Forgotten Blood

Two Signatures

"You're holding the pen wrong," Ava said, without looking up.

"I'm holding the pen exactly right. I'm holding it like someone who's signed Dad's name a hundred times since she was fourteen." Zara didn't slow down. The forged signature came out clean, practiced, indistinguishable from the real one even under the desk lamp's harsh light. "Some of us learned useful skills growing up instead of reading novels in corners."

"Reading novels in corners is also a useful skill. It taught me patience. You're going to need patience for what comes after this part."

They were in the locked study at the back of the east wing, the one neither brother ever bothered checking because neither brother believed either wife had the spine to need a locked room for anything interesting. That alone told Zara everything she needed to know about how seriously this family had ever taken her.

"How much longer until the transfer clears?" Ava asked.

"Three signatures down. One left. The lawyer doesn't check anything past the letterhead anymore — he stopped actually reading these months ago." Zara set the pen down and rolled her shoulders, satisfied. "He thinks Eleanor trusts him completely. People who think that stop paying attention."

"Eleanor trusts no one completely. Including us."

"Eleanor barely registers us at all, which is worse." Something flat and old moved behind Zara's eyes, gone before it could turn into anything Ava could ask about. "Married into this family eighteen months ago. You'd think that buys at least a phone call on a birthday."

Ava didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that wouldn't open a door neither of them wanted open tonight.

"Dad never calls either," Zara added, quieter. "Funny how that works. Married us off to secure the family's future and then acted like the wedding was the whole job. No follow-up required."

"He gave us everything money could buy."

"He gave us everything that costs nothing to give." Zara picked the pen back up, mostly to have something to do with her hands. "There's a difference, and I don't think he's ever once noticed it."

Outside the study door, the house settled the way old houses did at night, creaking in places that didn't matter, quiet in the places that did.

"This isn't really about the money," Ava said. It wasn't a question.

"No." Zara didn't pretend otherwise. "The money's just the part we know how to take."

She slid the final document across the desk. Ava read it twice, the way she read everything, slow and exact, before picking up her own pen and adding the last signature needed.

"If anyone finds this before it's finished—"

"No one's going to find it." Zara was already filing the papers back into the folder, already three steps ahead the way she always was once a decision had actually been made. "Adrian's distracted. Damien thinks he's the only careful one in the family, which makes him easy to work around as long as we don't do anything that looks careless. And Eleanor's too busy deciding who else deserves to disappear from this family to notice two daughters-in-law doing exactly what she taught us to do."

"What did she teach us?"

Zara looked up at that, and for once there wasn't anything sharp or bored in her expression at all.

"That love is optional in this family. Control isn't." She closed the folder. "We're just the first ones who figured out we'd rather have the second thing, since nobody was offering the first."

Ava didn't say anything to that either. She just turned off the lamp, slid the folder into the drawer that locked from the inside, and sat with her sister in the dark a moment longer than either of them needed to.

Two floors up, behind a different locked door, Adrian Sterling was staring at his phone, rereading a text from a woman his grandmother hadn't approved of and didn't know existed yet.

He had no idea his wife was three signatures closer to owning half of everything he thought was still his.