The mansion still smelled like sawdust and wet paint, but Lucien had lit candles anyway, dozens of them, lined up along the unfinished windowsills like he thought that would make the plywood floors look like something out of a magazine.

"You're going to burn this place down before we even move in," I said.

"Then we'll build a better one." He said it so easily, like the money didn't matter, like nothing could touch us. He had his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, and there was a streak of drywall dust on his forearm that he hadn't noticed.

I noticed everything about him. I always had.

"This one's fine," I said. "I like the cracks."

"There are no cracks. It's not finished."

"Exactly."

He laughed, and it was low, and it filled up the empty room in a way that made me forget the walls weren't painted yet. He crossed the space between us, careful of the exposed wiring near the doorway, and pulled me against him like he'd done it a thousand times, because he had.

"Twenty-four hours," he said into my hair.

"I know."

"Are you scared?"

I pulled back enough to look at him. "Of marrying you? No."

"Of anything?"

I hesitated. Just a half second. Long enough that if he'd been looking for it, he might have caught it. But he wasn't looking for anything. Why would he be.

"No," I said. "I'm not scared of anything."

He studied me anyway, because that was Lucien — he studied everything, even when he wasn't trying to. Then he let it go, the way he let go of things when he trusted them.

"Good," he said. "Because I need you to know something."

"You're being dramatic."

"I'm serious." His hands found mine, and his thumb ran over my knuckles, over the ring that wasn't there yet but would be tomorrow. "Whatever happens. Whatever comes at us — the company, my father, any of it — I choose you. Every time. No version of my life makes sense without you standing in it."

I wanted to say something back that matched it. I opened my mouth, and nothing came, because there was a phone buzzing in my coat pocket across the room, and I already knew who it was, and I already knew I couldn't tell him.

"Lyra?"

"I choose you too," I said. It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth, and those were different things, and I told myself that mattered.

He kissed my forehead like that settled it. For him, it did.

I left an hour before I was supposed to be home, telling him I wanted to stop by the old apartment to grab the dress one more time before tomorrow, make sure the alterations sat right. He believed me because there was no reason not to. That was the worst part. He never once had a reason not to.

Julien was waiting in the parking garage two blocks from the office, hood up, engine off, exactly where he'd told me to meet him.

"You're late," he said when I got in.

"I had a fiancé to lie to."

"Don't say it like that."

"How else should I say it?"

He didn't answer that. Julien wasn't like his brother — where Lucien filled a room, Julien folded into corners of it, watched from the edges. He had a laptop open on his knees, the screen turned so I could see it, rows of numbers that meant nothing to me yet.

"Look at this," he said, and turned it toward me fully. "Three shell accounts. All routed through a subsidiary that doesn't officially exist. All of it moving through approvals with my father's signature on them."

"Your father signs everything."

"Not this. I checked the calendar. He was in Geneva the day this went through." He rubbed a hand over his jaw. "Someone forged it. Someone inside."

"Have you told Lucien?"

"No." The word came fast, sharp enough that I sat back a little. "And you're not going to either."

"Julien—"

"I mean it, Lyra." He turned the laptop back toward himself, closed it halfway, like even I hadn't earned to keep looking. "You know how he is. He'll go in loud. He'll confront whoever he thinks did it before we even know who that is, and if we're wrong, we tip our hand, and if we're right—" He stopped.

"If we're right, what?"

"Then whoever's behind this has already killed to protect it once. I'd rather not find out what they do a second time."

The garage was cold, that specific concrete cold that gets into your hands, and I wrapped my arms around myself without meaning to.

"Why me," I said. "Why not someone from your team, someone who actually knows how to read that." I nodded at the laptop.

"Because I trust you." He said it simply, like it wasn't a big thing to say, though it was. "And because you're the only person in this family who isn't actually in this family. Nobody's watching you yet."

I didn't like the way he said yet.

"I need you to help me decrypt the rest of it," he said. "There's a second layer I can't get past. I think it's going to tell us who signed off on the transfers. The real name."

"And when we know?"

"Then we figure out what to do with it." He looked at me, and for a second he looked so much like Lucien it startled me — same eyes, softer around them. "I need you to promise me something."

"What."

"If anything happens to me." He said it flat, like he'd rehearsed it and hated how it sounded out loud. "Don't trust anyone with the Moreau name. Not until you know."

"Julien, don't talk like that."

"Promise me."

I didn't want to. Saying it felt like giving the thought a place to live. But he was looking at me like it was the only thing he was going to ask me tonight, so I said it.

"I promise."

He nodded once, seemed to breathe easier, and reached for the door handle. "Same time Thursday. Bring your laptop, not mine — mine's not safe to move around anymore."

I got out first. The garage was empty except for the hum of a fluorescent light two rows over, flickering the way they do when they're dying slow. I pulled my coat tighter and started for the street, already rehearsing what I'd tell Lucien if he asked why the dress fitting took so long.

That was when I felt it. The specific feeling of being looked at.

I turned.

Across the street, half-lit under a streetlamp that wasn't quite working right, there was someone standing very still. A shape. A phone, maybe, held up, angled toward me.

I blinked, and by the time my eyes adjusted, there was nothing there. No one. Just the empty street and the wind picking up trash along the curb.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a lot of things that week.

Three blocks away, a message sent from a number that didn't exist, to a person whose name I would spend the next three years trying to learn, read simply:

Target confirmed.