives that any viewer could see it completely. Patricia Vance at the podium