I sat in that dark parking lot for a long time after the message came through, my thumb hovering over Richard's contact information, a number I hadn't dialed in over a year.*Someone needs to reach your grandfather tonight. It can't wait until morning.*I typed back, hands finally steady enough to manage it. *Why? What's happening?*No reply came. I waited five minutes, then ten, the parking lot around me emptying out as the last of the Grant family's guests pulled away, headlights sweeping briefly across my windshield before disappearing down the drive. Nobody stopped to check on me. I doubted anyone inside that house was thinking about me at all anymore, not tonight, not with a signed divorce sitting on their dining table like a trophy.I finally called Richard directly. It rang four times before going to voicemail, his recorded greeting clipped and formal, a message clearly recorded by an assistant years ago and never updated since. I left nothing. Saying anything into that silence

I didn't sleep in the guest room they'd prepared. I sat in a chair by the window instead, turning Whitmore's words over until they lost their shape from repetition. *Running out of time to protect you from something.* I thought about the anonymous texts, the flowers, the coded key, the countdown that had turned out, in the end, to be exactly as precise as promised. I thought about how many of those messages had arrived at moments too convenient to be coincidence, and how little I actually knew about who'd been sending them.By seven, the house was already moving around me. I could hear it through the walls … footsteps, low voices, the particular hum of a household preparing for something larger than an ordinary morning.A young woman I didn't recognize knocked on my door a few minutes later, introducing herself as part of the estate's administrative staff, here to walk me through the property before the day's briefings began. She spoke with the careful, over-polished cheerfulness of s

The recording clicked off, and the library went silent except for the sound of my own breathing, louder than it should have been in a room this large.Bishop didn't say anything right away. He let the silence sit, the same way he'd let every other heavy thing sit since I'd met him, giving me room to absorb it at whatever speed I needed."One name," I said finally. "He said one name he never had the courage to say out loud. Why record a message like that and still leave the most important part out?""I don't know. I've listened to that recording twice myself, and I asked him about it directly, weeks before he died." Bishop's expression tightened slightly. "He told me the name was in the file. That I wouldn't need him to say it out loud once I understood what I was looking at."I turned back to the pages spread across the table, my father's handwriting dense and hurried across most of them, the urgency of a man who suspected he might not have much time left to finish writing down what h

I read the texter's message three times before I let myself respond. *Bishop doesn't know everything either … and neither, yet, do you.* It read less like a taunt than a warning, the particular tone of someone trying to slow me down rather than provoke me into moving faster.*Then tell me what I'm missing,* I typed.*Not yet. Take control of the company first. You'll need the resources before you need the rest of what I know.*I sat with that for a long time, turning it over, deciding whether to trust the pacing of someone who'd been right about almost everything else so far. In the end, the advice matched my own instinct closely enough that trusting it cost me nothing. I needed Cole Investment Group functioning under my direction, quickly, before Victor had time to recover from whatever he assumed my silence after the divorce meant.I met with Bishop again the next morning, this time with Nakamura present as well, both of them watching me with the particular attention of men waiting

*He thinks someone talked.*I read that line three times, feeling its weight settle somewhere it hadn't before. Victor believed someone had betrayed him, and was actively hunting for who. If he found Voss first, or worse, found whoever had been sending me these messages, I'd lose access to information I'd come to depend on more than I wanted to admit.I didn't have time to sit with that fear. The next morning, Nakamura told me the senior staff meeting I'd requested had been scheduled … a formal introduction between the new chairman and Cole Investment Group's most senior advisers, the people who'd actually run daily operations while Richard had remained mostly a name on letterhead in his final years."Everyone will be there," Nakamura said. "Including Marcus."I felt my pulse tick up slightly at the name, though I kept my expression carefully neutral. "Good. I want to see him in person."The conference room was larger than any I'd sat in at my old firm, a long table surrounded by face