The Ledger

For three seconds, Isabel considered several lies and discarded all of them. Josephine Kade did not look like a woman who could be lied to twice in one day.

"I got lost again," Isabel tried anyway.

"You're standing in front of an open ledger with your hand on the cover, dear. Lost people don't have such good aim." Josephine crossed the room slowly, cane tapping the floorboards, and eased the ledger shut beneath Isabel's fingers. "Whatever you think you heard last night — and I know you heard something, I saw your face at the toasts — is family business. Not yours. Not yet."

"Not yet," Isabel repeated. "So there is something."

Josephine's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "There is always something, in a family like this. The question is whether you're marrying my grandson or my bank balance. I'd like to know which, before the invitations go out."

"I love Sebastian," Isabel said, and was almost convincing.

"Mm." Josephine opened the door herself, an invitation to leave that wasn't really an invitation. "We'll see."

Isabel left Kade Hall an hour later than planned, rattled in a way she hated being rattled, and called Camille from the car before the gates had even closed behind her.

"She caught you in the study?" Camille's voice crackled through the speaker, delighted and horrified in equal measure. Camille had been the one to point Isabel at Sebastian in the first place, eight months ago, at a charity auction neither of them could afford to attend honestly. Are you out, she'd texted that night. Old money, no prenup gossip, grandmother's dying in a year, tops. "Iz, what if the old bat's onto you?"

"Then the old bat's onto something real," Isabel said. "The vault is empty. Those were his exact words. Three years empty."

Silence on the line.

"That's not possible," Camille said finally. "The Kades own half the port. I checked before I ever gave you his number."

"Check again."

It took Camille eleven hours and a cousin who worked at a title company to come back with anything, and when she did, she didn't call — she sent a single message, no commentary, just three attachments and four words.

Iz. Look at this.

Isabel opened the first file with her thumb still trembling from a coffee she'd had too much of, and the number on the screen was so far past what she'd imagined that for a moment she thought Camille's cousin had made a mistake.

He hadn't.