The Heiress They Failed To Kill

No Record

Draga worked methodically, without sleep and without mercy for anyone’s assumptions, including her own.

By the second day, she had nothing, and nothing was the most alarming thing she’d found in years.

Hunters Capital had incorporated four years ago in a jurisdiction that asked no questions and kept fewer records. Its funding traced back through three holding companies before the trail simply stopped, the way a good trail was built to stop — not by accident, but by design. No employee roster beyond a handful of names. No press. No photographs of its founder at galas, panels, or the kind of industry dinners where people like her usually couldn’t resist being seen.

“It’s not that she’s hiding something,” Draga said, spreading the printouts across Xander’s desk like a hand of cards nobody wanted to be dealt. “It’s that she’s hidden everything. There’s a difference. Hiding something leaves a shape. This leaves nothing.”

Xander studied the blank spaces where a biography should have been. “Everyone leaves something.”

“She didn’t.”

He thought of the boardroom. The stillness in her when everyone else in the room had been performing confidence they didn’t feel. The four floors she’d wanted with a specificity that had nothing to do with market value and everything to do with something she hadn’t said out loud.

I see four floors that used to matter. And will again.

Not a businesswoman chasing yield. A woman finishing something.

“Run it again,” he said. “Property records this time. Anyone who’s ever held a lease in that building going back twenty years.”

Draga hesitated in a way she rarely did. “You’re not usually this interested in a losing bid.”

“I’m not interested in the bid.”

“That’s what worries me.”

He didn’t answer that, because there wasn’t an answer that wouldn’t have sounded like exactly what it was — a man who’d spent a decade being unreadable, suddenly caught being read.

Later, alone, he pulled up the one photograph Draga’s people had managed to find: Bianca Hunters at the edge of a charity gala two years earlier, half-turned from the camera, caught leaving before the photo could finish becoming a photo of her.

He looked at it longer than the file warranted.

Whoever she was, she hadn’t built herself out of nothing. Nobody moved like that from nothing. Somewhere underneath the woman with no history was a person who’d learned, the hard way, exactly what having a history could cost you.

He didn’t know her name yet.

But he intended to.