PART 3:

And on the table nearest the door, abandoned in the chaos, she saw a folder, unmarked leather. The kind of folder that holds documents too important for email. It must have fallen during the argument or been placed there deliberately. She didn’t know. She walked back inside. The room was thinning out.

Nobody looked at her. The woman from table 14 was invisible, which was exactly the point. She picked up the folder. Later, she’d tell herself she did it on instinct or curiosity or the reckless self-destructive impulse that had driven her to this wedding in the first place. But the truth was simpler and uglier. She picked it up because Damen was afraid and some wounded, furious part of her wanted to know why.

She tucked the folder into her clutch, walked out of the Ashford Grand, climbed into a cab, and didn’t open it until she was home, sitting on her kitchen floor with her heels kicked off and her mascara running. Inside the folder were three things. A list of names she didn’t recognize, a series of account numbers routed through banks in four different countries, and a photograph.

The photograph showed a woman, dark-haired, beautiful, smiling at whoever held the camera with the kind of unguarded warmth that only exists when someone trusts the person on the other side of the lens completely. On the back, in handwriting, she didn’t recognize. Two words, find her.

Aurora stared at the photograph for a long time. Then she turned it over and looked at the woman’s face again, and something cold settled into her chest. Because the woman in the photograph was wearing a necklace, a delicate gold chain with a small pendant, the same pendant Aurora had seen tonight around Vivien Ashford’s neck. Aurora’s phone rang. Unknown number.

She almost didn’t answer. Miss Vale. The voice was low, controlled, and unmistakable. I told you to go home. Her breath stopped. How did you get this number? The folder you took, Lucian Moretti said, you need to bring it to me tonight. Why? A pause. When he spoke again, the control in his voice had thinned just enough to let something else bleed through.

Something that sounded impossibly like fear because the people in that folder have killed before. And if they find out you have it, you’ll be next. The line went dead. Aurora sat on her kitchen floor barefoot, holding a dead phone and a folder full of secrets, and realized with absolute stomach dropping clarity that the worst night of her life had just become something far more dangerous, and she had no idea who to trust.

This story is a work of fiction created solely for artistic and entertainment purposes. All characters, organizations, locations, and events are entirely fictional and bear no relation to any real individuals, entities, or historical events. Aurora didn’t move for a long time after the call ended. She sat on the cold kitchen tile with her back against the cabinet and her feet bare and her heart doing something ugly and erratic against her ribs.

The folder was open across her knees. The photograph faced up. The woman’s smile, open, undefended, trusting, looked back at her from the glossy paper like an accusation. She turned the photo over. Find her. Find her. Past tense in its implication. Present tense in its urgency. Her hands were steadier than she expected.

That scared her more than the trembling would have. She closed the folder, sat there in the dark kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment on the north side of Chicago, and listened to the building settle around her. Pipes groaning, someone’s television bleeding through the ceiling, the distant percussion of the city moving through its night without knowing or caring that she’d just stolen evidence from a wedding, and received a threat wrapped in a warning from a man who, by all available logic, should not know her name. She stood up, her knees achd. She

walked to the window and looked out at the street four floors below, at the pools of orange light from the street lamps, at the two parked cars she’d looked at a thousand times before that suddenly looked different. That was the thing about fear. It reframed everything. Cars became surveillance. Silence became threat.

Her own reflection in the glass looked like a woman she didn’t recognize. She pulled the curtain shut. Then she opened them again because closing them suddenly felt like confirming something she wasn’t ready to confirm. Her phone was still in her hand. She pulled up Jules’s contact, started typing, stopped.

What would she say? I accidentally stole documents from a mob connected wedding. And now Lucian Moretti has my phone number and I’m sitting in my kitchen trying to decide if I’m in danger. Jules would call the police or show up with wine and righteous fury and no capacity to help. Either option made things worse. She set the phone down, picked up the folder again.

The names on the list meant nothing to her individually. 11 of them, some with asterisks beside them, some with small notations in a handwriting she didn’t recognize as Lucian. The account numbers were routed through Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, a bank in Cyprus she’d never heard of. She knew enough from years of grant writing for a nonprofit to recognize the architecture of money laundering.

Not the specifics, but the shape of it. Money that needed distance between its origin and its destination. She looked at the list of names again. The third one from the bottom made her breath catch. D. Cole Damian. She sat with that for 30 seconds, counted her breaths, felt something that wasn’t quite surprised, but was adjacent to it.

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