The Heiress They Failed To Kill

Locked In

Bianca woke before dawn wrapped in someone else’s jacket, in an apartment she still didn’t know the address of, aware before she even opened her eyes that Xander hadn’t slept.

He was at the window when she sat up, phone in hand, expression unreadable in exactly the way it hadn’t been the night before.

“Someone knew exactly where you’d be tonight,” he said, without turning around. “Your schedule isn’t public. That parking structure isn’t on any calendar invite, any assistant’s outlook, anything I could find in an hour of looking. Which means either someone inside Hunters Capital talked, or someone’s been watching you closely enough to learn your patterns without needing to ask.”

Bianca sat with that longer than she meant to.

She’d built six years of her life around the assumption that careful was the same thing as safe. Watching Xander’s face, she understood, for the first time since the gala, that careful had only ever bought her time — not safety. Someone out there had learned her patterns. That took weeks. Maybe longer.

“You think I have a leak,” she said.

“I think you have a problem. I don’t know which kind yet.”

She almost told him everything, right there, in the gray half-light of an apartment that smelled like coffee neither of them had made. The name. The building. Six years of quiet architecture, one confession away from being real to someone other than her and Dominic. She got as far as opening her mouth before some old, well-earned instinct closed it again.

Not yet.

Xander didn’t push. That, more than anything, was what stayed with her afterward — that he’d left the door open and let her decide not to walk through it.

***

Two hours later, alone in his office with coffee gone cold for the second time in two days, Xander pulled up the Building 118 ownership records again — not Sterling’s holdings this time. Hers.

Four years of acquisitions. Quiet. Precise. Always one step ahead of the market. Office buildings, development parcels, commercial properties — pieces of a portfolio he’d seen before, years ago, under another name.

Kingsley.

He didn’t say it aloud.

He didn’t say anything to Draga when she came in an hour later. Didn’t flag it, didn’t file it, didn’t do any of the things a decade of training told him to do with information this size.

He just closed the folder, and set the question aside somewhere he wasn’t ready to look at yet.

Who are you really, Bianca Hunters?

Whatever the answer was, he was starting to suspect it mattered more than the building ever had.