Chapter 4
“You don’t know that.”
“I know her.”
Grant stopped pacing. “Do you. Or do you know the version of her that cleans your bathroom and remembers how you take your coffee?”
Adrian didn’t answer. That silence told Grant everything he needed to hear, and it worried him more than any answer could have.
So Grant did what he always did. He investigated.
“Anything on Elena Bennett before 2003, flag it and send it to me,” he told the archive clerk over the phone, already reaching for a second cup of coffee. “Today. Not next week.”
It took him two days to trace Elena Bennett through payroll archives that hadn’t been touched since before digital records existed. Two more to find the discharge paperwork — Elena Bennett, terminated without cause, the same week Adrian’s mother, Catherine Vale, died in what the official report called a single-car accident on a wet road outside Wayne, Pennsylvania.
Grant stared at the date for a long time.
No storm that night. No mechanical failure listed. No explanation for why a woman who had driven that road a thousand times lost control on a straightaway.
He found something else, too — a name buried in an old security log, requesting access to the Vale family archive the week before Catherine died. A name that made Grant’s stomach turn cold.
Victor Vale. Adrian’s uncle. The man who had quietly stepped into a father-figure role after Adrian’s own father passed, guiding the family’s business from the shadows for over a decade before retreating to Europe, citing health.
Grant brought it to Adrian that night, and watched something in his cousin’s face close like a door.
“He’s been in Zurich for eleven years,” Adrian said.
“He was here the week she died.”
Adrian said nothing. He didn’t need to. The math had already started assembling itself behind his eyes, and neither of them liked the shape it was taking.
Meanwhile, Vale House had its own smaller storm brewing. The six women who’d walked away with jewelry and cash weren’t finished — Adrian’s sudden dismissal of the entire selection process, without warning, without explanation, had humiliated families that didn’t forget humiliation easily.
Audrey Collins was the loudest.
She showed up at the gate two days later demanding to speak with Adrian directly, the grandmother’s ring still on her finger, fury dressed up as concern.
“You can’t just cancel this like it never happened,” she said, when Grant intercepted her in the foyer instead. “My family invested a great deal of faith in this arrangement.”
“Adrian’s not available.”
“Because of the maid?” Audrey’s laugh had no warmth in it. “Everyone’s already talking about it, Grant. The mafia king brought to his knees by a girl who empties his trash cans.”
May you like
Grant said nothing, but he watched her carefully — the too-quick anger, the way her eyes flicked toward the staircase like she was cataloguing exits, or witnesses.
It was a small thing. He almost dismissed it.
