Chapter 5 — Too Close
1067 Words
AUDREY'S POV
The knock at the front door came at seven in the morning, hard enough that I heard it from my wing, hard enough that I was already in the hallway when Richard's voice cut through the house — low, controlled, dangerous in a way I hadn't heard from him yet.
"Detective Marsh," he said. "You're early."
"Warrants don't wait for coffee, Voss."
I came down the stairs before I'd decided to, and found six officers spreading through the entrance hall like water finding cracks in a foundation. Marsh stood in the center of it, a folder under his arm, eyes moving over the house like he was pricing it.
"Mrs. Voss," he said, when he saw me. "Newlywed life treating you well?"
"Better before seven a.m. visits," I said, before I could stop myself.
Something flickered in his expression — interest, maybe, or suspicion, filing me away as either an asset or a threat. Richard's hand found the small of my back, firm, deliberate, a silent instruction: let me handle this.
"You have a warrant for what, exactly?" Richard asked, and his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before — flat, precise, a blade with no visible edge.
"Financial records. Business dealings prior to the wedding." Marsh handed over the paperwork without looking away from me. "Won't take long, unless there's something here that makes it take longer."
They tore through the study for forty minutes. I stood beside Richard the entire time, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and felt him vibrating with a tension he refused to let show on his face — not fear, something colder and more controlled than fear.
"Nothing," one of the officers finally reported. Marsh's jaw tightened, but he nodded, gathering his men toward the door.
"Enjoy the marriage, Mr. Voss," he said, on his way out. "I have a feeling I'll be back before the honeymoon's over."
The door closed. The silence after it was worse than the noise had been.
"They'll come back," I said.
"I know." Richard turned to me, and for the first time since I'd met him, something in his composure had genuinely cracked — not panic, but something adjacent to it, something he was working very hard to bury. "You handled that well."
"I've had practice not flinching in front of dangerous men." I meant it as a joke. It didn't land as one.
He studied me a beat too long. "Is that what I am to you? Dangerous?"
"You're something," I said. "I haven't decided what yet."
He stepped closer — not much, just enough that the air between us went thin. "Careful, Audrey. Curiosity gets people hurt in my world."
"Then it's a good thing I'm not afraid of getting hurt." I didn't step back. I don't know why. Some reckless part of me wanted to see what he'd do if I didn't.
What he did was reach up and tuck a strand of hair back from my face — slow, deliberate, nothing like the cold, contractual kiss at the altar. His hand lingered against my jaw a moment longer than the gesture required.
"That's a mistake," he said quietly, like he was warning himself as much as me.
"Which part?"
"All of it." But he didn't move away. Neither did I. For one suspended second, the distance between us disappeared entirely, and I felt the heat of him like a held breath before he stepped back, jaw tight, control snapping back into place like a door slamming shut.
"Marsh will keep digging," he said, voice back to business, like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened. "I need to know how much you're willing to be part of this. Really part of it. Not just a wife on paper."
"Then tell me what you're hiding," I said. "All of it. If Marsh comes back and I don't know what I'm protecting, I can't protect it."
He looked at me for a long moment — assessing, the way he had the very first day, except now there was something else underneath the calculation.
"Come with me," he said finally. "I'll show you exactly what you married into."
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RICHARD'S POV
I hadn't planned to show anyone the real ledgers. Not Davina, not my father before he died, not a single soul who wasn't already bound to me by blood or blackmail.
I led Audrey down to the sublevel beneath the house — the true records, the actual architecture of eleven years of careful work — and watched her take it in without flinching. Names. Numbers. Routes. The full shape of an empire Marsh was circling like a wolf that hadn't found the kill yet.
"This is everything," she said quietly.
"This is everything that gets me killed if it reaches the wrong hands." I watched her read faster than I expected, faster than most of my own men could. "Marsh doesn't have this. If he did, I'd already be in a cell."
"Then the priority is making sure he never gets it." She looked up at me, sharp, already three steps ahead. "You have a leak somewhere. That raid on your warehouse wasn't luck. Someone told him where to look."
I'd suspected the same thing for two days and hadn't said it out loud to anyone. Hearing her say it, unprompted, arriving at the same conclusion independently, did something to the careful architecture of control I kept around everything in my life.
"You're right," I said. "I don't know who yet."
"Then let me help you find out." She said it simply, like it wasn't a request, like she'd already decided this was her problem to solve too. "I'm your wife on paper either way, Richard. Might as well make me useful for something besides land."
I should have said no. Should have told her this wasn't her fight, that the safest thing for her was to know nothing at all. Instead I found myself nodding, some part of me relieved to have someone in this house who looked at the danger and leaned toward it instead of away.
"Careful," I said, echoing my own warning back at her. "Once you're in this, there's no clean way out."
"Good," she said. "I was never interested in clean."
For the second time that day, I felt the ground shift under something I'd spent eleven years keeping perfectly still.
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