I didn’t sleepthat night.
Samuel tried to soothe me. He pulled me against him in bed and ran his fingers through my hair, the mate bond humming with his calm like a lullaby. None of it worked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood stains on the cellar floor.
The thought of the Lincoln sisters being trapped in that terrible place for weeks, suffering through God only knows what atrocities, kept churning my mind. The only saving grace was that their magic signatures had not vanished. Which meant they were still alive.
In the dark silence of our bedroom, I told Samuel about the abilities my white wolf had manifested in the last week. That I could somehow see past glamour and sense magic on a level I shouldn’t be able to.
“Should we tell the Alliance?” I murmured against his chest.
Samuel was silent for a long time, his heartbeat just that bit faster as he absorbed my revelation.
“Not yet,” he whispered in my hair. His arms tightened protectively around me.
I gave up at four a.m. and crept downstairs to the study with my laptop, leaving Samuel slumbering fitfully in our bed.
Bo padded in on silent paws an hour later. He curled up under the desk and pressed his warm body against my feet without a word. Nora came in quietly with a cup of coffee shortly after. I thanked her and narrowed my eyes at the screen once more.
The Delaware shell companies had been mocking me for two days solid. I’d already exposed layer after layer of cryptic corporate redirection designed to exhaust anyone stubborn enough to keep digging. But whoever had built this house of cards had made the same mistake every clever criminal eventually made.
They’d gotten comfortable.
The outermost shells were flawless. Clean registrations, legitimate-looking addresses, even fake annual filings. But the deeper I went, the older the paperwork got, and older paperwork meant sloppier paperwork. A registered agent who’d used the same P.O. box for two different entities. A filing date that preceded the company’s official incorporation by three days. The kind of errors that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t an accountant with an unhealthy fixation on dates and numbers.
Lucky for us, I was exactly that kind of accountant.
By six a.m., I’d peeled back enough layers to find something solid. The innermost shell—the one that all the others ultimately fed into—was registered to atrust. The trust’s paperwork was filed in a county I didn’t recognize, using a naming convention that was archaic even by legal standards.
I stared at the name on the screen, my wolf going very still.
Thornwick Family Trust. Established 1976.
Bo’s head popped up from under the desk, his ears swiveling. “Your scent just did something weird.”
“I found it,” I said quietly.
In this particular instance, I hated being right.
Samuel appeared in the doorway before I could call for him. The mate bond must have spiked too, because he was barefoot, shirtless, and radiating the kind of alert energy that meant his wolf had dragged him out of bed.
“What is it?” he asked.
I turned the laptop toward him. “Every shell company traces back to a single entity,” I said in a hard voice. “The Thornwick Family Trust.” I pointed at the screen. “It was established by Cordelia Thornwick three years before the covens exiled her family.”
Samuel’s eyes narrowed. “She set it up as a safety net.”
“More than that. She set it up to survive.” I scrolled down to the property records I’d pulled from the trust’s filings. “The trust holds assets. Including real estate.”
Samuel leaned over my shoulder, his jaw tightening as he read. “One property. No street address listed. Just a lot number and a county designation.”
“I know.” I rubbed my eyes. “The lotnumber is old format. Pre-digital. I’ll need Gavin to match it against the county clerk’s records.”
Samuel straightened, the mate bond thrumming with cold focus.
“Get dressed. We’re going in early.”
The conference room at Hawthorne & Associates had seen its share of tense mornings, but the energy when we walked in at seven-thirty rivaled anything I’d experienced since joining the firm.
Didi was already there, a coffee in hand and her hair scraped back; her expression told me she’d slept about as well as I had. Gavin sat beside her with a cardboard tube under one arm and dark circles under his eyes. Barney occupied his usual spot at the far end of the table, a leather-bound folio open in front of him.
