married to my killer

chapter 7

Chapter 7

NAOMI POV

I didn't sleep that night. I lay next to Julian, listening to him breathe, running the same question in a circle until it wore a groove: who else knew I still had a key to that storage unit.

Carla knew I'd left the house. Edmund knew I had a business background. Neither of those was the same as knowing about a storage facility I hadn't set foot in for four years, or pulling a gate log to prove it. That took more than a guess. That took someone already watching before I ever drove there.

By morning I'd decided on one thing. I was done circling Edmund's files like they might bite me. I was going to open them.

Julian left early for the office, kissing my forehead on his way out, still half-asleep himself. "Don't disappear on me today," he said. "I mean it. Stay reachable."

"I'm not going anywhere," I told him, which wasn't quite a lie. I wasn't going anywhere. I was just going to spend the day somewhere he wouldn't like, in a room he'd never once asked me not to enter.

The east wing office looked exactly the way it had three days ago, and exactly the way it had a year from now, in the life I remembered. Same filing cabinets. Same particular quiet, the kind that only exists in rooms nobody uses for living.

Edmund's stack of files sat on the desk where Carla had left them, tied with a plain cotton ribbon like it was nothing more than paperwork. I untied it and started reading.

It was, mostly, exactly what he'd promised. Acquisition summaries. Merger valuations. Logistics-sector companies that had failed or been absorbed over the last fifteen years, listed in clean columns with dates and dollar amounts. Nothing about it looked dangerous. That was, I was starting to understand, the whole design of this family. Danger here never looked like danger. It looked like a spreadsheet.

I went through it page by page, comparing names against the ones I already carried in my head from the boxes in that storage unit. Reyes Logistics wasn't in Edmund's stack. I hadn't expected it to be. He wasn't going to hand me my own father's name on a plate.

But near the back, behind a valuation summary for a company I didn't recognize, I found a page that didn't belong with the rest. It wasn't formatted like the others. No letterhead, no case number. Just a short list, six company names, six dates spanning almost twenty years, and beside each one, a single word.

Resolved.

Resolved.

Resolved.

Five of them said that. The sixth said something else.

Pending Reyes.

My own name, half-written, sitting at the bottom of a list I wasn't supposed to see, in a stack of files I'd been handed on purpose.

I sat with that for a long moment, my hands flat on the desk to keep them from shaking. Five companies, resolved. Mine, still open. Still pending. After eighteen years.

I didn't know yet what "resolved" meant for the other five. I had a guess, and it made my stomach turn in a way I didn't have time to sit with, because that was the moment I heard footsteps in the hallway, unhurried, the kind that belonged to someone who lived in a house and had no reason to walk quietly through it.

I put the page back where I'd found it, careful, fast, and had the folder retired by the time Edmund appeared in the doorway.

"Early start," he said, looking at the ribbon in my hands like he was pleased I'd bothered.

"I wanted to get ahead of it. You said no rush, but I don't love owing people things."

"That's a good habit." He came further into the room, glanced at the stack, and didn't touch it. "Find anything interesting?"

It was such a light question. Just words, the way he'd told me the day before that Reyes Logistics was a failed company, aren't they all, eventually.But I'd learned, in the last four days, that light was exactly how this man delivered the things that mattered most.

"Mostly numbers," I said. "I'll need another day or two before I'd feel comfortable giving you anything useful."

"No rush," he said again, and smiled, and I smiled back, and neither of us meant it the way it sounded.

He left. I stood there another minute, my phone still in my pocket, the unknown number from yesterday still sitting unanswered in my messages, and a new name sitting unanswered in my head. Pending Reyes.

I thought about the business card I'd found three days ago, tucked in a folder that had no business holding it. Marcus Cole. Independent Financial Review.

I didn't have a plan yet. I only had a growing certainty that whatever Edmund Voss had resolved about five other families, he intended to resolve mine too and that somewhere outside this house, someone else already knew exactly what that word meant, because it had already happened to him.

I took out my phone, opened a blank message, and typed a name into the search bar instead of a text.

Marcus Cole.

My thumb hovered over search for a long time before I finally pressed it.