The Cole mansion woke up wrong that morning.
Not loudly. Not with any single dramatic event that could be pointed to afterward as the moment everything shifted. It woke up wrong the way expensive things sometimes do, quietly, beneath the surface, in the spaces between conversations and the silences that stretched too long over breakfast tables and in hallways where people passed each other without speaking.
Adrian came downstairs at six forty-five looking like a man who had fought a war in his sleep and lost. His shirt was pressed because the staff pressed everything in this house regardless of the hour, but everything else about him carried the weight of days without proper rest. The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened into something that no longer looked temporary. His jaw held a ten
