PART 10:

Before something before what? Lucian’s expression shifted in a way she’d never seen it shift before. Carefully. the way someone moved who was carrying something fragile and had just hit an unexpected step. The federal investigators, he said, the ones I told you about who started asking questions 3 weeks ago. He paused.

I found out last night, the meeting I left to come get you. They moved faster than I expected. There’s a subpoena. It went out yesterday. The room went quiet. for the trust accounts, she said, for all accounts associated with the trust’s operational history. He held her gaze, including accounts that were used as transit vehicles in the 8 years prior.

Her hands on the chair back, her name on an account, her father calling at 5:00 in the morning. “He wants to talk to me,” she said, before I find out about the subpoena from someone else. before I get a call from a federal investigator. Before I have a lawyer who isn’t his lawyer, she let go of the chair.

He wants to get to me first. Yes, Lucian said. That’s what I believe. Because if he gets to me first, he controls your response. He controls what you say, who you say it to, how the account is explained. Lucienne’s voice stayed level, but she could hear the thing underneath it. Now, the pressure that had been building since last night, since before that, since 7 months of watching something approach from a distance and being unable to stop the momentum of it, he needs you cooperative or he needs you discredited, one or the

other. She looked at him. If I don’t cooperate, she said, what does discrediting me look like? Lucien reached across the table and turned the tablet to face her. He’d pulled up a new document while she was standing. not account records. Something else. A page from what looked like a gossip publication’s website timestamped 40 minutes ago already live.

The headline read, “Moretti family speaks out on troubled daughter. Concern after wild night with known crime figure.” The article had quotes, “Anonymous family sources, words like erratic and history of instability, and we’ve tried to help her for years.” There was a photo her and Lucen outside the subway station, his arm around her, her face bruised and her dress destroyed.

The caption underneath it read, “Ava Moretti with alleged organized crime associate Lucien Vel following what sources describe as a breakdown at her sister’s wedding.” She read it twice. The article had been published at 5:47 in the morning, 20 minutes after her father had called Seline. She set the tablet down very carefully.

He didn’t wait to see if I’d cooperate, she said. He already started. Yes, he’s already decided what I am. She could hear her own voice from a strange distance. The troubled daughter, the one who made a scene, the one who ran off with a dangerous man and had to be managed. She looked at Lucian. He’s been preparing this version of me in case he ever needed it.

The article went up before most people are awake, Lucian said. By 8:00, it’ll be everywhere. By 9, his lawyers will be calling anyone who might take your account of last night seriously. She picked up her phone from the table. 17% battery now. Three missed calls from the unknown number that had started calling at 6. She looked at the number for a long moment.

Then she called it back. It rang once, a voice she didn’t recognize, male, businesslike, with the specific careful neutrality of someone who’d been trained to sound like nothing in particular. Ms. Moretti, thank you for returning the call. My name is Agent Curtis Delaney. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigations Financial Crimes Unit.

I was hoping we could find a time to speak with you today regarding the Moretti Civic Trust. A pause. I want to be clear that at this stage, you’re not a subject of our investigation. We believe you may be a material witness, but there are some time-sensitive aspects to the situation that I think you’d want to be aware of before before my father’s lawyers call you, she said.

A brief pause. Yes, Agent Delaney said, “That’s accurate.” She looked at Lucian across the table. He was watching her with an expression she had no name for. Not worry exactly, not calculation exactly. something that lived between them in the space where the personal and the strategic had been blurring for seven months.

She thought about her father’s voice, the smooth delivery of the announcement at the podium, the particular warmth with which he’d looked at Seline, the architectural precision of 8 years of transactions, the article that had gone live at 5:47 in the morning. She thought about sugar flowers, 342 of them. She thought about what it cost to make something beautiful for people who were counting on you not to look too closely at what they were doing while you worked.

Agent Delaney, she said, I’ll meet with you today, but I’ll be bringing my own counsel. She kept her eyes on Lucen and Sans, and I have documents I think you’ll want to see. The agents voice changed almost imperceptibly, a fraction of increased attention. The shift of someone who had just moved from introductory script to actual conversation.

That’s very helpful, Ms. Moretti. Can I ask what kind of documents? Ava looked at the tablet on the table, the account records, the transaction histories, the name Voss Meridian, the name Daniel Ferris, the web of it, all the careful architecture of her family’s survival built on the assumption that she would always be too grateful, too damaged, too hungry for their approval to ever look.

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