Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Daisy Fletcher is the best I’ve ever seen.
The mystery novels. The parents who sent a guidebook to the wrong country. The colour-tabbed file with its quarter-inch intervals and its yellow category for things that don’t fit but seem relevant. Every detail is designed to make me believe she’s real, and she delivers them with a sincerity that borders on art.
But the yellow tab nags at me.
Because a woman playing innocent wouldn’t flag a billing discrepancy. A woman playing the game would file it blue and never mention it. A woman who understood what Keyes, Inc. is and how it operates would know that drawing attention to a billing discrepancy is the last thing you do.
Unless the flag was for me. A show of integrity, timed for impact, delivered in front of the client she’s been assigned to impress.
Unless it wasn’t.
The car turns onto the coast road. The Mediterranean opens on the left, all that blue, and I close my eyes and I can see her hands folding in her lap after Kaye shut her down. They didn’t fold gracefully. They gripped each other. The knuckles went white. It was the fold of a woman who wanted to disappear, not a woman who was performing.
I’ve read people for years. I’ve built an empire on it. Andrei handles security, Alexei handles strategy, Artem handles enforcement, and I handle the thing none of them can: I see what people are hiding. It’s a skill. A weapon. The reason every billionaire I’ve met has sat across from me in rooms like that conference room and told me things they’d never tell their wives.
I have never been wrong.
Daisy Fletcher is performing. The tabs, the blush, the five-thousand-mile calculation, the mystery novels. All of it. She’s her aunt’s project, polished and placed in my path, and the yellow tab was the cleverest move of all because it made me hesitate.
I push it away.
My phone buzzes. The screen lights with a name I don’t ignore.
Alexei.
I answer.
My brother’s voice is the same as always: stripped of warmth, efficient, a blade wrapped in syllables. “The name from Mila’s laptop. The second thread.”
I sit forward. “And?”
A pause. Alexei doesn’t pause for drama. He pauses because the information requires it.
“It connects to Keyes.”
The Mediterranean burns past the window. The leather creaks under my hands. And the yellow tab, the girl from Idaho, the billing discrepancy she shouldn’t have noticed and shouldn’t have flagged and shouldn’t have mentioned, rearranges itself in my mind into something that has nothing to do with innocence and everything to do with the mole inside our circle who has been feeding information to the man who killed our father.
Chapter 3
DAISY
The coffee appears on Monday.
No note. No card. Just a paper cup from a place I’ve never heard of, sitting on my desk early, before the office filled, when the only people here are me and the cleaning crew. The cup is warm. The coffee is black with one sugar, which is how I take it, which is information I have given to exactly one person in Monaco and that person is Blythe and Blythe does not buy people coffee.
I drink it. It’s perfect.
On Tuesday, there’s another.
Same cup. Same place. Same black-one-sugar. I arrive even earlier this time and the cup is already there, which means whoever is leaving it got here before me, which means they are either very committed or very insane.
On Wednesday it rains.
Monaco rain is not Idaho rain. Idaho rain is honest. It falls, it soaks you, it stops. Monaco rain is theatrical. It arrives in a gust of salt air off the Mediterranean and turns the streets into something out of a film, all reflected lights and slick marble, and I’m halfway between my apartment and the office with no umbrella and a cardigan that is absorbing water like a bath towel when a black car pulls to the kerb beside me.
The rear window lowers two inches. A voice I would recognise in a hurricane.
“You walk to work.”
I keep walking. Rain in my eyes, rain down my collar, rain doing its absolute best to destroy the only professional blouse I own that doesn’t have a coffee stain.
The car keeps pace.
“I happened to notice,” Anton Almazov tells me through two inches of open window, “that you walk to work. In the rain. Without an umbrella. This seems like a solvable problem.”
“I like walking.”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shivering.”
I am, in fact, shivering. My teeth are doing a thing. I clamp them together and walk faster, and the car matches me stride for stride, and somewhere behind the tinted glass I can hear him, not laughing, but doing that thing with his voice that is worse than laughing, the warm hum of a man who finds something entertaining and doesn’t feel the need to hide it.
“Miss Fletcher.”
I stop. The rain doesn’t. But everything else does, because he has never called me Miss Fletcher outside of a conference room and the sound of it on a rain-soaked Monaco street does something to my spine that I refuse to examine.