Chapter 226

[ 923 words ]

Delia’s POV

He was gone.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and listened to his footsteps on the stairs and then the sound of a door and then nothing, and the house was quiet, and I was standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s outfit with the remains of a breakfast I had been eating for comfort rather than hunger, and the echo of everything he had just said was sitting in the room like something physical.

You are not my type.

Looking at you does not make me want you.

I sleep where she sleeps. Every day.

I walked back to the table.

I looked at the plate.

I picked it up.

I threw it.

The plate hit the floor and shattered—the ceramic splitting into four large pieces and several smaller ones, the food scattering across the tiles, the sound of it filling the kitchen and then fading into the silence of a house that had absorbed the sound and moved on without caring.

I stood over the broken pieces.

My chest was heaving.

She was real.

That was the thing I had been half-convincing myself was not true—that his wife was a legal technicality, a name on a piece of paper, a ghost he was searching for that he would never actually find. I had been in this house for a year, and I had told myself that the absence of her was evidence that she did not really exist. Not as a person. Not as someone he actually—

I sleep where she sleeps. Every day.

He knew who she was.

He had found her.

And whoever she was, whatever she had done or said or been, Julian Windsor was sleeping in her bed every night and coming back to this house in yesterday’s clothes and sitting across from me at breakfast and saying looking at you does not make me want you like it was the simplest true thing in the world.

I looked at the broken plate on the floor.

I did not clean it up.

I walked out of the kitchen and went to my wing and closed the door and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at my phone and thought about who in this city knew enough about the Windsor family ring to give me the name I needed.

Because I was going to find her.

If it was the last thing I did in this house, I was going to find her.

I called him at nine in the morning.

Marcus—not his real name; nobody in his line of work used their real name—had been my private investigator for eight months. He had found things I had not expected him to find. He had also consistently failed to find the one thing I actually needed, which was any usable information about Katia Kensington’s private life.

He answered on the third ring.

“Tell me you have something,” I said.

A pause. The kind of pause that told me before he said a word that what was coming was not what I wanted to hear.

“Ms. Kensington,” he said. “I have been working on this for eight months. I have tried every channel available to me—public records, financial databases, social media forensics, and contacts within the legal and corporate system.” He paused again. “Your sister’s private information is untouchable p>

I sat very still.

“What do you mean, untouchable?” I said.

“I mean that every avenue I have pursued has hit a wall,” he said. “Her personal finances prior to IG Technologies are sealed in a way I have never encountered before. Her medical records are untouchable. Her personal history before she came back to New York last year—I cannot find a single usable record. Nothing. It is as though the six years she was away simply do not exist in any searchable form.” He paused. “Whatever Katia Kensington is hiding, she has had very significant help hiding it. The kind of help that costs considerably more than most people have access to. Someone with serious resources has built a wall around her private life, and I cannot get past it p>

I looked at the wall of my wing.

“Keep looking,” I said.

“Ms. Kensington,” he said. “I have to be honest with you. I have reached a dead end. Every direction leads to the same wall. I do not believe continued investigation is going to produce results.” He paused. “I am withdrawing from this case. I will send my final invoice by the end of the week p>

The line went quiet.

I sat with the phone in my hand long after he had hung up.

Eight months. Eight months of feeding him information, paying his invoices, and waiting for something I could use, and he was withdrawing because Katia Kensington’s private life was apparently constructed by someone who understood exactly how to make a person invisible when they needed to be.

The kind of help that costs considerably more than most people have access to.

I thought about that.

I thought about Julian and his security team and his four hangars and his shell entities three layers deep and his biometric lock on the study door. I thought about the way Katia’s financial history before IG Technologies did not exist in any searchable form. I thought about the wall I had been hitting for eight months and the wall Victor had been hitting and the wall that seemed to exist around every single piece of Katia’s life before she walked back into Brooklyn last year.

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