The Quiet Heir

CHAPTER 4: A VOICE FROM THE LIFE I BURIED

My phone rang at two in the morning, and I knew before I answered it that only one person alive still called that number.

"You silenced my call," Odalys Sterling said, the moment I picked up, her voice thin with age but sharp as ever, sharp enough that I sat straight up in the narrow servant's bed, fully awake in an instant. "Three days, Corwin. Three days since your father's funeral, and you couldn't spare thirty seconds for your grandmother."

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it. "It's been complicated."

"Complicated." She made the word sound like an insult. "I heard about the promise. The whole board heard about the promise, which means half the businessmen in this city now know that the last Sterling heir is engaged to a girl whose family thinks he sweeps floors for a living. Do you understand what a position that puts us in?"

"I'm handling it."

"Are you." It was not a question. "Tell me, are you handling it the way your father would have wanted, quietly and with dignity, or are you handling it the way I taught you, which is to never let anyone underestimate you twice?"

I thought of Marcus on the terrace, of the careful, dangerous curiosity in his eyes, of Desmond's threat over his glass of whiskey, of the folded paper passed to Foster Bell under the table.

"Someone's already looking into me," I admitted.

The silence on the line stretched long enough that I could picture her exactly, sitting in her study at Sterling Tower, back straight despite her frail health, calculating faster than most men half her age.

"Then you have less time than you think," she said finally. "Corwin, listen to me. I did not spend fifteen years training you to run that company just so you could hide in a groundskeeper's room, waiting to be discovered by accident. If your identity comes out on someone else's terms, in someone else's timing, you lose every advantage you have. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, it sounds like you're playing a very dangerous game of patience with people who have no idea what patience actually costs when it runs out."

I closed my eyes, rubbing a hand over my face, feeling for the first time since the funeral something close to exhaustion.

"I need more time," I said. "There's something happening inside the Renfrew family, something involving Desmond and a private banker named Foster Bell. If I move too early, I lose the chance to see how deep it goes."

Another silence, shorter this time, and when she spoke again her voice had shifted, curiosity replacing frustration.

"Foster Bell," she repeated slowly. "I know that name. He handled the quiet liquidation of the Ferro family's shipping company two years ago, right before it collapsed entirely. If he's circling the Renfrews, Corwin, that family is in far worse trouble than a broken heart over an unwanted engagement."

"That's what I thought," I said.

"Then you'll need to move carefully, and you'll need help you can trust completely. Malik is good, but he's one man inside a house full of people paid to notice things." She paused. "I'm sending someone."

"Grandmother, no. The fewer people who know who I really am, the safer this stays."

"The person I'm sending already knows exactly who you are," she said. "She's known since you were twelve years old."

My stomach dropped slightly. There was only one person outside Malik and my grandmother who had ever been allowed close enough to know the truth, and I had not seen her in almost ten years.

"You're not serious," I said.

"Deadly serious. Priya starts as the Renfrew family's new physical therapist for Edmund next week. Officially hired through an agency. Unofficially hired by me, an hour ago, the moment you told me a name like Foster Bell was circling that house." Her voice softened, just slightly, in the way it only did when she was worried and did not want to admit it. "You are not doing this alone, Corwin. Not this time."

I sat in the dark for a long moment after she hung up, listening to the old house settle around me, the same creaks and groans my father used to complain about when I visited him as a boy, before I understood any of what I was being trained for.

Sleep did not come easily after that. When it finally did, it was shallow and short, broken by the sound of raised voices somewhere in the house before dawn.

I found the source in the east hallway, Isabelle standing outside her father's bedroom door in a robe, arguing in fierce, hushed tones with Desmond, who looked like he had not slept either.

"You can't keep him from doing what he wants with his own signature," Isabelle was saying. "It's his company, Uncle Desmond, not yours."

"Your father is not well enough to make decisions about anything," Desmond snapped back. "The doctor said stress could trigger another episode. Every decision that comes out of that room right now needs to go through me first, for his own protection."

"His protection," Isabelle repeated, voice thick with disbelief, "or your convenience?"

Desmond's jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought he might actually say something honest in front of her. Instead his eyes flicked past her and landed on me, standing at the end of the hallway where I had no business being at that hour.

"Go back to your room," he said coldly. "This is a family matter."

"He's about to be family," Isabelle said, before I could respond, surprising both of us. "Whether either of you likes it or not."

Desmond stared at her for a long, tense moment, something calculating moving behind his eyes, before he turned without another word and walked back down the hallway, disappearing into the dark of the east wing.

Isabelle exhaled slowly once he was gone, some of the fight draining out of her shoulders, leaving her looking younger and more tired than I had seen her yet.

"What was that about," I asked quietly.

She glanced at her father's closed door, then back at me, weighing, I could tell, how much to say to a man she still barely trusted.

"He wants my father to sign something," she said finally. "Some kind of restructuring document, giving him more control over company decisions while my father recovers. My father's been refusing for weeks." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Tonight my uncle stopped asking politely."

I thought of Foster Bell's careful cufflinks, of the folded paper passed under a dinner table, of my grandmother's warning about a company circling toward collapse.

"Isabelle," I said slowly, "I need you to tell me exactly what that document says, if you can get a copy of it."

She looked at me sharply, some of her old suspicion returning to her face. "Why would I trust you with something like that?"

"Because," I said, holding her gaze steadily, "I don't think your uncle is trying to protect your father at all. I think he's trying to sell what's left of this family out from under him, and I think Foster Bell is the man he's planning to sell it to."

Isabelle went very still, the color draining slightly from her face as several pieces she had clearly been trying not to connect suddenly clicked together behind her eyes.

"How do you know that name," she whispered.

Before I could answer, a sound cut through the hallway that stopped both of us cold, a sharp, ragged cry from behind her father's bedroom door, followed by the crash of something heavy hitting the floor.