The Billionaire's Clever Thief

5

ALARIC

"I don't understand," I said. "You went to the nursing home first thing this morning, like I asked."

I stood by the window with my coffee going cold in my hand, listening to Marcus explain something I didn't want to hear twice

"Yes, sir. Front desk confirmed no purse was turned in. I asked them to check the visitor's log too, in case someone found it and forgot to report it." Marcus shifted his weight, the way he always did when he was about to say something he thought I wouldn't like. "They pulled the security footage as a courtesy. Miss Amelia is seen on camera leaving the building last night. She has her purse in her hand the entire time. Never sets it down once."

I set the coffee mug on the counter slowly. "That's impossible. She said she left it there."

"That's not all, sir." Marcus cleared his throat. "When I was cleaning out the car this morning, I found the purse. It had been pushed under the passenger seat, toward the back, wedged in pretty deep. Not the kind of place something falls by accident. It looked deliberate."

The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound.

"Deliberate," I repeated.

"I could be wrong, sir. Could have slipped back there while she was getting out."

But I wasn't listening to him anymore, not really, because my mind had already started doing the thing it did best, the thing that made me good at what I do, laying facts out flat and following the line between them until it connected somewhere ugly.

She hadn't forgotten her purse. She'd hidden it.

Why would a woman hide her own purse.

There was only one answer that made sense, and it landed in my chest like a fist. She'd needed a reason. A reason to come home with me, a reason to stay under my roof, a reason to be inside my house with no one watching and nowhere she was supposed to be.

She had an ulterior motive.

"f**k," I said, and the mug hit the counter harder than I meant it to, my coffee sloshing over the rim, and I was already running, already crossing the kitchen at a pace that made Marcus step back out of my way.

The guest wing was on the other side of the mansion, past the study, past the room I hadn't opened in three years, the one still packed with my father's things because I hadn't been able to decide what to do with them and hadn't wanted to look at them long enough to try.

The room Amelia was sleeping in.

I took the stairs two at a time, my mind running through everything I'd told her in twenty four hours, every piece of the company, every name I'd let slip in passing, the offhand comment about my father's floor, his rule about liabilities, none of it meant to matter, all of it potentially a gift I'd handed a woman who stole for a living without even realizing what I'd done.

She was clever. She was patient. And I had brought her directly into the one room in my house full of things I hadn't let anyone touch since my father's funeral.

* * *

AMELIA

The boxes were stacked three deep against the far wall, half hidden under a dust sheet that had slipped sideways sometime in the night, and I told myself I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I told myself curiosity was just a habit I couldn't switch off, that any room full of someone else's secrets would have pulled me in exactly the same way.

That was a lie, and I'd told enough of them to know one when it came out of my own mouth.

The first box held nothing, old files, expired contracts, things too boring to matter. The second held photographs, Alaric as a boy, stiff and unsmiling even then, standing beside a man with the same sharp jaw and colder eyes.

The third box was the one that stopped my hands completely.

A leather folder, cracked with age, tucked beneath a stack of business awards I didn't bother reading. I pulled it out and opened it, and my eyes caught on a name typed across the top of an old transport contract, a company logo I hadn't seen in ten years but would have recognized in my sleep, because I'd spent a decade searching for exactly this piece of paper.

Beneath it, a termination letter. A signature.

Beneath that, was a name.

Not Alaric's.

His father's.

The date matched. The company matched. Every fragment my father had ever let slip before he was arrested, all matched the words in front of me with a precision that made the room tilt sideways.

I sat down hard on the floor, the folder still open in my lap, my whole body gone cold and distant, like I was watching myself from somewhere outside my own skin.

He was Alaric's father.

The man who ruined mine, who buried mine, who took everything and called it business, was the man in the photograph downstairs, the man whose floor Alaric now stood on, whose name Alaric had inherited along with everything else.

Footsteps thundered down the hallway outside, fast and urgent, and I barely had time to shove the folder back into the box before the door burst open and Alaric stood in the frame, his chest heaving, his eyes locking onto mine with a look that told me he already knew something was wrong.

He just didn't know what yet.

"It's you...It's been you all along" I fell on the ground out of weakness and that's all I can remember.