married to my killer

chapter 5

NAOMI POV

CHAPTER 5

I had one job that week to find out what Edmund Voss was hiding, before he found out I was looking. On Tuesday, he gave me an opening to do exactly that.

By Tuesday, the files Edmund had promised me were sitting in the east wing office, exactly where he'd said they'd be. A plain stack of paperwork, nothing about it standing out.

I haven't opened them yet.

If Edmund was giving me a cleaned-up version, the safe version, the one he thought a curious daughter-in-law could be trusted with, I needed to see the real version first, before I trusted anything in his folder. So instead of opening his files, I went to get my own.

My father's old company records were still sitting in a storage unit across town, in boxes I hadn't opened in four years. I told Julian I was meeting an old friend, which wasn't technically a lie, just an old excuse I was reusing. He kissed me goodbye and told me to take my time. It bothered me a little, how easy it was to lie to a man who had no reason to doubt me.

I'd stopped going through those boxes years ago, after I accepted that my father's company had simply failed the way companies sometimes do badly, suddenly, with no one left to explain why. I'd built my whole adult life on top of that explanation. I'd stopped asking questions because there were no answers left to find.

Now I don't have that luxury anymore. Something in this family's paperwork was connected to my father's company, and I needed to know what.

The first box held exactly what I remembered: old invoices, insurance letters, the leftover paperwork of Reyes Logistics, my father's company, gone within eighteen months the year I turned sixteen. I went through it carefully, looking for anything that matched the phrase I couldn't stop thinking about from Edmund's dining room: unresolved legacy liability.

I found it in the third box, in a folder I must have skimmed past a hundred times without really reading.

Regarding transfer of minority holdings Reyes Logistics Group pending resolution.

I'd seen that exact wording before. Three days earlier, in the Voss family's private archive, on the index card taped inside the cabinet door.

Retained pending resolution of unresolved legacy liability.

The same words, in the same order. Not similar phrasing identical. The kind of specific legal language used by people who work for the same law firm, or were trained by the same one.

I sat on the concrete floor with my father's ruined company spread out around me in boxes, and felt something shift not full understanding yet, just the sense that a piece was about to fit somewhere it hadn't before. I didn't know what a "minority holding" in my father's company actually meant. I didn't know who it had been transferred to, or when, or why no one not my father, not the lawyers who'd handled what was left of his estate had ever once mentioned it to me.

I kept going through the folder. My hands weren't quite steady anymore. Most of what I found was ordinary paperwork from the company's dissolution, a list of creditors. But near the bottom, stapled to a page I'd apparently never actually read closely, was a legal document authorizing the transfer of company shares. Two names were signed at the bottom.

My father's name was one of them.

The second signature belonged to someone I didn't recognize by name but I recognized the handwriting immediately. I had seen it only three days earlier, on our wedding registry, where Edmund had insisted on co-signing as a formality.

Edmund Voss's signature. On a document about my father's company. From years before I ever met this family.

I still didn't understand what any of it meant. I didn't know how much money was involved, or what a "minority holding" gave someone the right to. But sitting there on that concrete floor, I understood one thing clearly: whatever had actually happened to my father's company, it wasn't the story I'd been told my whole life.

And Edmund Voss's name was part of it.

I put the folder back exactly the way I'd found it the same careful habit that had kept me safe in his house for the last three days. I was halfway to the storage unit's exit, already reaching for my phone to call a car, when it buzzed in my hand and nearly stopped my heart.

One new message, from a number I didn't recognize.

Everything alright at the unit? Saw the gate log and didn't realize you still had a key to that place.

I didn't know that number. I didn't know how anyone could know I was here, or how they'd gotten access to the gate log for a storage facility I hadn't visited in four years unless someone had already been watching for exactly this.

I stood completely still in the doorway, the padlock still warm in my hand, and understood, with total certainty, that I had not spent this afternoon alone.