“Boss, That Medicine Looks Different,” the Maid’s Little Girl Warned

By nightfall, Marcus returned with a folder in his hand and a look on his face that Damian recognized immediately.

It was the look of a man who had found something he wished he hadn’t.

They spoke in the study with the doors closed, only the two of them and the dim glow of the desk lamp between them. The bottle of scotch on the sideboard stayed untouched. Neither man reached for it.

“The pharmacy confirms your usual prescription was delivered as normal,” Marcus said. “Sealed. Correct dosage. Correct color. It arrived at the side entrance at nine in the morning three days ago.”

“Signed for by?”

“Kitchen staff. Standard procedure.”

“So the bottle was switched after it entered the house.”

“Yes.”

“Which means whoever did this had access to my study after the delivery and before this morning.”

Damian’s fingers tapped once against the desk. Slow. Deliberate.

“Who signed the manifest?”

Marcus opened the folder.

“Alina.”

The name landed in the room like a dropped glass.

“She signs for deliveries every week,” Marcus said quickly. “It’s part of her job. It doesn’t mean—”

“I know what it doesn’t mean.”

Damian said it sharply, and then sat with the sharpness, because he did not like the way it had come out. It had come out too fast. Defensive. Which meant the doubt had already arrived, uninvited, and made itself at home in his chest.

He thought of Sophia’s hand in his.

He thought of Alina’s tears in the doorway.

He thought of two years of quiet, careful work — a woman who had never once given him a reason to distrust her, who had never once asked for anything.

And yet the timeline pointed at her front door.

“There’s something else,” Marcus said.

His voice had dropped.

“The security footage from the hallway outside your study. Most of it is normal. But there’s an eleven-minute gap yesterday afternoon. The camera loops the same frame over and over.”

“Someone tampered with it.”

“Yes.”

“Who has access to the security system?”

Marcus hesitated.

Damian felt his patience thin to nothing.

“Vincent,” Marcus said finally. “He asked me for temporary access two days ago. Said he wanted to review footage of the east wing for a security upgrade he was planning.”

“And you gave it to him.”

“I gave it to him because he’s your brother, sir.”

“Get him here. Now.”

Vincent Cross arrived twenty minutes later dressed in a charcoal jacket and jeans, a glass of scotch already in his hand, as if he had walked out of a party rather than into an interrogation.

He was four years younger than Damian. Where Damian carried his power in silence, Vincent wore his like a loud, expensive suit.

“Someone tried to poison me,” Damian said the moment his brother cleared the doorway.

Vincent’s face shifted. Surprise flashed across it, quick and wide.

But Damian had spent his entire life reading faces for a living, and something about that surprise sat half a second too long — the way a man’s face does when he has rehearsed an emotion before walking into a room.

“What are you talking about?”

“You had access to the cameras. There’s an eleven-minute gap outside this room yesterday. The same day my medication was switched.”

Vincent set his glass down. Slowly.

“You think I did this.”

“I think you’re going to explain yourself.”

The two brothers looked at each other across the desk.

Years of old resentment rose up between them, silent and familiar. Things unspoken since their father’s death. Since the company was split. Since Damian had taken control of everything and Vincent had been left standing in the shadow of a throne he had always believed should have been his.

“I asked for that footage,” Vincent said, “because I’m trying to find out who’s been leaking information to the Moretti family.”

Damian said nothing.

“They’ve been circling us for months. You know that.” Vincent’s voice tightened. “I found out three weeks ago that someone inside this house has been feeding them information. Deliveries. Schedules. Your movements.”

“Three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t bring it to me.”

“Because the last time I brought you a suspicion without proof, you didn’t speak to me for a year.”

Damian felt something cold settle low in his stomach.

If Vincent was telling the truth — if the gap in the footage was his brother trying to find a leak rather than create one — then the poisoning was not simply an internal betrayal.

It was an opening move.

The Morettis had a hand inside this house. Close enough to reach his morning coffee.

Damian did not sleep that night.

He sat in the dark study long after Vincent left, the two pill bottles still on the desk in front of him like evidence in a trial only he was presiding over.

If Vincent was telling the truth, the traitor was not his brother.

Which left a harder question sitting in the dark with him.