The ledger looked smaller in the morgue’s fluorescent light.
It fit in the palm of my hand, a slim black rectangle with my father’s initials pressed into the leather, the gold worn down by too many fingers. It could have been a notebook, a planner, something harmless. It wasn’t.
I knew that before I opened it. I knew it the way I knew my own name.
“Ms. Crest?” The executor’s voice echoed against the tile, too loud in the quiet. “We really should do this in my office.”
I didn’t look at him. The sheet covering my father’s body was still pulled up to his chest. His face was bare. There was a line between his brows that hadn’t smoothed out, even in death, as if he’d gone out mid-calculation.
“You said this was it,” I said. My voice sounded scraped raw, like it belonged to someone else. “No accounts, no properties, no… valuables.” I forced the word out, because it felt stupid saying wealth in a room that smelled like disinfectant and cold metal. “Just this.”
“Just that.” He shifted, uncomfortable. “Per the will. To be delivered to you personally. And, ah, destroyed upon your discretion.”
Destroyed.
Something inside me tightened. My father never destroyed anything that could be turned into leverage. Not voluntarily.
I opened the ledger.
Names. Columns of them, written in my father’s unhurried hand. Each one followed by numbers, codes, dates. Some I recognized—judges I’d seen on the news, a senator who’d once shaken my hand at a hospital fundraiser. Others meant nothing to me. Yet they all sat there on the page, nested rows of power and owing and owed.
My stomach rolled.
“Ms. Crest?”
I shut the book. The snap of leather and paper felt like an ending.
“It’s nothing,” I lied. “Old contacts. I’ll take care of it.”
Of course I didn’t destroy it. Of course I left the morgue with the ledger pressed to my chest, my fingers numb around it, like it was a bomb and I was too tired to care if it went off.
Outside, the rain had turned the city to a smear of neon and asphalt. I stood under the overhang and watched a thin stream of water run off the edge, shattering against the sidewalk.
My phone buzzed.
For one stupid, irrational second I thought it would be my father. I even checked the screen before I remembered I’d just seen his body.
Unknown number.
I answered anyway. “This is Elara.”
Silence. Then: “You have something that belongs to me.”
The voice was male. Deep. Smooth in the way of someone who never had to raise it to be heard.
“I don’t—” I started.
“The ledger.” He didn’t bother pretending it might be anything else. “Walk to the curb.”
A prickle moved across the back of my neck. I looked up, scanning the street. A black sedan idled at the crosswalk, windows tinted too dark for the hour. Another car sat a little further down, engine humming. People moved along the sidewalk in wet blurs.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, but my feet had already taken one step, then another.
“Funny,” he said. “You think you have a choice.”
A door clicked open.
He wasn’t in the sedan. He was closer. Leaning against a dark SUV I hadn’t even registered, parked half in shadow beneath a dead streetlight. The rain made a hazy halo of the air around him, slicking his charcoal coat, dripping off the angles of his face.
