The File

I didn't sleep. Vale's words sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't set down. The file with your father's name on it. Ask him why he never showed you.

I lay in the enormous guest bed in the enormous quiet penthouse and told myself it was a raider's trick — a crack of doubt slipped neatly between me and the only ally I had left. That was what men like Vale did. They found the seam and worked it. I knew that. I knew it the way you know a thing in daylight and forget it at two in the morning.

By three I was in the hall.

The study door was open a hand's width, gold light spilling across the floor. He was awake too. Of course he was.

I pushed it open. Adrian stood at the window, still in his shirt from the gala, sleeves pushed up his forearms, a glass of something amber and untouched in his hand. He didn't turn.

"You should be asleep," he said to the glass. "Big day tomorrow. We have to keep convincing a city full of sharks we can stand the sight of each other."

"Vale spoke to me. On the terrace."

The line of his shoulders changed — just slightly, just enough. He set the glass down. "What did he say?"

"That I married into a family good at burying secrets." I kept my voice level, the way my father taught me to read a hostile room. "That I should ask my husband about a file with my father's name on it. And why he never showed it to me."

For a long moment, Adrian said nothing.

And in that nothing, I learned everything — because a man with nothing to hide would have laughed. Would have rolled his eyes and poured me a drink and called Vale a liar. Adrian just stood there, very still, like a man bracing for a blow he'd known was coming for years.

"He's trying to turn you," he said finally. "Don't let him. It's the only weapon he has left."

"Then tell me there's no file."

He didn't.

That was the answer.

I crossed the room before he could move — and there it was. Not even hidden well. Half-slid under a closed laptop on the desk, like he'd been looking at it tonight, after the gala, after Vale. A plain manila folder gone soft at the corners with age. My father's name on the tab in faded ink. And beneath it, in a steady older hand I'd seen once before on a notarized page, the initials E.S. — his grandfather.

I picked it up. My hands were steady. To this day I don't know how.

"Elena." His voice changed completely — low and stripped, the polished CEO gone out of it. He'd crossed the room without my hearing him; he was close enough now that I could feel the heat of him at my back. "Don't open that."

"Give me one reason."

"Because the second you read it, you won't believe another word out of my mouth." His hand hovered near mine, not quite touching, like he didn't dare. "And tonight, of every night, I need you to believe me more than I've ever needed anything from anyone."

I should have heard the warning in it. Tonight, of every night. As if he knew exactly what was inside, and exactly what it would take from him.

My thumb was already under the flap.