Darius Larkin had his glass raised and the first line of his toast ready when the ballroom doors opened and four police officers walked into his engagement party.The music faltered and died. Two hundred guests in silk and black tie turned toward the entrance with their champagne halfway to their lips, and for a moment Darius thought it was a mistake, a noise complaint or a wrong address on a busy Saturday night. Then he saw the man walking behind the officers, and his grip tightened on the glass.Jasper Ellingham, CEO of Ellingham Holdings and heir to the Ellingham fortune, was the man Darius had trusted three days ago with the biggest discovery of his career.He had found it late on a Wednesday, alone in the analytics office with half the lights off. Forty million dollars had been drained from the employee pension fund in small, careful transfers that were never supposed to add up. Darius traced them for six hours straight, printed everything, and carried it up to the top floor hims

Darius didn't want to hear another word about ledgers or debts. His grandfather had been dead for ten minutes, and all he wanted was to plan a funeral nobody would come to."I need to arrange his funeral," he told Basil. "That's all I care about tonight.""Barnaby arranged his funeral years ago," Basil said. "What he couldn't arrange was this. Please, Mr. Larkin. He asked me to show you first."They drove to the Lower Town through empty streets. The watch shop sat at the end of Gilder's Row, so narrow that Darius could touch both walls with his arms outstretched. He had grown up in the two small rooms above it. Basil unlocked the door with his own key, and the familiar smell of oil and brass hit Darius so hard that he had to stop in the doorway.Everything was exactly as Barnaby had left it that morning. His loupe lay beside a half-repaired wristwatch on the workbench, and the price list was still taped to the window in his careful handwriting: cleaning and repair, twenty dollars. Alo

Darius woke the morning after the funeral to a phone that wouldn't stop vibrating.Four hundred notifications had arrived overnight, most of them from strangers. He opened the first link and saw his own face. It was the footage from his engagement party, shot by a guest on a phone. There he was on his knees in a torn tuxedo with his hands cuffed behind him, while Jasper stood above him holding the folder of forged records. Ashworth Media, the biggest network in Ostley, had cut it together with photographs of elderly pensioners and run it on every channel they owned under a single headline.WATCHMAKER'S GRANDSON STOLE PENSIONERS' SAVINGS.By breakfast it had been viewed two million times. By ten o'clock, the comments had found his address.By noon, they were outside. Darius watched from behind the shop counter as the crowd grew on Gilder's Row, sixty or seventy people at first, then more. Most of them were old. They were retired dockworkers, clerks and cleaners who had given Ellingham

The Moreau Grand rose above the harbor like a tower of gold glass, and at eleven o'clock at night every window was blazing. Darius came alone, as the invitation asked, in the same black suit he had worn to bury his grandfather. He had told Basil where he was going. He hadn't told Freya.He got as far as the VIP entrance on the top floor.The host at the door was a slim man in a velvet jacket, and he recognized Darius before he reached the rope. His polite smile vanished. "I'm afraid not, sir," he said, stepping squarely into his path. "We don't admit guests who are under criminal investigation. I'm sure you understand."Darius reached into his jacket for the invitation, but a burst of laughter from inside cut him off.Behind the velvet rope, at the best table in the room, Jasper Ellingham was celebrating. Sienna sat beside him in silver sequins, and a half-dozen of Jasper's friends lounged around them with stacks of chips and bottles of champagne on ice. One of them spotted Darius and

On the ninth day after his grandfather's death, Darius walked into Ellingham Tower for the first time since his arrest.The auditorium on the fourth floor was packed. Two hundred pensioners filled the rows of red seats, many of them holding the same cardboard signs they had carried on Gilder's Row. Along the back wall stood a solid line of cameras from every network in Ostley, Ashworth Media in the center with three crews of its own. The Fairfaxes sat in the front row, Cordelia in navy and pearls and Reginald gray and silent beside her. On the stage, behind a long table draped in Ellingham blue, Jasper sat with the pension board on one side and Sienna on the other, her hands folded neatly in her lap.High above the seats, behind a wall of tinted glass, was the private gallery reserved for the Ellingham family. Severin stood there alone with his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the room like a man watching a play he had already read.Freya walked in beside Darius. They ha