Chapter 4

My hands were still shaking when I closed my bedroom door.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed them flat against my thighs, staring at the floor, and trying to slow everything down inside my chest.

Malvin had a file about my father, which meant he knew something, but how much did he know? I didn't know yet.

I lay down without changing my clothes and stared at the ceiling until the light outside my window changed.

In the morning, Malvin was already at the kitchen counter when I came out, coffee in hand, and then he looked up when I walked in.

"My office at home and at the company are off limits to you." His voice was quiet and absolute.

"That is not a request, Elena. It is a condition of this arrangement."

I said nothing.

He held my gaze for one long second, then looked back at his phone. "The car leaves in fifteen minutes."

Malvin didn’t discuss or explain anything, he just closed a door disguised as a sentence and had already decided the conversation was over before it began.

I poured my coffee and drank it standing up because sitting felt too much like settling. I left the house early and went to see my mother before work.

She was more alert than yesterday, sitting straighter, color returning slowly to her face. I kissed her cheek, pulled the chair close, and spoke before the nurse could appear and interrupt.

"Tell me what you saw that night, Mom. Everything." I said.

She looked at the window for a moment. Then she folded her hands in her lap and began.

"It was late, and everyone had gone to bed except me. One of the senior staff had told me to stay back and finish the hallway." She paused.

I asked quickly. “Then what happened, Mom?”

"I saw Bernard near the study. He was one of the senior household staff, and he was passing a folder to someone through the side entrance.” She said and continued. “I couldn't see the other person clearly, but I saw the car, and it had a company plate connected to Celeste Kain's office."

My stomach dropped. "Celeste."

"The next morning, the jewelry and documents were reported missing, and I was called in first, before anyone else." Her hands weren't steady, but her voice was. "They told me if I said a word, your scholarship would be pulled. Your father's case was already collapsing, and they knew I had nothing to fight with." She looked at me directly. "So I stayed silent. I let them take my name and my job because I had you and Noah to protect."

The room felt very quiet.

"Did my father know about the documents?" My voice came out lower than I intended.

She hesitated. "Weeks before he died, he told me the money from his project had been moved through a company he didn't recognize. He said he was going to take what he found to someone he trusted." Her lips pressed together. "He never got the chance."

I sat with that for a long moment, and thought inside my head that my father never died a guilty man, but because someone made sure he couldn’t speak.

I was quiet through the whole morning at the office.

Malvin noticed but said nothing. We moved through the same spaces without speaking, and I used every quiet minute to carry what I now knew without letting it show on my face.

By afternoon, Maya appeared at my desk with a paper bag she set beside my keyboard without asking.

"Sera had a two-hour closed meeting with Malvin this morning," she said.

I kept typing. "Okay."

"She also asked one of the junior staff which projects you're currently handling."

My hands slowed on the keyboard, I looked up, and the expression on Maya’s face was not gossip, but a warning.

"Just keeping you informed," she said and left.

Sera saw me near the elevator at the end of the day. She fell into step beside me like we had arranged it.

"Long day," she said.

I pressed the elevator button and said nothing.

"Malvin works everyone hard." She paused for a while. "Some people adjust, and some don't last long enough to."

The elevator opened, we both stepped in, and she watched the floor numbers like she was choosing her next words with care.

"I don't have a problem with you, Elena. I just think you should know what you walked into." Her voice stayed warm. "Malvin doesn't do anything without a reason. This marriage, the timing, all of it. He's protecting something, because he always is." The lobby light appeared above the door. "The people closest to him usually figure that out too late." She said and walked out ahead of me.

I stood inside the elevator one second longer than I should have, her words pressing against every question I was already carrying.

That night, the penthouse was quiet, and I waited until the light under Malvin's home office door went dark and the hallway outside went completely still. Then I got up, crossed the living room slowly, tried the office door, and it opened.

I slipped inside using only my phone screen for light. The desk was cleared, and the document from the night before was gone. I checked the side drawer, but it was empty.

I was about to leave when I noticed the bookshelf. One folder was sitting slightly out of line with the rest, then I pulled it open.

Inside were printed pages, names, dates, and records I didn't have time to read fully, and near the back, there was a photograph that stopped me completely.

It was my mother, standing outside the Kain estate, caught in a moment she never knew was being recorded.

I turned it over, and there was a written note on the back in someone else's handwriting that made the floor feel unsteady beneath me.

She saw too much.

Below it, there was a single question in different ink that made my blood run cold.

What does the daughter know.