Archie glances out the window. “Well. That looks friendly.”
I don’t answer. I’m not thinking about the Rover. I’m thinking about the letter.
It showed up three nights ago. No stamp. No return address. Hand-delivered to the estate’s side gate by someone my staff didn’t recognize and didn’t stop long enough to be questioned. When I opened it, the paper was thick and folded with care. Neat handwriting. Ink, not pen.
And one line at the bottom, no signature:
I'll make sure the pretty lie joins her mother soon.
While it wasn’t signed, it didn’t need to be. I’m sure it was Douglass Huntington-Russell.
Martine never saw it. I disposed of it before she could.
It’s not that I don’t trust her, it’s that I know how she’d react. She’d beg me for answers, and pester me uncontrollably until I’d have to gag her and leave her tied to my bed.
I can’t let her do either. So here I am.
I open the cabin door and head down the stairs toward the car. Archie follows.
Snow’s falling lightly, not sticking yet. The kind of cold that gets under your skin but doesn’t freeze you outright.
I walk straight up to the driver’s side. Tap twice on the glass.
It rolls down an inch: a man’s face, slim, glasses, Eastern European. Civilian-looking, but that’s the problem. The ones wholookharmless usually aren’t.
“You Herron?” he asks.
I nod. “You have something for me.”
He stares at me for a beat too long, then passes me an envelope with a location and unlocks the door.
We climb in. Archibald still has his hand near his jacket, just in case.
The driver doesn’t introduce himself—just drives.
Ten minutes later, we pull off into a crumbling compound that used to be a boarding school or a prison, hard to tell which. It’s all gray stone and rusted gates, with a bad energy.
We step inside a room set up with a portable heater, a plastic table, and a laptop that appears to have been stolen from a NATO bunker.
The man plugs in a drive and pulls up a map.
“I’ve been tracking movement,” he says. “Properties under Huntington-Russell foundations. They’ve been quiet for twenty years internationally, then suddenly three months ago, activity started here.” He taps a small town on the border. “Supply shipments. Private security movement. It’s clean work.”
“And you’re sure it’s Douglass?” I ask.
He nods. “The paperwork trails back to a fund only one man accesses. And I traced that fund through an old embassy project, found this.” He pulls up a scan of a declassified report, with most of the properties now claimed to belong to Martine since the inheritance.
“How the hell is she involved in this?” Archie asks.
I answer before the guy can. “It’s complicated.”
Archie turns to me. “Explain.”
I take a breath. The first one that feels like it burns.
“Her father killed her mother, and I was there,” I say. Flat. No sugar.
Archie blinks. “What?”
