The files came in batches.

Sloan laid them across the hospital tray table one folder at a time — printed copies, clean and organized, the way she did everything. Wire transfers. Shell accounts. Emails between Tiffany and a man whose name I recognized from my father's company rosters. Digital receipts for a penthouse lease, a car, a jewelry account, all paid from funds that had moved through three intermediary accounts before landing somewhere they were never supposed to go.

I went through each page slowly. My hands were steady.

'There's more on the USB,' Sloan said. 'Communications going back fourteen months. Timestamps, locations, the works.'

I nodded and kept reading.

Then I heard it — a pause. Not long. Maybe two seconds. But Sloan was never quiet by accident.

I looked up.

She was holding the financial summary page. The one with the source name at the top. Jack Torres, VP of Corporate Finance, Pierce Industries.

Her face was completely still. That particular stillness I'd learned to read over years — not calm, but controlled. The kind that costs something.

She set the page down on the stack without a word and pushed the whole folder toward me.

I didn't ask. Not then. I took the folder and filed it away and made a note to myself that I would ask later, when there was room for it. When I could give her answer the space it deserved.

'Thank you,' I said.

She nodded once and moved to the window.

---

I called Carla Washington at six in the morning.

She picked up on the second ring. No surprise in her voice. No preamble.

'I was wondering when you'd call,' she said.

'I have the financial trails,' I told her. 'Pierce Industries funds into Tiffany Allen's personal accounts. Fourteen months of documentation. My father's legal team is already moving on the federal side.'

'I have the surveillance footage,' she said. 'His apartment building. Hers. Three separate locations over eight months. I also have the receipts he thought he deleted.' A short pause. 'I have divorce papers. They've been ready for six weeks.'

I let that land for a moment. Six weeks. She'd been carrying that alone for six weeks and never moved until she had everything she needed.

'I need you at the venue,' I said. 'The reception screens. Can you handle that yourself or do you need my team?'

'I'll handle it myself.' Her voice was flat and certain. 'What time?'

I told her.

She hung up without a goodbye. I respected that.

---

I discharged myself at seven-fifteen.

The nurse tried to stop me. I signed the forms, thanked her, and walked out. Rayna was in the hallway. She looked at me the way she sometimes did — like she was measuring something she didn't have words for yet.

'You don't have to do this today,' she said quietly.

'I know.' I kissed her cheek. 'Tell Dad I'll call him after.'

Sloan was already outside with the car.

---

The venue was empty when we arrived. Eight-twelve in the morning, three hours before guests. The florists were still working. A catering crew moved through the reception hall with their heads down.

Nobody looked at us. We weren't dressed for a wedding.

I walked the ceremony aisle first.

The fire pits were set into shallow depressions in the floor, covered with thin decorative panels that would give way under weight. Amateur work, honestly — if you knew to look, you could see the seams. Dominic's fraternity brothers had clearly done this before and never been caught. That kind of confidence makes people sloppy.

Sloan crouched beside the third panel and pressed the edge with two fingers. It flexed. She looked up at me.

'They're all live,' she said.

I moved to the aisle entrance. The buckets were rigged above the arch — four of them, suspended on a simple trip-wire mechanism attached to a pressure plate in the floor. The liquid inside had a smell that reached me even from a distance. Foul and sharp. Something you wouldn't forget.

I stood there and thought about the fact that two days ago, I had known about this tradition and told myself I would get through it. That I would stand there and take it because the marriage on the other side was worth the humiliation.

The thought felt like it belonged to someone else now.

I walked back to where the wedding gown hung on a garment rack near the bridal suite entrance — still in its bag, waiting. I unzipped it carefully.

The degrading words were scrawled across the inside lining in thick black marker. Every one of them deliberate. Every one of them meant for me.

I zipped it back up.

'We need to make sure Deborah Nichols is in this dress before the processional,' I said.

Sloan was quiet for a moment. Then, very quietly: 'With pleasure.'

I turned back toward the aisle. The morning light came through the tall windows in long, clean lines and lit up the flowers and the rigged floor panels and the buckets above the arch, and I stood in the middle of all of it and felt something settle in my chest.

Not peace, exactly.

Precision.

The hallway outside the Nichols family suite smelled like hairspray and expensive perfume. Someone had ordered room service. A half-eaten plate of eggs sat on a tray outside the door.

Sloan knocked twice. Professional. Unhurried.

Deborah opened it.

She was already in her mother-of-the-groom dress — cream silk, pearl buttons, the kind of outfit that cost more than most people's rent. Her hair was pinned. Her makeup was done. She looked at me and her face did the thing it always did: that small, reflexive tightening around the eyes. Like I was a smell she couldn't quite place.

'You have the audacity to show up here —'

Sloan moved.

It was fast. It was quiet. One second Deborah was in the doorway, and the next Sloan had her arms pinned behind her back and we were inside the suite with the door shut. The two cousins who'd been sitting on the sofa — Dominic's aunt and some woman I'd met once at Christmas — scrambled to their feet. Sloan looked at them. Just looked.

They sat back down.

I walked to the center of the room.

Deborah was breathing hard. She was trying to pull free and Sloan wasn't even straining. I watched Deborah's face cycle through outrage, then confusion, then something that was almost the beginning of fear.

Good.

'Let me go,' she hissed. 'You have no idea who you're dealing with —'

'I know exactly who I'm dealing with.' My voice came out even. Quiet. 'You're the woman who kicked me in the stomach while your son watched. You're the woman who stood in a hospital hallway last night and felt nothing.' I tilted my head. 'You wanted to see a bride walk the aisle today. I'm going to give you that chance.'

She went still.

I nodded to Sloan. Sloan smiled — that particular smile she had, the one that didn't reach her eyes — and walked Deborah toward the garment bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door.

We'd moved it an hour ago. Deborah didn't know that.

The screaming started when we got the bag unzipped. Not because she could see the words on the lining — those were on the inside. She was screaming because she understood, finally, that this was not a negotiation.

It took four minutes. Sloan was efficient. The two cousins stayed on the sofa and stared at the carpet.

When it was done, Deborah stood in the center of the room in the wedding gown. The veil was pinned into her hair. Her pearl-buttoned dress was in a heap on the floor.

She looked at me with pure, shaking hatred.

I looked back at her without any feeling at all.

'Someone will come to escort you to the processional,' I said. 'If you make a sound before then, Sloan will hear it.' I picked up my bag. 'Congratulations. You're finally getting everything you wanted.'

---

Dominic was in the groom's suite two floors up.

Sloan handled that part herself. I waited in the stairwell and listened.

I heard his voice through the door — relaxed, a little impatient. Then Sloan's, pleasant and smooth, telling him the bride was still getting ready, that he should head down and take his position at the altar, that everything was on schedule.

A pause.

Then the sound of him moving. Unhurried. Confident.

I heard him straighten his cufflinks. That small metal click. I'd heard it a hundred times and never thought about what it meant until now — a man touching his armor before walking into a room he believed he already owned.

His footsteps moved away down the hall.

Sloan appeared in the stairwell doorway. She looked at me.

I nodded.

We went down.

---

From the side corridor near the venue entrance, I could see everything.

Three hundred people. New York's finest — business partners, social connections, people who had sent gifts and RSVPs and made travel arrangements for a wedding they thought they understood. The flower arrangements were extraordinary. The light through the tall windows was warm and gold.

Dominic stood at the altar.

He looked good. I had to acknowledge that. He was composed, shoulders back, the picture of a man at ease with his own future. He glanced toward the entrance once, twice. Patient. Certain.

The ceremony music started.

Sloan stood beside me. Neither of us spoke.

I watched him standing there — the man who had been calm when I found him, who had said *you're overreacting*, who had stood in a doorway and watched and not moved — and I felt nothing that resembled grief. What I felt was clean and cold and completely clear.

I touched the inside of my left wrist. Once.

Then I dropped my hand.

The processional began.

I stayed where I was and watched Dominic Nichols wait at the altar for a bride he would not recognize until the veil came up, and I thought about the velvet box I had carried across the city the night before, and the door that had swung shut in my chest, and how quiet everything had been since.

The music swelled.

I didn't move.

I just watched.