Elodie's POV
The third note is the one that breaks something open in me.
The first two I could almost explain away. "Replacements don't deserve happiness" — slipped under the penthouse door on a Wednesday. "You'll end up like your sister" — tucked inside a dry-cleaning bag returned to the lobby. Ugly. Threatening. But possible, I told myself, to dismiss as someone who knew about the arrangement and wanted to rattle me.
The third note arrives inside a sealed envelope addressed to me at the office where I've been consulting three days a week for Thornwick's company. Nobody outside the building should have that address. Nobody outside a very small circle even knows I go there.
I open it at my desk. Three words this time.
"Your sister screamed."
I fold it in half. Put it in my bag. Walk to the bathroom and sit on the floor of a locked stall for four minutes breathing like I'm surfacing from underwater.
Then I get up, wash my hands, and call Thornwick.
He hires security within the hour. Two people — one for the penthouse entrance, one who follows me without making it obvious. I argue. He doesn't budge.
"Someone got your office address," he says. His voice is flat in the way it gets when he is furious and refusing to show it. "That's not random. That's organized. You don't argue with me on this, Elodie."
"I'm not a package you can protect with a bodyguard—"
"I know exactly what you are." He looks at me steadily. "Which is why I'm not willing to lose you to whoever this is."
I stop arguing.
Four days later, the mechanic calls.
The car I drive — the one registered to the Vale household account — went in for a routine service that morning. The mechanic's voice on the phone is careful and slow, the voice of someone who has figured out they are holding something serious and doesn't want to drop it.
"Ms. Vale, I need you to come in. There's something with the brake lines."
I close my eyes.
"Cut?" I ask.
A pause. "You knew?"
"No," I say. "But my sister's were too."
That night I pull out the police report from Calista's accident. I requested a copy three weeks ago through a contact Quinlan gave me, tucked it in the back of my desk drawer, and told myself I'd look at it when I was ready.
I'm ready now.
I spread it across the kitchen table after Thornwick falls asleep. Page by page. Witness statements, forensic notes, photographs of the crash site, the vehicle inspection summary.
There it is. Buried in the technical language on page eleven, flagged as "consistent with mechanical failure" and then — nothing. No follow-up investigation. No further analysis. Just a note that the determination was inconclusive and the file was closed pending Calista's recovery.
The brake lines on Calista's car were compromised.
Not failed. Compromised.
The word the report uses is "unusual wear pattern." I've looked up enough in the last week to know what that means. Brake lines don't develop unusual wear patterns on a car that's eighteen months old and fully serviced. They develop them when someone who knows what they're doing wants a crash to look like an accident.
Someone tried to kill Calista.
Someone is now trying to kill me.
And they used the exact same method both times, which means they're either very confident or they simply don't think anyone is paying close enough attention to notice.
They were right the first time.
They're wrong about the second.
I don't sleep. I move from the police report to my laptop. I start with what I know — Calista was careful, organized, meticulous. If she was suspicious about something, she would have kept records. She just wouldn't have kept them anywhere obvious.
It takes me until four in the morning to find the first thread.
Our father's company — the one that feeds into the Vale holdings — has three subsidiary accounts I've never seen referenced in any family document. Small names, registered offshore, barely any web presence. I dig into the filing histories. The accounts are four years old. Each one receives transfers at irregular intervals. Each one immediately moves that money somewhere else.
I follow the chain as far as I can before it goes cold.
Fifty million dollars. Moved over four years through shell companies that exist on paper and nowhere else.
My hands are shaking but my mind is completely still. I recognize this feeling — it's the same one I get standing in front of a painting that's been misattributed for decades. The wrongness of it hums at a frequency most people can't hear. But I can always hear it.
I look at the dates.
The transfers stopped eight weeks ago.
Eight weeks ago is exactly when Calista had her accident.
I wake Thornwick at five AM. I put my laptop on the bed in front of him without saying a word.
He sits up. Reads. His face doesn't change but his jaw goes tight — I know that jaw now — and he reads it a second time, slower.
Then he looks at me.
"Calista found this," I say. "Before her accident. She was investigating it."
"You think whoever was moving this money found out she knew."
"I think she got too close and someone decided it was easier to make her disappear than to stop." I pause. "And now I'm getting too close. So they're trying to do the same to me."
He is quiet for a long time.
"Someone in your family controls those accounts," he says. Not a question. The math is simple and brutal.
"Yes."
"Which means someone in your family tried to kill Calista. And is now trying to kill you."
"Yes."
We look at each other in the pale early light and I watch him absorb the full weight of it — that the enemy isn't a stranger, isn't a rival company, isn't some outside threat we can locate and remove. It's someone at the family dinner table. Someone who called me "the substitute" with a bright smile. Someone who hugged me at the wedding.
"I need to see all of it," he says. "Every transaction. Every account name. Everything."
"Already printed," I tell him.
He looks at me for one long moment. "You started this investigation before you woke me up."
"I needed to be sure first."
Something moves through his eyes — not suspicion, not quite. Something more complicated.
"How long have you been carrying this alone?"
"Since before the wedding," I say honestly. "Since the first text from the unknown number. I've been putting pieces together since day one."
He nods slowly. Then he reaches across and takes the printed pages.
"Then we finish it together."
We work through the morning. By nine we have a cleaner picture of the shell company structure and two names that appear across multiple registration documents — names I don't recognize at first. Thornwick searches them in his corporate database and goes very still.
"What?" I ask.
He turns the screen toward me.
One name is a known financial fixer — a man who builds untraceable accounts for people who can afford his silence.
The other name is a signatory. Someone who authorized every single transfer.
I read it twice. Then I sit back.
Because the second name belongs to the only person in my family I ever trusted completely. The only one who called to check on me the night of the wedding. The only one who warned me to watch everyone.
The name is Senna.