The main level is dark except for ambient lighting in the hallways. Security confirmed everyone’s accounted for—guards on rotation, household staff retired for the night, Diana in her assigned room under camera observation.
Except when I pass the sitting room, I notice light spilling beneath the closed door.
I push it open quietly.
Diana sits curled in one of the armchairs near the fireplace, legs tucked beneath her, something balanced on her lap. She doesn’t look up when I enter, absorbed completely in whatever she’s reading.
I move closer and recognize it immediately. One of Ethan’s notebooks—the personal kind he used for handwritten notes rather than digital files. I’d retrieved it from the storage unit along with the other materials before sanitizing the location, intending to review it for operational intelligence.
I hadn’t realized she’d found it.
She’s staring at a page covered in her brother’s handwriting, her expression empty in a way that’s worse than tears. Not grief—something hollower. Resignation, maybe, or the exhausted acceptance that comes after fighting battles you can’t win.
“You should be asleep,” I say quietly.
She doesn’t startle, which means she heard me enter and chose not to acknowledge it. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“So you came down here to read your brother’s notes.”
“I came down here because my room has cameras and I wanted privacy.” Her voice is flat, drained of the anger that usually colors her words. “The notebook was on the shelf. I didn’t go looking for it.”
I believe her. The sitting room holds items we’ve collected from Diana’s apartment and Ethan’s archived materials—things that felt too personal to destroy but too dangerous to leave accessible. She must have stumbled across it during one of the few times she’s been allowed beyond her bedroom.
I settle into the chair across from her, studying the way her fingers trace the edge of the page without actually touching the ink. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing important.” She closes the notebook carefully, setting it on the side table. “Just lists. Things he needed to follow up on, people he wanted to interview. Work that never got finished.”
The guilt that’s been simmering since the council meeting intensifies. Ethan Clarke’s unfinished work sits in this room because he’s dead, and he’s dead because I decided his life wasn’t worth the political complications of intervention.
Diana finally looks up, her dark eyes meeting mine with exhaustion that makes her look younger than twenty-three. “Why did you let him die?”
The question is quieter than when she asked it before, stripped of accusation. She’s not looking for a fight. She genuinely wants to understand.
“I convinced myself it wasn’t my responsibility,” I tell her honestly. “Sartore flagged your brother as a threat to their operations. They offered him money to stop investigating; he refused. They warned him to back off; he ignored it.
When Lorenzo informed me they were escalating, I made a calculation that intervening would cost more than it was worth.”
“Cost you more,” she corrects softly.
“Cost the organization more. Starting a war with Sartore over a journalist who wouldn’t have stopped digging even if we’d protected him seemed strategically unsound.”
“So you let them kill him.”
“I let the situation resolve itself without Rudenko involvement.” The distinction feels meaningless even as I make it. “Your brother knew the risks. He’d been threatened before, had protective details offered and refused. He chose to keep pursuing the story.”
Diana’s expression hardens slightly, life returning to her eyes. “He chose journalism. He didn’t choose to be murdered for doing his job.”
“In this world, those things aren’t separate.” I lean forward, needing her to understand even if she can’t forgive it. “The networks your brother investigated—the shell corporations, the offshore accounts, the senator connections—they’re protected by people who’ve spent generations building them. Exposing that infrastructure threatens billions in revenue and political power worth more than money. Men who control those networks don’t respond to exposure with lawyers and PR campaigns. They respond with elimination.”
“You’re one of those men.”
“Yes.”
The admission sits heavy between us. I’ve spent the past week dancing around what I am, letting her assume and calculate while maintaining enough ambiguity to keep her off-balance. Sitting here in the quiet darkness while she holds her dead brother’s notebook, the pretense feels pointless.
“I didn’t kill Ethan,” I continue. “But I’m part of the system that did. I benefit from the same protections he was trying to expose. When Sartore moved against him, I chose organizational stability over his life.”
Diana looks away, staring at the cold fireplace. “Why are you telling me this?”
