Marcus's POV
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Callum is talking and I am not listening.
This is new. I listen to everything. I built my career on listening — on catching the word someone almost said, the number that doesn't match, the silence between two sentences that tells you more than both sentences combined. Callum has been my CFO for twelve years and in twelve years I have never needed him to repeat himself.
"Marcus."
"I heard you," I say.
"Then what did I just say?"
I pause. He waits.
"Say it again," I say.
He makes a sound that is not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh. "The Singapore deal closes Thursday. You need to sign the final approval by noon tomorrow or we lose the window." A pause. "Where are you right now?"
"My study."
"Physically, yes. Where are you actually?"
I don't answer that. I look across the open space of the apartment toward the east wing hallway, which is empty. Rosa finished the tour twenty minutes ago. I heard the elevator close. Nadia is alone in her suite now with her boxes and whatever she's deciding about all of this.
I heard her walk in this morning. I wasn't watching — I was at my desk, where I belong, doing work — but I heard the specific sound of someone moving through an unfamiliar space without letting it unsettle them. Measured steps. Deliberate. No hesitation long enough to become uncertainty.
She moves through the world the same way she reads documents. Fast first pass, slower second pass, nothing missed.
"Marcus," Callum says.
"Send the approval file. I'll sign it before noon."
"That's not what I'm asking about."
"Then ask what you're actually asking."
Another pause. Callum chooses his words carefully around me, always has. It's one of the reasons I keep him close. "Ethan called me this morning," he says. "Forty minutes ago."
I go still.
"He saw the marriage license filing," Callum continues. "He's not calm about it."
"He doesn't need to be calm," I say. "He needs to be irrelevant."
"He's threatening to go to the board. He's saying the marriage is a conflict of interest. That you're using a personal relationship to position yourself against the Steele family's business interests."
I almost smile. Almost. "He's going to argue conflict of interest to a board that watched him approve his own family's acquisition of his ex-wife's father's company."
"I know," Callum says. "I'm just telling you he's moving."
"Let him move," I say. "Moving people are easier to predict than still ones." I pull the Singapore file toward me. "Anything else?"
The longest pause yet.
"The courier delivered the letter this morning," Callum says quietly. "To her."
I set the file down.
"She has it," he confirms. "Vance sent confirmation twenty minutes ago."
I look at the east wing hallway again.
She has her grandfather's letter. She's reading it right now, or she's already read it, and somewhere in those two handwritten pages is a sentence that points a finger at the man who delivers it — at me, by extension of the name I carry and the door I walked through.
I told Callum last night we needed to move faster.
I didn't move fast enough.
"I need to speak with her," I say.
"Before or after the board call?"
"Before."
I hang up and stand and walk to the east wing.
-
Her door is closed.
I raise my hand to knock and then stop.
Because I can hear, through the door, the specific silence of someone who is not sleeping, not moving, not doing anything except sitting very still with something very heavy.
I know that silence. I've lived inside it. It's the silence of a person recalculating everything they thought they understood.
I knock twice. Quiet. Not demanding.
Nothing.
I knock again. "Nadia."
A beat. Then her voice, completely level: "I'm reading."
"I know," I say. "I'd like to explain—"
"I'm still reading."
I stop. I put my hand flat on the door and I wait.
Four minutes pass. I stand in the hallway of my own apartment and wait, which is not something I do. Marcus Steele does not wait in hallways. Marcus Steele schedules, controls, and proceeds.
The door opens.
She's holding the letter. Both pages, slightly creased where she pressed them flat. Her eyes are dry — she hasn't been crying, she's been thinking, which is somehow more intense. She looks at me the way my mother used to look at storms coming — not afraid, just very, very prepared.
"Your grandfather," I start.
"Wrote that the man who delivers this letter cannot be fully trusted," she finishes. "Yes. I read it."
"He wrote that in a general sense—"
"He wrote it specifically," she says. "He wrote: the man connected to the Steele business interests who comes to you with this information will have his own reasons, and those reasons may not match yours. She holds the page up briefly. "He knew. Fifteen years ago, he knew that someone connected to the Steele name would eventually be involved."
I hold her gaze. "He wasn't wrong to be cautious."
"Are you telling me he was wrong?"
"No," I say. "I'm telling you that cautious and corrupt are different things."
She looks at me for a long time. "Then tell me the part you still haven't told me. The part about the Steele family connection. The part that explains why a man who married into a name connected to my family's theft is now standing in a hallway asking me to trust him."
This is the moment. I know it. There is no more managed timing, no more strategic sequencing. She has the letter. She has most of the pieces. And she is standing in front of me with the particular expression of someone who will build the picture herself if I don't hand it to her — and her version will be darker than the truth.
I tell her.
All of it. The Steele family's silent partnership. The connection to the buried heirship. The fact that I found out two years after taking the name. The choice I made to stay and fix it rather than walk away clean.
She doesn't interrupt. She listens the way she does everything — completely.
When I finish, the hallway is very quiet.
"So the name I'm carrying," she says slowly. "Steele. It's connected to the people who took from my family."
"Yes," I say.
"And you carried it too. Knowing."
"Yes."
She looks down at the letter in her hands. Then back up at me. Something moves across her face that I can't fully read — and I can read most things.
"I need today," she says. "Don't talk to me today."
She steps back.
She closes the door.
I stand in the hallway.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I already know who it is before I look.
Ethan.
But it's not a call this time. It's a forwarded email. Sent to my personal address with one line of text from Ethan above it: I think you forgot that I know things too.
The forwarded email is from a journalist.
At the city's largest financial newspaper.
And the subject line reads: Re: Marcus Steele — Fraudulent Marriage and Holloway Asset Acquisition — Ready to publish Monday.