Chapter 6: The Wrong Side of Midnight

Anastasia’s POV:

I had been staring at my ceiling for three hours when my phone rang.

Not Simone, who had called twice already and left one voicemail that I had listened to four times without responding to because I did not have the words yet and Simone deserved better than half of them. Not Marcus, who checked in every Sunday with the reliability of a man who needed to feel useful. Not anyone in my contacts at all.

Unknown number. Harlow City area code.

I stared at it for four rings and answered on the fifth because something in the base of my stomach told me that not answering was not actually an option.

“Anastasia Voss.” The voice on the other end was unhurried and smooth in the way that belonged exclusively to men who had never once had to raise it to be heard. “I was hoping you would pick up.”

I sat up slowly in the dark of my bedroom with the folder still on my nightstand where I had placed it two hours ago after reading it for the third time.

“Who is this?” I said, though something told me I already knew.

“My name is Robert Vane.” A pause that was not uncomfortable because he had clearly decided it would not be. “I think you and I have some mutual interests worth discussing, Ms. Voss. Or perhaps I should say Mrs. Salvatore, given that the divorce was never actually filed.”

My jaw tightened.

He knew. Of course he knew. A man who had spent two years orchestrating the quiet dismantling of an empire from the inside knew exactly where every paper trail led and apparently mine led directly to him.

“What do you want?” I said.

“A conversation. Nothing more than that, not yet.” Another pause. “I think when you hear what I have to say you will find that we want very similar things. And I think you are smart enough to know that the position you are currently in, with a fake account in your name sitting inside Salvatore’s shared drive, is not one you want to be standing in alone when this all comes to a head.”

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

He knew about the account. Which meant either he had created it himself or he was monitoring Renata closely enough to know every move she made inside that building. Either possibility was its own particular kind of terrifying.

“I will meet you,” I said, because the alternative was sitting in my apartment waiting for a trap to close around me and I had already done enough waiting in my life to last several lifetimes. “But understand something, Mr. Vane. I am not meeting you because you have leverage over me. I am meeting you because I want to look at the man who has been pulling strings in my life from a distance and I want him to have to look back.”

A silence that was different from the ones before it.

Then something that might have been a smile moved through his voice.

“Friday,” he said. “The Meridian Hotel. Noon.”

He hung up before I could respond and I sat in the dark of my bedroom with my phone in my hand and my heart doing something loud and complicated against my ribs and I thought about Adrian’s folder and the fake account and the thirty day countdown and the man forty two floors above a parking garage who had no idea any of this was coming for him.

Then I called Simone.

She picked up on the first ring.

“I have been sitting on my couch in my coat for forty minutes,” she said, “waiting for you to call me back because I knew you were not fine and I knew you would call eventually and I was not going to miss it by being asleep.”

Something cracked open in my chest at the sound of her voice.

“I need you to come over,” I said.

“I’m already in the elevator.”

She arrived seven minutes later with her coat still on and two containers of leftover pasta she had grabbed from her fridge on the way out because Simone Carter’s primary love language was making sure the people she loved were fed during a crisis. She took one look at my face and the folder on my nightstand and sat down on my bed without taking her coat off and said nothing, which was the most Simone thing she had ever done because she understood instinctively that I needed to be the one to start.

I told her everything.

All of it. Adrian. The folder. The pregnancy test bought with cash from a pharmacy three towns over. The fake account. The thirty day countdown on Lucas’s inheritance. The phone call I had just gotten off twenty minutes before she arrived. I watched her face move through approximately eleven different expressions while I talked, disbelief and fury and something cold and focused that only appeared on Simone’s face when she had shifted from feeling something to deciding what to do about it.

When I finished she was quiet for a long moment.

“She planned it,” Simone said. Not a question. The specific flat tone of a woman processing something that made her want to break something expensive. “She sat down somewhere and planned the worst morning of your life like it was a line item on a to do list.”

“Yes.”

“And now she has a fake account in your name inside Lucas’s company.”

“Yes.”

“And you agreed to meet the man she is working with on Friday.”

“Yes.”

Simone looked at me for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. We’re going to need Dean.”

I blinked. “Simone.”

“Ana. The man is a corporate lawyer who has been looking for a reason to help Lucas for eight months without Lucas asking him to. He needs to see that folder.” She was already reaching for her phone with the energy of a woman who had made a decision and was not entertaining alternatives. “And before you say anything about it being complicated between us, I am an adult and this is more important than complicated.”

I watched her type a message to Dean Mercer at eleven forty seven on a Thursday night with the focused efficiency of someone who was absolutely not thinking about the fact that she was texting Dean Mercer at eleven forty seven on a Thursday night.

Her phone buzzed back in under a minute.

She looked at the screen and something moved across her face so fast I almost missed it before she locked it down behind the expression she used when she was pretending something had not affected her.

“He’s coming,” she said, not looking at me.

“Simone.”

“Do not,” she said, in a tone that closed the subject as effectively as a slammed door, and stood up to hang her coat because apparently she was staying and had decided this was the moment to finally take it off.

I let it go. But I filed it away, the flush at the base of her throat and the way her hands were slightly less steady than usual as she hung her coat on my rack, and I thought that whatever was happening between Simone Carter and Dean Mercer had moved several steps past complicated without either of them noticing.

Dean arrived twenty two minutes later in a grey sweater and the slightly disheveled look of a man who had been asleep and gotten up without complaint the moment his phone buzzed. He stopped in my doorway and looked at Simone first, just for a second, the kind of look that happened before a person remembered to make it stop, and then he looked at me with the steady professional focus of someone shifting gears.

“Tell me everything,” he said, and sat down.

So I did.

I watched Dean read the folder the way lawyers read things, systematically, without visible reaction, going back to certain pages and reading them again with a stillness that told me his brain was already building something while his face gave nothing away. When he finished, he set it down on my coffee table and looked up.

“This is enough,” he said. “Not for everything but for enough. The shell company transfers alone are a federal issue if we get the right people involved.” He looked at me. “You said she created a fake account in your name?”

“Six weeks ago. She used it tonight.”

“Do you have the access log?”

I picked up my phone and showed him the screenshot I had taken in the parking garage with the steadiness of a woman who had learned to document things before she allowed herself to feel them.

Dean looked at it for a long moment.

“She’s trying to make you the fall person,” he said quietly. “If this unravels before she’sready then she needs someone to point at and she has spent six weeks building a paper trail that points directly at you.”

“I know.”

“And you agreed to meet Vane on Friday?”

“I did.”

Dean looked at Simone. Simone looked at Dean. Something passed between them in that look that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the two years of unfinished business they had been carrying around each other like furniture they kept rearranging without ever deciding where it actually belonged.

Then Dean looked back at me.

“You’re not meeting him alone,” he said.

“I was not planning to.”

“And Lucas needs to know.” He picked up the folder. “Not everything. Not yet. But enough to start protecting himself before Vane files and he has thirty days and no warning.”

I thought about Lucas in that conference room. The lines around his eyes. The way he had said my name like he was handling something he understood was fragile. I found the papers, Ana. I never filed them.

“I know,” I said.

“Can you tell him?”

The apartment was very quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly.

Dean nodded like that was the only answer he had expected and stood and picked up the folder and looked at me with the steadiness of a man who had already decided which side of this he was on.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “Friday is three days away and we have work to do before then.”

He looked at Simone one more time on his way to the door. She was looking at the coffee table.

“Simone,” he said.

“Goodnight Dean,” she said, to the coffee table.

A pause.

“Goodnight,” he said quietly, and left.

The door closed and Simone sat very still for exactly four seconds and then reached for the pasta containers and handed me one without looking up and said absolutely nothing and I decided that was the most honest thing either of us had done all night.

I took the pasta.

We ate in silence and somewhere across the city Robert Vane was sleeping soundly in whatever expensive room he occupied, completely confident that Friday was going to go exactly the way he had planned it.

He had never met Anastasia Voss.

Not the real one.

At least not yet.