My mouth goes dry.
I close the email and open the encrypted file I’ve been compiling for weeks. I scroll past Thierry and Melanie’s death reports. Pastthe liquidation trails. Past the donation shell companies and aliases.
All of them, in one way or another, lead back here.
To him.
Tothem.
To the family with too much money, too many secrets, and one glaring space in the narrative where my parents used to be.
I think back to the Foundation Saint-Laurent, the fake charity that received most of my parents’ estate after their deaths, only to dissolve quietly within two years. Ivanov Holdings was one of its benefactors.
And now they want me to work for them?
I sit back in the chair, staring at my laptop like it might bite me. How did they even find me? I didn’t apply to anything within their company.Perhaps someone from Harvard submitted me as a candidate. Maybe someone wanted me in their building, watching their books, keeping me close.
My hands hover over the keyboard while my heart thunders in my chest. This could be the worst idea I’ve ever had. But if there’s even a chance this job brings me closer to the truth about my parents, closer to understanding what I’ve walked into, then I have to take it.
I open the email again. I don’t move, don’t breathe. I just stare at it like the words might rearrange themselves into a warning I can’t ignore.
I stand, suddenly restless, and move to the window.
The view is pure Paris—old rooftops, wrought-iron balconies, a sky that hasn’t seen the sun in three days. It should feel romantic. Dreamy. It doesn’t. It feels like I’m being watched.
I wrap my arms around myself, rubbing the goosebumps from my skin. Something in my gut is whispering that this job offer is no coincidence.
I could delete the email. Walk away. Take the next flight back to Chicago and forget I ever opened that encrypted file. Forget the name Devereaux. Forgethim.
But that’s not who I am.
My parents were murdered. I don’t need a court ruling to confirm it. I’ve seen enough red flags to wallpaper the Louvre.
This job offer is the first real chance I’ve had to get inside the machine. To learn what really happened. What the Ivanovs know. What they’ve covered up.
I turn back to the desk and sit down. My fingers hover over the keyboard as I prepare to type. A thousand versions of my reply scroll through my mind—cool, professional, eager, neutral. But only one version makes it to the screen.
I accept.
I stare at it. Two words. Seven letters. And a future I can’t predict. But it’s the one I’m choosing.
I click send and sit back, heart pounding, the cursor blinking like a warning light in the dark.
CHAPTER 6
YURI
The city below,mycity, is still asleep when I unlock the folder.
No lights yet in the windows across from mine. No noise but the low hum of the heater. Just me, the dark, and a file that shouldn’t exist in hard copy but does, because I don’t trust cloud security when it comes to her—the incoming asset.
I flip through the pages again. Not because I need to—I’ve read it six times already—but because I like watching it unfold.
Harvard. Summa cum laude. Background in forensic accounting. Risk analysis. Clean as snow, too clean. No debt. No social media presence beyond the polished LinkedIn profile she’s obviously curated with care. Two internships. Three glowing letters of recommendation.
And at the bottom, clipped neatly to the edge, a photo.
My jaw tightens.
