Three dots appear, then disappear, then appear again.
You sure you're ok? You've been weird since the Ambrose thing. Did something happen?
My fingers hover over the keyboard. I could tell her. I could type out the whole story—the murder, the dahlia, the encounter at the market—and send it before I lose my nerve. Bea is my friend. She would believe me. She would help.
But help how? What could she possibly do against a man like Gabriel Ambrose?
And if I tell her, I put her in danger, too. If he's watching me, he might be watching anyone I talk to. Anyone I trust. Anyone who could be used against me.
Just tired,I type.Big job, you know? I'll call you this week.
The lie comes so easily. That's what frightens me most—how natural it feels to hide this, to carry it alone, to protect a secret that's slowly crushing me from the inside.
I put the phone face-down on the cushion and don't look at it again.
The afternoon crawls by. I should work—I have a funeral arrangement due Monday, a consultation scheduled for Tuesday—but I can't make myself move. Can't make myself care about flowers and ribbons and whether the lilies should be white or cream.
The funeral arrangement. White roses. The same roses I dropped somewhere between the market and my apartment, abandoned in my panic.
A client is depending on me. A grieving family is waiting for flowers to honor their dead.
And I can't do it. Can't make myself go back to the market, back to where he found me, back to the place where he might be waiting again.
I'll have to cancel. Or order online. Or find some other solution that doesn't involve leaving this apartment ever again.
This is what he wants,I think.He wants you trapped. Paralyzed. Waiting for him to make the next move.
The thought makes me angry. A small, hot spark in the cold fog of my fear.
I hold onto that anger. It's the only thing keeping me from falling apart completely.
Instead of working, I open my laptop and type his name into the search bar again.
I've done this before, in the days since the gala. Scrolled through articles and photos, looking for cracks in his perfect image. Found nothing.
But I wasn't looking hard enough. I was skimming, half-hoping I wouldn't find anything, that I could convince myself I was wrong about what I saw.
Now I dig deeper.
I find the obvious things first. The philanthropy. The charity galas. The awards and accolades and glowing profiles in business magazines. Gabriel Ambrose, eldest of the three Ambrose brothers, heir to a fortune built over generations, steward of a family legacy dedicated to giving back.
The photos show a man who looks exactly like what he's supposed to be—handsome, polished, approachable. The smile that doesn't reach his eyes, my mother said. She was right. In every photo, there's something flat behind his expression. Something watching.
I find articles about his brothers, too. Josiah, the middle child, described as "the strategic mind behind the Ambrose business empire." Benedict, the youngest, rarely photographed, mentioned only in passing as "the private one" or "the family's wild card."
Three brothers. Three masks. I wonder what's behind the other two.
I scroll past the surface and look for older articles. Buried mentions. The kind of thing that gets published once and never referenced again.
It takes an hour, but I find something.
A society column from eight years ago, archived on a website that looks like it hasn't been updated since. A briefmention of a party at the Ambrose estate, a gathering of "the city's most influential families." The columnist describes the event as "exclusive" and "mysterious," with guests wearing masks and "peculiar serpent imagery throughout."
Then, a throwaway line:One attendee, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the evening as "more ritual than party," though he declined to elaborate on what that meant. Rumors have long swirled about a private society associated with the Ambrose family, sometimes called the Serpent Brotherhood, though no concrete evidence of such an organization has ever surfaced.
Serpent Brotherhood.
I read the line three times, my heart pounding.
