The devil's private bride

Camille Kane had been in the building eleven minutes and already decided she hated the elevators. Glass-walled, silent, rising through the center of the restored Blackwood Holdings tower like the building wanted every visitor to feel small on the way up. It had worked on her uncle, once. She checked her reflection in the steel door instead of looking down at the city falling away beneath her. Navy blazer, hair pulled back tight enough to read as severe rather than styled, a leather folio holding credentials that were, technically, entirely real — a forensic accounting license, a court-appointed auditor's badge, six years unwinding fraud at two of the city's largest firms. The name on the badge wasn't. Camille Reyes. Her mother's maiden name, borrowed for exactly as long as it took to get close enough to the Blackwood restitution fund to find out whether Adrian Blackwood's very public, very photogenic reckoning eighteen months ago had been honest — or Daniel Blackwood's old trick in a better suit. Her uncle believed the second. Victor had spent eighteen years building a case against the Blackwoods and ended up in a courtroom instead of a boardroom for his trouble. He'd come out the other side quieter, older, done trusting a single dollar the family claimed to be returning. Audit it properly, he'd told her, the day she agreed to take the court-appointed seat on the fund's oversight committee. Not for me. For your father. He never got the apology. I want him to get what was owed, at minimum. Her father — Victor's older brother — had died four years ago still believing the Kane family's stake in the original partnership had simply been erased, no fight, no formal acknowledgment. Camille had grown up on that grievance the way other kids grew up on bedtime stories. Not sad exactly. Just there, a fact of the household like the furniture. The elevator opened onto the fortieth floor, and Camille stepped into an office considerably less imposing than she'd braced for — open, light-filled, a working fund rather than the glass fortress from old photos of Adrian's original empire. A young assistant met her at the door. "Ms. Reyes? Mr. Blackwood's expecting you. This way." Mr. Blackwood. Not the Adrian Blackwood whose face had been in every business page in the city for two years — she reminded herself of that. Her actual assignment sat one rung down the family tree: Marcus Blackwood, the cousin who'd apparently traded prison for community service dressed up as corporate penance, now running the very fund she'd been sent to verify. She'd read his file twice on the flight in. Convicted, loosely speaking, of facilitating fraud alongside a criminal network he claimed — and the court had believed — he'd only ever half-belonged to. Sentenced to restitution work instead of prison, a mercy she found almost offensive for a man whose father had orchestrated the whole theft in the first place. She was fully prepared to dislike him before she'd even opened his door. Marcus Blackwood stood when she walked in — tall, dark-haired, tired in the specific way of a man who hadn't slept properly in longer than made sense for someone running a philanthropic operation. His handshake was brief, professional. His eyes assessed her with a care that made her instantly aware of how carefully she'd need to hold the fiction she'd walked in wearing. "Ms. Reyes. Thank you for taking this on." Quieter than she expected. Less polished than his cousin's voice reportedly was. "I imagine the court didn't give you much choice in the assignment, but the door's genuinely open. Whatever you need to verify, you'll have full access." "That's generous," Camille said, keeping her voice flat, "for a man being independently audited." Something flickered behind his eyes — not offense, she noted, surprised. Weary understanding, like he'd expected exactly this opening shot and already made peace with absorbing it. "I'm not interested in defending my family's history to you, Ms. Reyes. I lived it. I know how bad it was." He gestured to the chair across from his desk. "I'm interested in proving, with real numbers, that what's happening now is different. If your audit finds otherwise, I want to know. I have no interest in running a fund that's just my uncle's fraud with better PR." "Convenient thing to say to the woman about to go through your books." "True whether it's convenient or not." Something steady entered his voice, and despite every instinct telling her to hold ground, she found herself reassessing him, just slightly. "Where would you like to start?" "Original disbursement records. Every payment to every affected family, back to the fund's founding. Who's been paid. Who's still waiting." "You'll have them within the hour." He paused. "Can I ask — not to pry into your professional judgment, just curiosity — why this case? You could've taken any assignment the court offered." The careful architecture of her cover story tightened around her. "I have a professional interest in restitution funds that actually restitute," she said, which was, technically, true. "Too many exist for optics instead of outcomes. I like proving the difference." "Then we want the same thing," Marcus said, something like relief in his voice, no idea the woman across his desk carried a surname that would end this fragile courtesy the moment he learned it. She gathered her folio and stood, already composing the first line of that evening's report to her uncle, and told herself — with more conviction than she felt — that whatever steadiness she'd just glimpsed in Marcus Blackwood's voice changed nothing about why she'd come.