on her door.
“Mr.
Moretti wants you in the library.”
Mara found Vincent alone beside a laptop.
His jacket was gone.
His sleeves were rolled to his forearms.
He looked less like the immaculate figure who terrified half the household and more like a man who had spent several hours discovering that his certainty had been built on rotten boards.
He turned the screen toward her.
“Security logs from the night the watch disappeared.”
Mara studied the rows of access records.
“I don’t understand them.”
“Someone disabled three cameras using Enzo’s administrative credentials.”
“Could they have been stolen?”
“Yes.”
Vincent tapped another entry.
“But his private office terminal was used to do it.”
Mara’s stomach tightened.
“Where was he during the outage?”
“At dinner with me.”
She looked confused.
Vincent continued.
“Which means either someone entered his locked office while he was downstairs, or Enzo scheduled the shutdown earlier.”
“Can you tell which?”
“Gabriel is trying.”
Mara looked toward the library door.
“If Enzo is involved, why would he care about me?”
Vincent’s gaze settled on the medal at her throat.
“Maybe for the same reason I did.
Your father.”
The next morning, Vincent did something no Moretti employee expected.
He took the maid into the private archive himself.
The room occupied a windowless section beneath the east wing.
Shelves climbed from floor to ceiling, filled with decades of contracts, shipping records, tax documents, family correspondence, and paper files too sensitive to digitize.
Mara stopped at the threshold.
For two weeks she had risked everything to enter this room.
Now the man she had deceived was holding the door open for her.
“You said Brennan remembered a private ledger,” Vincent said.
“What did it look like?”
“Blue cloth cover.
Brass corners.
My father used a red pencil for corrections.”
Vincent nodded.
They searched for nearly two hours.
Nothing.
Then Mara noticed an old shelf label beneath a newer one.
The faded lettering read 2008–2018 AUXILIARY ACCOUNTS.
“This shelf was moved,” she said.
Vincent examined the floor.
Four shallow marks scarred the wood where the cabinet had once stood several inches farther from the wall.
They pushed together.
Behind it was a narrow recess.
No ledger waited inside.
Only a torn sheet of blue cloth and a yellow carbon copy of an accounting page.
Mara stared at it.
“That’s from the ledger.”
“You’re certain?”
“My father drew his sevens like this.”
She pointed toward a column.
Vincent studied the page.
The transactions were coded, but one repeated notation appeared beside several transfers.
R-17.
Vincent went completely still.
“I’ve seen that code.”
“Where?”
He looked at her.
“In my father’s private notebook.”
The same notebook Vincent had placed beside his wallet during the test.
They returned to the drawing room.
Vincent opened it to a section written during the final months of his father’s life.
R-17 appeared six times.
Beside the final entry were three words.
Russo offshore discrepancy.
Mara read it twice.
“Russo.”
“Enzo’s family name.”
“Your father suspected him.”
“Apparently.”
“Then why accuse my father?”
Vincent turned several pages.
The next sheet had been removed cleanly from the binding.
Someone had taken whatever his father wrote after discovering the discrepancy.
A knock sounded at the door.
Gabriel entered carrying a tablet.
“We recovered the camera archive.”
Vincent looked up.
“Show
