I made it four blocks before I had to pull over.

The car idled beside a closed flower shop. Buckets of dead tulips sat in the window. I gripped the wheel until my knuckles went white, then let go one finger at a time.

*Breathe, El. You can scream later.*

I picked up my phone and pressed play on the recording again. I skipped ahead past the laughing. Past Laney's whining. Past the part where he called me a sad little rich girl.

Near the end, there was a line I had missed the first three times.

"*Relax. The real drafts aren't even here. They're in my study at home. Holding company papers, the trust timeline, all of it. Elowen never goes in there.*"

I stopped the recording.

He was right. I never went in there. He told me once that his study was "the only place my brain can shut up." I thought it was sweet. I gave him his space.

I gave him a safe.

I dialed his private number. Not the office line. The one he said was "just for you, sweetheart."

It rang twice.

"El?" His voice came out too fast. Behind him, something rustled. A drawer slid shut. "Hey. Hey, what's up?"

"Hi. I just wanted to hear your voice again."

"Oh. Yeah. Of course." A pause. His breathing was uneven. "Listen, babe, I'm actually about to walk into a meeting."

"A meeting? It's past seven."

"Closed-door thing. Senior team only. Harlan stuff, you know how it is." He cleared his throat. "Very boring. Very long."

Somewhere behind him, a woman giggled. Then it cut off, like someone had pressed a hand over her mouth.

I stared at the dead tulips.

"Who's there with you?" I asked lightly.

"What?"

"I heard someone laugh."

"Oh. That's—Laney. She's setting up the conference room. Printing agendas." He laughed too. It came out thin. "She says hi."

"Tell her I said hi back."

"Will do."

"And tell her not to stay too late. She works so hard for you."

Silence on the line. Just one beat too long.

"Yeah," Kael said. "She really does."

I pressed my thumbnail into the leather of the steering wheel. Hard. It left a little crescent mark.

"Promise me something," I said.

"Anything."

"Don't push yourself tonight. You always forget to eat when you're stressed. Order something real. Not those protein bars."

He let out a long breath. I could hear the relief in it. The fool thought he'd gotten away clean.

"God, I love you," he said. "You're too good to me, you know that?"

"I know."

He laughed again. This time it sounded real. "I'll call you when we wrap up. Could be midnight, though. These guys love to hear themselves talk."

"Take your time," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Sleep, okay? Take your pills if you need them."

*Take your pills.* Another brick in the wall he was building around me.

"Goodnight, Kael."

"Night, sweetheart."

The call ended.

I sat there for exactly ten seconds. Then I flipped on my turn signal, swung the car around, and drove toward the Calder Tower.

Home.

---

The penthouse took up the top two floors. My father bought it the year I turned sixteen. Kael moved in after the wedding and changed the art, the furniture, the scent in the hallway. Cedar and something sharp. His cologne lived in the walls now.

I took the service entrance and used my own keycard for the private lift. Nobody saw me.

The apartment was dark. I left the lights off and used my phone's flashlight instead.

The study sat at the end of the east hall. The door was shut.

I tried the handle. Locked.

Of course it was.

I stood there for a second, staring at the brass knob. Then I remembered something. Two winters ago, Kael locked himself out after a business dinner. He was drunk and furious. I'd laughed and pulled a spare key from the back of the hall closet, taped under the top shelf.

"How did you know that was there?" he had asked, squinting at me.

"My dad hid it," I'd told him. "This was his house first."

He had never asked me about it again. I bet he forgot it existed.

I reached into the closet, ran my fingers along the underside of the shelf, and felt the tape.

Still there.

The key turned with a soft click.

His study smelled like whiskey and printer ink. His laptop was gone, but the desk was a mess of paper. Contracts. Sticky notes. A coffee mug with a ring of dried brown at the bottom.

I set my phone face-up on the desk so the light shone at the ceiling. Then I started pulling drawers.

Top drawer. Pens, a stapler, receipts.

Second drawer. Old tax files. My name on half of them.

Bottom drawer. Locked again.

"You paranoid little snake," I muttered.

I grabbed a letter opener from his pen cup and wedged it into the gap. My hands were sweating. The blade slipped once and scraped the wood. I tried again. The cheap lock popped.

Inside lay a single black folder. Thick. Heavy. A yellow tab stuck out of the side.

Someone had written on it in Kael's tight, slanted handwriting.

*Wren Holdings — Phase 2.*

My pulse pounded in my ears.

I lifted the folder halfway out of the drawer. The first page showed a chart. Boxes and arrows. At the top sat my name. At the bottom sat his.

Every arrow pointed down. From me to him.

Then I heard it.

A low hum, deep inside the walls. Then a soft mechanical whir.

The private elevator.

Someone was riding it up.

I froze with the folder in both hands. The only people with a keycard to that lift were me, the building manager, and my husband.

My phone buzzed on the desk. A text lit up the screen.

*Kael ❤️: Meeting ended early. Heading home to grab some files. Love you.*

The whirring grew louder.

Floor by floor, he was coming up.

The elevator hummed louder.

I flipped the black folder open and started shooting. Page one. Page two. The chart with all the arrows. My thumb tapped the screen so fast the shutter sound blurred into one long stutter.

*Wren Holdings. Trust Timeline. Morton—Exit Package.*

Twenty pages. Thirty.

The whir in the walls changed pitch. Slower now. Close.

I opened my cloud app and hit upload. A little blue bar crawled across the screen.

"Come on," I hissed. "Come on, come on."

Forty-one percent.

I slid the folder back into the bottom drawer, tab facing out, exactly how I found it. The broken lock wouldn't catch. I shoved the drawer hard with my knee. Something inside clicked. Close enough.

Letter opener back in the pen cup. Point down, like he kept it.

Seventy-eight percent.

I locked the study door behind me and pressed the spare key back under the closet shelf. The tape had lost its stick. I held it there with one finger and counted to five.

The elevator chimed.

Upload complete.

I ran.

---

By the time the front door opened, I was in our bed with the comforter pulled to my chin. My coat hung over the chair. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was sure he'd hear it through the wall.

Footsteps in the hall. They paused outside the study.

A key. A lock turning.

I stared at the ceiling and did not move.

Thirty seconds. A minute. A drawer scraped open.

*Please. Please don't look closely.*

The drawer shut. The footsteps came toward the bedroom.

The door swung open, and light from the hall spilled across the floor.

"Jesus—" Kael jumped back a full step. "El?"

I sat up slowly and rubbed my eyes. "Surprise."

"What are you—you're supposed to be in Zurich."

"I know." I gave him a sleepy smile. "I wanted to be home for our anniversary. I took the early flight. I was going to wait up, but I passed out."

He stood in the doorway for a long moment. His tie hung loose. His collar was wrinkled on one side.

Then his face melted into something soft.

"You crazy woman." He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. "You flew all that way just to sleep?"

"Just to see you."

He cupped my face in both hands. His palms smelled like vanilla lotion. Laney's. The bottle on her desk.

I held still while he kissed my forehead.

"God, what a night," he groaned, flopping back across the foot of the bed. "Three hours of Harlan's people arguing over decimal points. I thought my head was going to split open."

"My poor husband."

"Don't." He laughed and covered his eyes with his arm. "If you're nice to me, I'll cry."

I laughed too. A real one. It came out of nowhere, bright and loud, and for a second it scared me more than he did.

He lifted his arm and peeked at me. "What's so funny?"

"You," I said. "You always look so dramatic when you're tired."

"I'm a tragic figure." He sat up and squeezed my knee. "Did you take anything to sleep? You look pale."

"No pills tonight."

"You should, babe. Jet lag messes with you. You remember last time."

I didn't remember a last time. There had never been one.

"Maybe tomorrow," I said.

He kissed me on the mouth this time. I kissed him back. I made myself sink into it, the way I used to.

When he pulled away, he smiled at me like I was the only woman alive.

"Happy anniversary, El."

"Happy anniversary."

He went to shower. I lay awake listening to the water run, and I did not close my eyes once.

---

The next morning I told him I had a dress fitting and lunch with an old school friend.

"Look at you," he said, buttering his toast. "Back for one day and already busy."

"A girl has errands."

"Take the driver."

"I'll drive myself."

He paused with the knife in the air. Just for a blink. Then he shrugged. "Text me when you get there."

I didn't.

---

Elias picked a diner on the far side of the river, the kind with sticky menus and no one from our world. My cousin was already in a back booth when I arrived, his jacket off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

"You look like hell," he said.

"Thank you. I worked hard on it."

"Sit. Talk."

I slid my phone across the table with one earbud. "Listen first."

He frowned and put it in.

I watched his face while the recording played. Elias was a corporate litigator. He'd sat through hostile depositions without blinking. Now his ears went red. Then his neck. At the part about Dr. Pell, his hand closed so hard around his coffee mug I thought it would crack.

He ripped the earbud out.

"That son of a bitch."

"There's more." I opened the photos and turned the screen toward him.

He swiped through them fast. Then slower. Then he stopped on the chart and stared.

"Wren Holdings," he muttered. "He set up a shell. In your name first, so it looks like your idea. Then it flips to him." He looked up. "El, this is fraud. This is conspiracy. We call the police today. Right now."

"No."

"*No?*"

"Keep your voice down."

He leaned across the table. "He's planning to have you declared unstable. He's paying a doctor to lie in your medical file. And you want to sit on this?"

"I want to finish it." I kept my voice flat. "Elias, look at page twelve again."

He swiped back.

"Those consulting fees," I said. "Those aren't for the future. They're already being paid. He's been moving money for months. Through people I've never heard of."

His jaw worked. "Gray money."

"If I go to the police today, what happens tonight?"

He didn't answer.

"He makes six phone calls," I said. "Accounts close. Files get shredded. Dr. Pell suddenly has no records. And all I'm left with is a recording of my husband being a pig in bed. That's a divorce. That's not a prison sentence."

Elias sat back hard against the booth. For a long moment he just looked at me.

"When did you get like this?" he said quietly.

"About seven o'clock last night."

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Okay. Okay. So what do you want?"

"Everything. The bank trail. The trustee deal. Whatever he's paying Pell. I want the whole chain before he knows I'm holding it."

"That means you go home and keep sleeping next to him."

"Yes."

"Kissing him. Smiling at him."

"I did it last night."

He rubbed his face with both hands. "I hate this."

"You don't have to like it. You just have to help."

"I'll pull the corporate filings on Wren. Quietly." He tapped the table. "And Morton—I'll find out if anyone's approached him. But El, one thing first."

"What?"

"If Kael's paranoid enough to lock his drawers, he's paranoid enough to watch the house." Elias pulled out his phone. "I know a guy. Former security. He sweeps offices for my clients."

"The penthouse?"

"Every room. Today. While Kael's at work."

---

His guy was named Ruben Okafor. Big hands, quiet voice, a black case full of wands and blinking boxes. I let him in through the service lift at two o'clock.

"Bedroom first," I said.

He shook his head. "Places where people talk business first. You said there's a study?"

I unlocked it with the spare key.

He walked the room slowly, holding a gray device out in front of him. It clicked softly near the desk. Louder near the bookshelf. Then, in the far corner by the window, it let out a sharp, steady whine.

Ruben crouched. He ran his fingers along the baseboard, behind the potted fern.

He held up something smaller than a shirt button. A tiny wire trailed from it.

"Live," he said. "Transmitting right now."

My mouth went dry.

Last night. The drawer. The letter opener scraping the wood. Me hissing *come on, come on* at my phone.

Ruben looked up at me.

"Ma'am," he said quietly, "whoever put this here heard everything that happened in this room."