Chapter 2 A Name I Haven't Said In Years

• The card burned in my coat pocket the whole drive home, like it might set the fabric on fire if I left it there too long.
• I didn't call the number. I wasn't ready for that yet. What I was ready for was my father's study, the one room in the house nobody had touched since the hospital called. Desmond offered twice to have it sorted. I told him twice that if anyone touched a single paper in there without my permission, I'd have him removed from the property myself.
• By nine that evening the house had gone completely silent, the kind of silence that only happens in a home built for a family that no longer fills it. I let myself into the study and the lock stuck the way it always had. I leaned my shoulder into the door and the smell hit me before the lights did, old books, cedar, the faint trace of a cologne he'd worn for thirty years, and it nearly put me on the floor.
• I gave myself one minute to feel it. Then I made myself move.
• I wasn't looking for proof that my father had lied to me. I was looking for whatever he'd been too afraid to tell me while he still had the chance, and men like him didn't hide things where Desmond could find them with a key and an excuse. He hid things where only I would think to look.
• The bottom drawer of his desk had a false back. I'd known about it since I was twelve, back when I hid report cards in there before he could ask about my math grade. I doubted Desmond knew it existed. I doubted anyone did but me.
• My hands shook when I pulled it open.
• A stack of letters tied with string. A small velvet box I wasn't ready to open. And underneath everything, a photograph, edges soft with age, corners bent from being handled more than once in thirty years.
• Two young men stood in it, arms slung over each other's shoulders, laughing at something outside the frame. It took me a second to place the taller one, because I had never once seen him look that happy in any picture I grew up with.
• My father.
• And beside him, unmistakable even three decades younger, Cornelius Voss.
• I sat down hard in the desk chair, the photo trembling in my hand along with the rest of me. There was writing on the back, faded, but readable if I tilted it into the lamp.
• Before everything. Don't let them forget what we built.
• Before everything. Before what? Before twenty years of headlines and boardroom warfare, apparently, because the two men in this photograph weren't enemies. They stood like brothers. They stood like men who trusted each other with their lives.
• My phone rang, and I nearly dropped the photograph jumping at the sound.
• "Okay, talk to me right now," Nadia said the second I picked up, no hello, straight into it the way she always did when she'd been waiting too long for a text back. "You've gone quiet for an hour and that's never good with you."
• "I found something. In my dad's study."
• "What kind of something?"
• "A photo. Him and Cornelius Voss, young, laughing, arms around each other like they'd known each other their whole lives." I turned it over again, read the inscription a second time like it might change. "There's writing on the back. It says before everything, don't let them forget what we built."
• Silence for a beat. "Built what."
• "I don't know. That's the whole problem, I don't know anything. Everyone in this city spent twenty years telling me these two families hated each other, and I'm holding proof that at some point they didn't just tolerate each other. They loved each other like family."
• "Okay. So let me make sure I understand this correctly." I could hear her pacing on the other end, the way she always did when she was working something out loud. "Your dead father secretly knew the man whose grandson you're now required to marry."
• "Yes."
• "And instead of calling that grandson, who might actually know what any of this means, you're sitting alone in a locked study at nine at night investigating a family conspiracy by yourself."
• "When you say it like that it sounds insane."
• "It sounds like the opening of every romance novel where the heroine gets herself murdered in chapter four." I heard the smile underneath it even so, the one that meant she was scared for me and covering it with sarcasm because that was the only way she knew how to be scared out loud. "Call him, Isla."
• "Tomorrow."
• "Tonight would be better."
• "I need tonight first. I need to sit with this before I hand it to a stranger, even if that stranger might be the only person who understands it."
• She let out a breath that told me she disagreed and wasn't going to fight me on it, not at nine at night, not with me already this far gone. "Fine. But you're not staying in that house alone all evening turning this over in your head. Lock the study when you're done. Text me the second you're actually in bed, not just when you say you are."
• I promised her I would. I didn't entirely mean it.
• After we hung up, I sat there a long time with the photograph in one hand and the letters still tied in the other, not ready yet to pull the ribbon loose and see what else he'd hidden behind a drawer only I knew existed.
• I was reaching for the string when I heard it. A creak on the floorboard just outside the study door, the exact spot that only made noise if someone stepped on it trying not to be heard and failing anyway.
• I froze, the photograph still in my hand, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.
• Nobody was supposed to be in this house tonight. My mother was staying with her sister. The staff had gone home hours ago.
• The floorboard creaked again, closer, and I realized whoever it was wasn't leaving.
• They were coming toward the door.
• I grabbed the letter opener off the desk without thinking, the only thing within reach that could pass for a weapon, and I stood with my back against the bookshelf as the handle turned slow, too slow, like whoever was on the other side already knew I was listening.
• The door opened.
• And Alaric Voss stepped into the room like he had every right to be there.
• I didn't have time to ask him how he got in, or why, or what gave him the idea that he could walk into my father's house after dark like he owned it. His eyes went straight past me to the photograph still shaking in my hand, and everything about his face changed. The control I'd watched him wear like armor outside the lawyer's office cracked clean down the middle.
• "Where did you get that," he said, and his voice wasn't steady anymore.
• "You recognize it."
• He didn't answer. He didn't have to. I watched something move behind his eyes that looked a lot like fear, the first real thing I'd seen from him since he handed me that card on the sidewalk, and in that one unguarded second I understood something that turned my stomach cold.
• Alaric Voss already knew exactly what my father had spent his whole life hiding.