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Chapter 273
Helen Sterling had been awake since five.She always was. Sleep was for people who could afford to be surprised.She sat in the morning room of Sterling House with the wedding seating chart spread across a white linen tablecloth, a cup of black tea at her elbow, a silver pen in her hand. Four hundred guests. Thirty-eight tables. Two senators, three judges, the police commissioner, the mayor, and half the board of every company in Ashford that mattered.Each name was a favor owed. Each seat was a message.She moved the mayor two tables closer to the head table and made a small, neat note in the margin.At fifty-four, Helen was still beautiful in the way that took work. Her blonde hair was swept into a smooth chignon. Her skin was flawless. Her cream silk blouse had been pressed at six. She looked exactly like what the magazines called her: the gracious first lady of Ashford's most powerful family.She had built every inch of that image herself.The door opened without a knock. Only one
Chapter 272
Reece argued. Julie argued. Kai went anyway."He found the safehouse in less than two days," Reece said at the bottom of the stairs. "If he wanted you dead, you'd be dead. That's not comforting.""It's not supposed to be.""Then why go?""Because he wants me to see what he knows." Kai buttoned his coat. "And I want to see what he's hiding."---The Blackwell estate sat in the hills north of the city, behind a stone wall and a pair of iron gates that opened before the Mercedes reached them. The drive wound up through old oaks and manicured lawns, past a fountain, past a garage with eight doors, to a house of pale stone and tall windows that glowed gold in the morning light.Kai had been here before. Ten years ago, the night Marcus Blackwell found him bleeding on a sidewalk. He'd been nineteen, filthy, still shaking with adrenaline, and Julie had been asleep in his arms.He'd thought it was a palace.Now it looked like what it was. A fortress.The driver opened his door. A woman in a gr
Chapter 271
Richard took the page out of Kai's hand.Kai let him.His father held it close to his face in the weak glow from the Bentley's open door. His lips moved silently as he read. Location. Time. Victim. His eyes reached the last line and stopped.For a long moment, he didn't move at all.Then his knees gave out.He didn't fall so much as fold, sinking down onto the steel guardrail at the edge of the shoulder like a puppet with its strings cut. The page trembled in his fingers. His breath came in short, ragged pulls."Derek," he whispered.Kai said nothing."He'd just turned eighteen. Helen bought him a car for graduation. A black Porsche. I told her it was too much, too fast for a boy his age, and she laughed at me." Richard stared at the page. "That spring, it went into the shop for a month. Helen said he'd scraped it against a gate at the country club. I never even went to look at it."His voice broke on the last word."A month," he said. "A month in the shop. And I never asked."The win
Chapter 270
Ethan found the phone in eleven minutes."It's not at the Sterling estate," he said over the speaker, his voice thin with exhaustion. "It's not at the tower either. It's sitting on Route 9, heading north out of the city. Hasn't moved in forty minutes."Kai was already pulling on his coat. "Where exactly?""Just past the reservoir. Near mile marker—""Fourteen," Kai said.A pause on the line. "How did you know that?"Kai didn't answer. He hung up.Lila was watching him from across the room, the laptop still glowing behind her. "That's where it happened," she said softly. "Isn't it?""Stay here. Keep Marisol quiet. Nobody else knows the file's gone.""Kai—""Please."It was the word that stopped her. He could see it land. She nodded once.He went down the stairs two at a time.---Reece drove without headlights for the last half mile.The highway curved along the dark edge of the reservoir, empty in both directions. No streetlights out here. Just the reflective posts on the shoulder, ca
Chapter 269
Lila's apartment looked like a crime scene that had been organized by a librarian.Paper covered everything. The couch, the coffee table, the floor. Printouts of internal memos with whole lines blacked out. Clinical trial tables marked up in red ink. Photographs of men in suits, connected by strings of colored tape across one entire wall. In the middle of it all, a laptop glowed beside a mug of tea that had gone cold hours ago.Kai stood just inside the door. He didn't sit."When did he call?" he asked."Ten-fifteen." Lila closed the door behind him and leaned against it. "He hasn't called me after nine in six years. Not since I stopped coming to Sunday dinners.""What did he say?""That you were back in Ashford. That you'd come to me before the weekend was over." She pulled the reading glasses out of her hair and folded them. "And that when you did, I should tell you he'd like to see you. Tomorrow. At the house."Kai said nothing."He sounded pleased," Lila added. "That's what fright
Chapter 268
The candles hissed softly in the silence.Kai didn't move. The envelope hung forgotten in his hand."Then who was?" he asked."I don't know.""You knew enough to come halfway across the world.""I know there was a driver." Anya folded her arms. "A car came around the bend at two in the morning, doing sixty in the rain. It hit your mother. The driver stopped. Called it in himself. Waited on the shoulder for the ambulance like a good citizen." Her voice stayed flat. "His name went into the accident report. Officer Thomas Hale wrote it down.""So I find Hale.""Hale's retired. Drinks himself to sleep in a trailer outside the county line. He doesn't remember his own birthday, let alone a traffic report from ten years ago." She tilted her head. "But the report still exists.""Where?""Ashford County Courthouse. Basement archive. Sealed by order of Judge Alan Pryce forty-eight hours after your mother died."Kai's jaw tightened. "A sealed report. For a traffic accident.""For a traffic accid
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