The first family reached out on a Tuesday, three weeks after Victor confirmed the scope of the widening inquiry, before Sera's office had said anything publicly at all.Fae took the call herself, in the study, on the line she'd had set up specifically for this, and Derek was at the desk across from her going through quarterly numbers when her posture changed, the particular stillness that meant something had arrived that mattered more than the numbers in front of him.He set the report down and listened to her side of it."Yes," Fae said. "I understand." A pause. "No, take whatever time you need. We're not going anywhere." Another pause, longer this time, and Derek watched her face carefully, the way she absorbed something difficult without letting it show in her voice, a skill he'd watched her build over months of forty-seven families and difficult calls and had never quite stopped admiring. "I'm so sorry. I know that doesn't fix anything. But I am."She ended the call twenty minutes

He read the folder over three nights, a little at a time, the way Jacob had told him to, and Fae read it with him each night, sitting close, saying nothing unless he wanted her to, her presence a kind of company that didn't ask anything of the moment except to be shared.The entries weren't ordered by date so much as by whatever had struck Elena as worth recording, a scattering of small observations and larger ones, sometimes only a line, sometimes a full page.*Your father asked me to marry him in the parking garage of the West Group building, of all places, because he said he couldn't wait until we were somewhere nicer and I laughed at him for twenty minutes before I said yes. I want you to know that about him. He is a careful, deliberate man in every part of his life except the parts that matter most, where he simply acts. I hope you inherit that.*Derek read that one aloud to Fae on the second night, and she was quiet for a moment before she said, "He proposed to me in a garden wi

The wedding was three weeks away, and Fae had stopped sleeping properly, a fact she denied every morning and that Derek noted anyway, the faint shadows under her eyes, the way she'd taken to reading the seating chart at two in the morning instead of leaving it for daylight."You need to actually rest," he told her, on a Tuesday night, finding her at the desk in the main house's study, where they'd taken to staying more nights than not as June approached, the house fully opened now, staffed properly, warm in a way it hadn't been in thirty-one years."I will," Fae said, not looking up from the seating chart. "After the caterer confirms the final headcount. After Pruitt finishes the trellis repair. After—""Fae."She looked up."There will always be an after," Derek said gently. "That's how weddings work. There's no version of this where every detail is finished before the day arrives. Some of it is going to be imperfect, and it's going to be fine anyway."Fae set down her pen and looked

The letter that arrived in August had no return address, and unlike Vael's, it wasn't handwritten.Victor brought it to Derek personally rather than routing it through the normal channels, his expression carrying the particular gravity Derek had learned meant something required immediate attention rather than measured response."This came to the West Group's general counsel office," Victor said. "Addressed to you specifically. Security scanned it before it reached me. No physical threat embedded in the paper itself, but I wanted you to see the contents before deciding how to proceed."Derek read it standing in his study.*Mr. West,**The investigation your foundation has encouraged is disturbing arrangements that predate your family's involvement by considerable time and that involve people who are not as accommodating as Marcus Vael or Margit Roos have proven to be. You should understand that the four countries Sera's office has identified represent only a fraction of what remains ac

Halloran called on a Tuesday morning, three weeks after Voss's visit, and his voice carried none of the careful neutrality Derek had come to expect from federal investigators delivering preliminary findings."We found something," he said. "I wanted you and Fae to hear it before it goes into any formal filing."Derek put him on speaker, Fae leaning in from across the desk."We traced the printer," Halloran said. "The discontinued model from the letter. There were eleven still in active commercial use across Europe that matched the specific wear pattern our forensics team identified. Ten of them belong to small accounting firms, print shops, nothing connected to anything. The eleventh belongs to a holding company called Ferrand Administration, registered in Luxembourg, which on paper manages real estate investments." He paused. "Ferrand Administration has existed for thirty-eight years. Its ownership structure runs through four shell entities before it reaches an actual person.""A name