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Chapter 14
Marcus was surprised by how quickly the number traced back, and slower than either of them wanted it to. At eight the following morning, Marcus read from his screen, "It's registered to a residential address in Pasadena," his voice still rough from lack of sleep. "Gerald Whitfield is the owner. However, the address is a home that has been rented out to short-term tenants for the past six years, and Gerald Whitfield has been dead for eleven years. Gerald Whitfield is not the person using this number. His name is being used because it leads nowhere.""Someone careful.""Someone very careful. Marcus rubbed his eyes. But there was one thing I did discover. In the past month, the number has only made two calls. My office. Three days prior to that, a landline registered to Nathaniel Vale's estate."Ethan stilled. our Nathaniel Vale.""Yes, your decoy. Marcus's voice had gone careful in the particular way it did when he was about to hand Ethan something he wasn't going to like. This indicat
Chapter 13
Adrian hadn't believed his very own relief for more than a day .That changed into the part he did not say out loud to anyone, not to his uncle at the party, not to Preston, not even to himself in any way he'd admit to in daytime. He'd made the apology call because the proof had demanded one, A named guy, a face, a press launch, the entire equipment of the public file insisting he'd been incorrect. but some thing approximately the timing had stayed lodged in him like a splinter too small to dig out cleanly, and three sleepless nights later, he was still turning it over.The Aurelius filing appeared on his screen once more, the same four-shells-deep surname staring back at him as he sat in his office long after everyone else had gone home. He had informed Isabella that the case was over. He had kept the investigator on retainer, but he hadn't told her. "Anything new," he asked when the man eventually returned his call at around midnight. Depending on what you mean by "new.". "Paper
chapter 12
He did not answer her question in the car.He chose not to respond at the registrar's office either, because he was on the phone for forty minutes with people whose names she had never heard, undoing whatever Victor had set in motion before five o'clock that he couldn't do anymore. She sat in the lobby the whole time with her coat on, watching him work with a focus that frightened her a little not because it was unkind, but because it was so completely unlike anything she'd expected from a man she'd first mistaken for harmless.They also did not chat in the car on the way to her place. She let him go in because she had no mental capacity left to even contemplate the question and he stood in her kitchen like a man who had arrived at a verdict he already knew to be undesirable."You can sit down," she said finally, the first thing either of them had said in an hour. "I'm not going to yell at you standing in my kitchen like you're about to get fired.""I don't know what I'm about to get.
chapter 11
"Ethan." Isabella's voice was gentle but commanding, the tone she assumed when she was on the verge of ordering for them all to get the hell out of her face. "Who sent you a message?""Marcus.""What was his message?"He weighed it, the way he always weighed things with her lately, and felt for the first time in weeks that weighing itself was a far more serious complication than anything else. "He said the timing of the story was no coincidence. It was devised to fall at this very moment.""Orchestrated by whom?""I don't know yet." That much, at least, was true. He didn't know why. He was starting to suspect, with a cold certainty settling low in his stomach, that he already knew who.Before she could ask another question, his phone rang yet again and, this time, he decided to answer the call in front of her as a small token of the honesty he was unsure how to express otherwise."Speak to me," he said."Victor was the leak," Marcus's voice came suddenly, fast and intense like that of
Chapter 10
Ethan called his best friend Marcus before he got to the car."Tell me you're exaggerating."I wish I were." Marcus voice was steady, all the careful control of a man trying not to say the wrong thing out loud. "Cole's editor moved it up. It's live in twenty minutes, not six a.m. I couldn't buy you guys any more time than that.""Twenty minutes to do what.""Decide how you want to survive the next twenty four hours," there was a pause, and a different tightness in his friend's tone, all the careful planning of another man already in motion. "Or, Ethan. Twenty minutes to let me handle it the way we always planned to, if it ever came to this."Ethan closed his eyes, because he knew what exactly Marcus meant, because they had written it out together years ago, when it had seemed a very far off hypothetical rather than a twenty four hour countdown."Do it," he said"You're sure."Do it, Marcus. Now."He hung up the phone to find Isabella watching him from across the car, her expression care
Chapter 9
"You said this was urgent," Isabella said, not moving from where she stood. "So say it.""I intend to." He finally met her eyes, all the politeness drained away, leaving something more calculating in its place. "I received a very interesting phone call this afternoon from a gentleman who was able to, with a great deal of certitude, inform me about the fact that my daughter's future husband is not, in fact, a consultant." He glanced over at Ethan. "In fact your full-time client, Mr. Ethan. That's an arrangement you've been making with my father."The room stilled.Ethan didn't relax, not the way he'd been doing in hundreds of similar meetings before this one, only a cold and steady pressure blooming in his chest, a slow awareness of being on thin ice."Who called you," Isabella asked, her tone measured."He didn't give a name. He didn't need to." Her father set his glass down. "I've led this kind of life for forty years, Isabella. I know when you're passing an enemy weapon along to a b
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