Seventy-Four Billion Reasons

Chapter One: The Toast

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 himself. Jasper had listened, nodded, and shaken his hand. "You did the right thing," he had said. "Leave it with me."

Now Jasper held a thick folder against his chest, and he was looking at Darius the way a man looks at something he has already won.

"Darius Larkin?" The lead officer stopped in front of him. "You're under arrest for the theft of forty million dollars from the Ellingham Holdings pension fund."

"That's not possible," Darius said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. "I'm the one who reported it."

"Convenient," Jasper said, loud enough for the back of the room to hear. He opened the folder and held up a page for the nearest guests. "Wire records, Darius. Every dollar moving into an offshore account in the Caymans. Your name, your signature, your passport number. Did you really think nobody would check?"

Darius stared at the page. It was his name, and it was his passport number. It was also impossible, and he knew that with the calm certainty of a man who spent his life reading numbers, but certainty meant nothing in a room like this. He could feel the air shifting as two hundred people decided who he was.

"Pension money," someone muttered near the bar. "Those were retired workers." A woman he didn't know raised her phone and started filming.

Cordelia Fairfax rose from the head table in a rustle of green silk. Sienna's mother had never liked him, not since their first dinner, when she asked what his family did and he answered honestly. She lifted the cream-colored engagement contract her lawyers had insisted on, looked straight at him, and tore it in half. Then she tore it again.

"I warned my daughter," she said, letting the pieces fall to the floor. "People like you always want what isn't theirs."

"Sienna." Darius turned to his fiancée. She stood beside the cake in white and gold, and she wasn't looking at him. "Sienna, tell them. You know me. You know I would never do this."

She didn't answer. She looked down at her left hand, slipped off the ring he had saved fourteen months to buy, and set it carefully on the edge of the table. Then she crossed the ballroom, her heels loud on the marble in the silence, and slid her hand into Jasper's.

Jasper raised it to his lips and kissed her knuckles.

The whispers started at once, and they were worse than the accusation. Since spring, someone said. Everyone at the club knew. The yacht, that weekend in Monaco. Darius stood there holding a full glass of champagne and felt the pieces fall into place, one after another. Every late night Sienna had blamed on her mother's charity work had been spent with Jasper. And Jasper hadn't simply grabbed a convenient scapegoat three days ago. The frame had been built around Darius from the beginning.

A chair scraped near the kitchen door.

The Fairfaxes had seated his grandfather there, at a small table beside the swinging door where the waiters rushed in and out, as far from the head table as the room allowed. Barnaby Larkin was eighty-two, thin and slightly stooped in the same brown suit he wore to every wedding and funeral. He repaired watches for a living in a narrow shop in the Lower Town, and he had raised Darius alone since the boy was seven. Tonight he had been the only person in the room who looked truly happy.

He crossed the ballroom slowly and stopped in front of Jasper. He didn't raise his voice. "Ask your father," he said quietly, "whether he wants you doing this."

Something flickered across Jasper's face, gone almost before it appeared. Then he laughed. "My father? Old man, my father doesn't know you exist." He put a hand flat on Barnaby's chest and shoved.

It wasn't even a hard push, but Barnaby was eighty-two. He stumbled backward, his heel caught the edge of a rug, and he hit the marble with a sound Darius knew he would hear for the rest of his life. One hand flew to his chest and stayed there, and his breathing turned short and ragged.

"Grandpa!"

Darius dropped the glass and ran. He made it three steps before an officer caught him around the waist and another took his legs, and he hit the floor hard enough to taste blood. Someone wrenched his arms behind his back, and steel bit into his wrists. They hauled him onto his knees facing the crowd, and he fought anyway, twisting toward the old man on the floor and shouting for someone to call an ambulance.

Sienna looked down at him from Jasper's side. "Stop it," she hissed. "You're embarrassing me."

The paramedics arrived within minutes, though it felt like an hour. They knelt over Barnaby, cut open his shirt, and lifted him onto a stretcher while the guests stepped back to give them room. As they wheeled him past, Barnaby's hand shot out and caught Darius's sleeve with surprising strength.

He pressed something cold into Darius's cuffed palms. It was the old brass pocket watch with the cracked face, the one that had sat on his workbench for as long as Darius could remember.

"Don't let anyone take this," Barnaby whispered. His eyes were sharp and clear. "Not even the police."

Then the stretcher was gone, and the officers were dragging Darius out through the side entrance into the rain.

In the back of the squad car, he sat with his hands locked behind him, the watch hidden in his fist and blood drying on his lip. The city slid past the window in streaks of red and white. He kept seeing the ring on the table, the torn contract, his grandfather's face as he hit the floor.

Then he felt it against his palm, faint and steady. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Darius stared down at his closed fist. That watch had stopped twenty years ago, on the night his parents died, and his grandfather had never once tried to fix it.

Now it was running.