Nobela ni Gabriella Stark

Anastasia’s POV:The eggs were good.Lucas was insufferably pleased about this and did not say so out loud which somehow made it worse. I ate and he ate and we did not talk about Whitmore or the drives or the Meridian Group or any of the things that had occupied every waking hour of the past week. We talked about nothing. He told me about a restaurant in Rome he had eaten at alone on a business trip three years ago and spent the entire meal wishing he had someone to share it with. I told him about a design project I had abandoned halfway through during the marriage because I had run out of time and space to finish it and had found the sketches at the bottom of a drawer eight months ago and started again.“What was it?” he said.“A community center,” I said. “Pro bono. For a neighborhood that needed one.”“Did you finish it?”“Not yet,” I said. “But I will.”He looked at me across the table.“I believe that,” he said.We stayed for an hour longer than we needed to and I did not feel gu

Anastasia’s POV:Marcus hugged me before I left and I let him hold on longer than usual because he needed it and because I did not know when the next time would be that things were calm enough for a hug to just be a hug.“Be careful,” he said.“I will,” I said.He did not look convinced but I went anyway.The city was barely moving. Lucas drove and I sat with my bag in my lap and did not feel the need to say anything and neither did he and we just moved through the quiet streets toward the north end of the city where Senator Carl Whitmore lived in a brownstone that looked exactly like what it was, the home of a man who had been comfortable and powerful and untouchable for a very long time.Patricia was already there when we arrived. She got out of her car and came to Lucas’s window and held up a warrant.“Signed an hour ago,” she said. “We go in now before he comes downstairs.”We went in.The two agents Patricia had brought were already inside and positioned and said nothing when we

Anastasia’s POV:We divided the work the way you divided anything enormous and urgent. Patricia took the financial documents. Lucas took the company structures. Marcus took the names, cross referencing them against public records on a burner phone Dean had never touched. I took the timeline, building the sequence of events from the earliest document our fathers had produced to the most recent, laying out the full twenty two years in a way that would hold up in a federal courtroom.Elena made food nobody asked for and set it beside people without comment and it got eaten without acknowledgment and that was its own kind of language in a house full of people too tired for words.Diane sat with Victoria in the front room and at some point around three in the morning I looked through the doorway and found them both asleep in their chairs, Diane’s head dropped to one side, Victoria’s hands still folded in her lap in the particular posture of a woman who maintained her composure even unconsc

Anastasia’s POV:Patricia’s father’s office was on a street I had driven down a hundred times without ever noticing it existed.Callum Street ran parallel to the main financial district, one block east of the towers, the kind of street that existed in the shadow of something more important and had given up competing with it. The buildings were older here, three and four story walk ups with ground floor offices that turned over every few years, accountants and small law practices and the occasional consulting firm that nobody could quite explain.Number fourteen had a hand painted sign above the door that said Haines Advisory Services in lettering that had been there long enough to fade. The light inside was on.Patricia was standing in the doorway when we pulled up, her badge on her belt and her phone in her hand.“You didn’t have to come,” she said.“You were going alone,” I said.“I’m a federal investigator,” she said.“It’s midnight and the people you are investigating have been at

Anastasia’s POV:I read the message twice before I said anything.“They are already there,” I said. “Patricia did not say where.”Lucas was already reaching for his phone.“Call her,” I said. “Now.”He called. I watched his face while it rang, watched him stand up from the desk, watched his jaw tighten when she picked up.“Patricia. Where?”A pause. I could hear her voice through the phone but not the words.“Say that again,” Lucas said.Another pause.He lowered the phone slowly.“The storage facility,” he said. “Marcus’s unit. They went back to the unit.”Marcus stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor.“I left it open,” he said. “I left the door unlocked. I never locked it back up after we took the box.”“There’s nothing left there,” I said. “We have everything. The drives, the photograph.”“They don’t know that,” Lucas said. “They are going to search it anyway.”Victoria’s voice came from the doorway where Diane had wheeled her closer to hear.“Then let them search an

Anastasia’s POV:The house was smaller than I expected.Lucas had built an empire out of glass towers and seventy floor headquarters, and somehow I had absorbed the assumption that everything connected to him would carry that same scale, but the house on Linden Street was a modest two story brick building with a small front garden gone wild from years of neglect, the kind of house a successful but not yet wealthy man bought for his young family before the world decided he was going to be something larger.Lucas stood at the gate for a moment before he opened it.“I’ve not been inside since the week after the funeral,” he said. “I come and stand outside sometimes. I’ve never gone further than the garden.”“You don’t have to go in tonight,” I said.“I do,” he said. “I think I’ve been waiting for a reason for fifteen years and this is it.”He opened the gate.The key still worked, which told its own story about a man who paid someone quietly to maintain a house he could not bring himself