Chapter 1 - The Other Woman's Door
Rain battered against the smoked-glass windows of Griffin Tate’s black Lincoln Navigator, turning the neon signs of Midtown Manhattan into smears of bleeding crimson and sickly amber. Every breath I drew felt restricted, my lungs fighting against the swell of my seven-month belly. Inside me, Audrey shifted restlessly, her tiny heel pressing hard against my ribs.
*I am here,* she seemed to remind me. *You cannot break.*
"She didn’t run," Griffin said. His hands remained loose on the steering wheel, his cold, observant eyes fixed on the entrance of a boutique brownstone on East 64th Street. "If she knew you were on her heels, she would have cleared out her townhouse within twenty minutes of Sebastian leaving the Whitmore. But she’s still on the third floor. Lights have been on for forty minutes."
I looked down at the manila folder resting on my knees.
The photograph sat on top. My father—Arthur Ward—grinning against a backdrop of limestone balustrades in a city that looked like old Vienna. Beside him stood the pale woman in the cream coat, whose eyes held a predatory calm. And there, with bruised knuckles and a woolen schoolboy coat, stood eight-year-old Sebastian.
Sebastian Ward-Hartley. The man who, two nights ago, had knelt on our Egyptian cotton sheets, kissed the rounded skin of my stomach, and whispered: *“Hurry back to me, little girl. Don’t let your mother work too hard while Daddy is in Washington.”*
Washington. Seattle. The Whitmore Hotel. Suite 1804.
"Give me the file on Natalie," I said, my voice dangerously steady.
May you like
Griffin didn't argue. He reached into the leather pocket behind his seat and handed me three stapled pages.
"Natalie Vance. Age thirty-three. Columbia Law, top five percent. Hired by your late father’s private hedge fund six months before he suffered the coronary that killed him. After his estate liquidated, she transferred directly into Vance Capital, an offshore asset-management shell company headquartered
