THE BILLIONAIRE WHO KILLED MY HUSBAND

Chapter Three: The Gala

Priya Anand had the kind of office that looked like a crime board in a low-budget thriller: printouts pinned to a cork board, red string that had started as a joke and never come down. She looked up when Elara knocked and her expression landed somewhere between Oh no, the widow and genuine relief that Elara was upright and functioning at all.

"You look terrible," Priya said, which was as close to I'm glad you're alive as she'd ever gotten in fifteen years of friendship.

"I need everything you have on Damian Black," Elara said.

"That's not really a condolence visit kind of request."

"It's not a condolence visit."

Priya studied her for a long moment, the kind of look she used to give sources who were about to either hand her the story of the year or waste six months of her life. Then she got up, closed the door, and sat back down.

"Okay," she said. "Why?"

Elara didn't tell her about the video. Not yet. There was a version of this conversation where she said the words out loud — my dead husband sent me a video, he's alive, a billionaire I've never met was at his funeral — and she wasn't ready for how that sentence would sound leaving her mouth.

"His name came up," Elara said instead. "In Nathan's stuff. Phone records, some emails I found closing out his accounts. I want to know why my husband was talking to Damian Black before he died."

It wasn't a lie. It was just an incomplete truth, and Elara found, with some surprise, that she was good at those.

Priya exhaled slowly and turned to her computer. "Black Industries doesn't talk to the press. I mean that literally. Four different editors have tried to land an interview with him in six years and gotten nothing but form letter declines from a PR firm that changes its name every eighteen months. He's careful. Almost professionally careful. There's a whole subgenre of finance journalism built around trying to figure out what he actually does, because the official story doesn't explain the money."

"What does explain the money?"

"Nobody knows. That's the whole point." Priya pulled up a folder and turned the screen toward Elara. "Here's what I do know. He's throwing his annual gala Friday night. Children's hospital foundation thing: very glossy, very photographed, the one night a year, he actually lets people near him in a social setting."

Elara looked at the screen. An invitation, elegant and understated, black card stock with silver lettering. The Ellison Foundation Gala. Hosted by Black Industries.

"Can you get me in?"

"As what? Security at that event has a list, and grieving widows of mid-level shipping executives aren't usually on it."

Mid-level shipping executive. Elara filed that discrepancy away with everything else she didn't understand yet. Nathan had always made his job sound bigger than that.

"I don't need to go as a press," Elara said. "The foundation is for children's hospitals. I sat on a hospital board for three years before I married Nathan. I still know people. I can get a plus one invitation through channels that have nothing to do with you."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I need someone to tell me what to look for once I'm inside. Who works for him? Who's afraid of him? Who used to work for him and might talk."

Priya tapped a pen against her desk, weighing curiosity against fifteen years of knowing Elara well enough to recognize when she'd made up her mind about something.

"There's a name," she said finally. "Julian Kane. Used to be Black's right hand, ran operations, handled things nobody else was trusted to handle. Left the company about eight months ago, and nobody will say why. Still shows up to these events, though. Old habits. Drinks more than he used to." She wrote the name on a sticky note and slid it across the desk. "If anyone in this city knows what Damian Black actually is underneath all that expensive stillness, it's him."

Elara folded the note into her palm.

"Elara," Priya's voice stopped her at the door. "Whatever this is. Be careful. People who ask questions about Damian Black have a way of not liking the answers they get."

"I don't need to like the answers," Elara said. "I just need them to be true."

She left with a name in her pocket and did not go home. She went to find a dress.

The boutique she chose was one she and Nathan used to walk past, a narrow storefront with a single gown in the window. She'd never gone in before — Nathan always steered her toward places with better lighting, dresses that photographed well for the events he liked to be photographed at. She went in alone now, on a Tuesday afternoon, and told the woman behind the counter she needed something for a gala Friday, something that didn't look like it was trying too hard.

"Trying too hard to do what?" the woman asked, already pulling dresses from a rack.

"To be noticed. Or to not be noticed. I haven't decided which yet."

The woman laughed and handed her a dress the color of wet slate, high at the neck, low at the back. Elara stood in front of the three-way mirror and studied the woman looking back at her: hollowed under the eyes, thinner through the collarbone, but standing straighter than she had in days. It took her a full minute to name the expression on her own face. It was the look of someone who had stopped waiting for the truth to arrive on his own and had decided to go and take it instead.

She bought the dress and shoes low enough to run in if it came to that — a thought she registered and set aside without examining too closely. She drove home in the last gray light of the afternoon with the garment bag laid flat across the back seat, and by Friday night she would walk into the one room in the city Damian Black couldn't fully control, wearing borrowed confidence and her husband's stolen voice in her memory.