I Married My Sister's Killer

Chapter 4 — The Card

In the morning, Damian makes coffee.

I know this because I hear it — the grind of beans, the precise hiss of steam, the ritual of a man who does not trust convenience. I lie in Iris's bed and stare at the ceiling and listen to him move around the kitchen like a man who has never once tripped over his own life, and I think about the card tucked into the seam of my cosmetics bag.

She knew.

Two words. No signature. No date.

I've been turning them over since 2 a.m. the way you turn over a coin that might be a different coin depending on the light.

By the time I shower and dress — one of Iris's polished blazers, dark trousers, the costume of a CEO's wife rather than a woman running an investigation — I have three working theories.

One: Iris left the card herself, before she died, knowing that whoever came next would find it. That she was smart enough and scared enough to leave breadcrumbs inside the lion's den.

Two: someone on Damian's staff left it. Someone who knew Iris, knew what she found, and wanted the next person in this room to know the truth.

Three: Damian left it. Which would mean he's not just watching me. He's guiding me. And I haven't even begun to understand why.

I walk into the kitchen.

He's at the counter, jacket already on, coffee already poured. There are two cups. He pushes one toward me without looking up from the document he's reading.

I sit down on the barstool across from him and I pick up the coffee and I don't say anything, because I've learned in sixteen hours that silence is Damian's first language, and I need to be fluent before I try to have a conversation in it.

He reads for two more minutes. Then he closes the folder.

"You went through the desk," he says.

It isn't a question. It also isn't an accusation. It's a statement of fact delivered the way you'd note the weather.

My pulse doesn't move. I've been preparing for this since the moment I found the card. "I was looking for paper," I say. "I wanted to write something down."

"Mm." He picks up his coffee. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

A beat. The city is loud fifty-eight floors below. The coffee is excellent and I hate that it is.

"No," I say.

He looks at me then — that slow, cataloging look that I am beginning to understand is his version of paying full attention. Most men look at a woman's face. Damian looks at the space between what she's saying and what she means.

"No," he repeats, and the word sounds different in his mouth. Like he's testing its weight. Like he's already decided it's a lie but hasn't decided what to do with that information yet.

"I'll have paper sent to your room," he says finally, and picks up his folder and walks out, and I sit in his kitchen with my excellent coffee and my three theories and the slow, cold realization that theory three is looking more likely by the minute.

He left the card.

And he just confirmed he knows I found it.

The question I can't answer yet — the one that is going to keep me awake for the next several weeks — is whether that makes him my enemy or my only possible ally.

I finish the coffee. It really is excellent.

I hate him a little more for that.