PART 6:

Then she walked back to the table and picked up the photograph and looked at Elena Voss’s face one more time. Beautiful, unguarded, trusting the person behind the camera. Find her, the back of the photograph said. She was already dead. Someone had written that note knowing she was already dead. Not a request, a reminder, a wound kept open deliberately to keep someone moving.

Aurora set the photograph face down and went to bed. She didn’t sleep. The next morning, her editor called before 8. Aurora worked for a midsize nonprofit focused on housing access, grant writing, community outreach, occasional communications work. It wasn’t glamorous and it barely paid. and she told herself for 3 years it was temporary until she figured out what she actually wanted to do with a journalism degree she’d never used.

She took the call with the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder while she made coffee she didn’t want the Ashford Gala. Her editor said he wasn’t technically her editor anymore. So the journalism job had dried up years ago but Marcus Chan had a habit of pitching her freelance work when he thought she was the right fit.

You saw what happened at the wedding last night? I was there, she said. A pause. You were at the Cole Ashford wedding? Yes. Aurora. His voice shifted. She knew that shift. The pitch was coming. I have a source inside Chicago City Hall says the Asheford family is connected to a city contract irregularity that goes back 6 years.

Nothing provable yet, but the timing of last night’s scene, the groom losing his composure publicly, it’s a crack in the surface. Marcus, I’m not asking you to go undercover. I’m asking you to write me something about the network of money and influence around the Ashford family. Background, context.

You have a connection through Cole. I don’t have a connection to Damian anymore. You were at his wedding. You know how these circles work. I need someone who can navigate the social terrain and I need it before the Asheford Gala next week because every outlet in the city is going to be looking for an angle. His voice went careful. This is real Aurora.

This isn’t a puff piece. This is the kind of story you went to school for. She stood at her kitchen counter with the coffee going cold in her hand and the prepaid phone sitting on the table 12 in from her and the folder in her bag already packed for the trip to her sister’s storage unit. How much? She said. He told her.

It was more than she made in 2 months at the nonprofit. I’ll need full editorial control on sources, she said. Within reason. No, full. Nobody I protect gets named without my sign off. Aurora. That’s the deal, Marcus. Take it or find someone else. A long pause. Fine, he said, but I need something preliminary by Friday.

She said yes and hung up and stood in her kitchen in the thin winter light and understood that what she’d just done was remove the last available exit. She was in this now from two directions, not just Lucian’s operative, a journalist with a commission. The overlap was either an asset or a disaster, and she didn’t yet know which.

Her phone buzzed, the prepaid one, a single address, Lakeshore Drive, tonight 9:00. Then a second message, come alone. Leave your regular phone at home. Then a third which she read twice before setting the phone down. There’s something you need to know about why Damen chose you 2 years ago. It wasn’t coincidence. I’ll explain tonight. I’m sorry.

Aurora read that last message four times. The coffee was cold. The folder was in her bag. The photograph was in the folder. She picked up her keys and she drove to her sister’s house in Oak Park with a folder full of evidence and the slow, sick understanding that her entire relationship, every quiet dinner, every whispered promise, every ordinary Tuesday that had felt like the building blocks of a life had been engineered, not love, strategy.

She’d been chosen, and she still didn’t know why. The drive to Oak Park took 40 minutes in morning traffic. Aurora kept both hands on the wheel and the radio off and her eyes moving between the road and the rear view mirror with the new exhausting habit of someone who’d spent 12 hours learning what it felt like to be watched.

Every car that stayed in her lane for more than three blocks became a question. Every van parked at a curb became a possibility. She hated it. Hated the way fear colonized the ordinary. Turned the familiar city into a grid of threats she couldn’t verify. Her sister’s house was a narrow two flat in a quiet residential block, graysiding, a front porch with two dead potted plants that had been dead since August.

Norah Vale was 34, divorced, worked nights as a floor supervisor at a medical supply warehouse, and asked fewer questions than anyone Aurora had ever known. It was the quality Aurora valued most in her. Nora opened the door in a bathrobe, coffee in hand, with the flat eyes of someone who’d gotten home at 6:00 in the morning. Storage key, Aurora said.

Norah looked at her, looked at the bag over her shoulder, looked at her face. You look terrible, Norah said. I know. Storage key. Aurora, please. Norah went inside and came back with a key on a yellow ring. She held it out, but didn’t let go when Aurora reached for it. “Are you in trouble?” Norah asked. “Not yet.

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