All Chapters of The Househusband Was A Sovereign : Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
12 chapters
Chapter 11: The Last Morning
Marcus Voss didn't think of himself as a thief. He preferred the term *acquiring leverage*. It was a phrase that let him sleep soundly after he'd had his assistant snap a few photos of a folder left open on Whitfield's desk—just a second too long—during a boring meeting about liability insurance.He hadn't actually been looking for anything. That was the best part. He’d just happened to be early for the meeting, alone in the office for four minutes, and his habit of glancing at whatever was lying around had finally paid off in a big way.Two photos. Side by side. One was a wax seal from a marriage contract six years old; the other was a signing seal from an Aurelius addendum dated three weeks ago. They were identical, right down to a tiny flaw in the spiral that no computer program could have replicated by accident.He didn't fully get what it meant yet, and he didn't need to. All he knew, sitting in his car outside the club at seven in the morning on Elena's birthday, was that he was
Chapter 12: Leverage
Dr. Eleanor Pryce had spent thirty years cataloging old symbols for people who were far too rich to care about public archives. In all that time, she’d learned how to keep a poker face, no matter what landed on her desk.Today, that didn't work."Where did you get this?" she asked. She slid the photograph back toward him with a kind of haste that suggested she didn't want it anywhere near her.Marcus had picked her office because it was private and expensive—the kind of place wealthy families went when they needed a family crest verified before a merger, or a rumor quietly shut down. He’d expected a boring afternoon. He hadn’t expected Dr. Pryce’s hands to actually shake."Does it matter?" he asked. "I just need to know what it is.""It matters a great deal, Mr. Voss." She folded her hands, trying to get a grip on her composure. "I've seen versions of this mark exactly twice in thirty years. Once in a manuscript that a family had kept locked away for four hundred years—they burned the