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“Hired, yes. But I could have declined.”

She goes quiet at that, turning it over with the visible care of a woman inspecting a coin for counterfeit. “I know,” she says finally, softly, and the two words carry more weight than they should.

We stand in the square for a moment in a silence that is, for once, entirely comfortable. And then I do something I have not consciously decided to do until it’s already done—I reach over and fold my hand around hers, lightly, leaving the choice to her in the looseness of my grip.

She looks down at it.

I keep my own gaze fixed forward, on the chapel spire at the far end of the lane, because I have apparently regressed to the romantic competence of a schoolboy and cannot meet her eyes while my pulse does something undisciplined. I can feel the weight of her stare on the side of my face, measuring me, reading whatever’s legible there.

“Let’s check out the stores,” I say.

She doesn’t answer until I finally turn and let our eyes lock—and when they do, she gives me something she does not give lightly. The wall comes down a careful inch. The bright manic glitter of Vex thins, and beneath it I catch the raw, unguarded thing I’ve only glimpsed once before, in a medical bay and a bathtub I wasn’t in: the true face under all the others.

Genevieve, looking out, deciding to be seen.

“Okay,” she says, and her fingers tighten around mine.

It doesn’t take long to find the shops that suit her. Arch Hollow’s fashion leans hard into a soft cottage-core sweetness—linen, lace, and muted florals, all hushed pastels and grandmother’s-garden restraint—but tucked among it, for the patient eye, are the wilder pieces: a dress in a clashing jewel-bright print, a coat the precise impossible green of oxidized copper, ribbons and buttons in combinations that should be criminal and somehow sing.

She moves through it like a tuning fork, lighting up at exactly the garments I’d have predicted, and I find an unfamiliar pleasure in simply watching her choose.

There is a tell in the way she shops, and I read it because reading her has become the most absorbing study of my life.

She doesn’t reach for anything that would let her disappear. Every piece she lingers over is loud—clashing, bright, impossible to overlook—and I understand it the way I understand most things about her now, in layers.

The world spent years insisting she be invisible. A doll on a shelf is dressed to match the room; a stripped asset is given nothing; a sedated patient wears the same orange as every other forgotten thing. She is done being matched to anyone’s decor. Every garish, twinkling, neon-threaded thing she pulls off a rack is a small declaration of war on every man who ever triedto make her blend in. I have never found a woman’s taste in clothing tactically interesting before. I find hers a manifesto.

At the counter, when the total tallies, something in her stutters.

She goes still mid-reach, and a frown pulls at her, and she leans toward me to whisper, mortified in a way that makes my chest ache, that she doesn’t have any money.

I have my card out before she’s finished the sentence.

“You don’t need it,” I tell her, tapping it to the reader. “And even if you carried a purse fat enough to buy the shop, it would stay exactly where it belongs—in the account that has your name on it.”

She blinks at that phrasing, but I move past it before she can seize on it, turning to the attendant to request that the entire selection be specially wrapped and delivered directly to our address rather than carried.

The woman behind the counter nods, assures me it’s no trouble at all, and I take Vex’s hand again as we step back into the sunlight.

“The account with your name on it,” I say, because she’s earned the rest of the sentence, “is not a figure of speech. I’ve spent the past weeks locating and consolidating your finances. Recovering what was scattered, securing what was exposed, quietly acquiring control of accounts that were sitting unguarded and vulnerable to anyone who knew where to look. It’s done. It’s safe. It’s yours.”

She stops walking entirely.

“I—” She frowns, and for the first time all morning the mastermind looks genuinely caught off her own footing. “I don’t even remember what I have. I put some of it into things—stocks, holdings, I think, before everything—but it’s a fog. I haven’t been able to count my own worth in years.”

“I know. I counted it for you.” I keep my tone even, factual, the way I keep everything that matters. “It’s considerable, for what it’s worth, though I suspect that surprises you less than the fact that anyone bothered. Once we know our final destination—once we’re ghosts and the board is clear—I’ll hand you the keys to every cent of it. Full access. No conditions.”

I do not tell her the full shape of what I found, because some of it she’ll want to discover with her own hands when the time comes, and because a portion of it raised the hair on the back of my neck in a way I am still cataloguing.

There was money she remembers—the stocks, the holdings, the careful little hedges of a clever girl. Then there was the other architecture beneath it: dormant accounts, shell structures, assets routed through names that meant nothing until I traced them back and found they meant her father.

Whatever empire the man built did not die entirely with him.

Some of its bones are still standing, quietly, in trusts no one has touched in years, waiting for the single surviving heir to remember she holds the only key. She thinks the husband left her with nothing.

The husband, I begin to suspect, left her with a great deal more than either of them realized—and a woman with her mind, handed the remains of a dynasty, becomes a problem of an entirely different magnitude than a runaway Omega in a pretty dress.

She studies me with open suspicion, the reflex of a woman who has learned that generosity is the first move of every long con.