Chapter 4
Nolan claimed he did not take the ring from my father’s body.
I believed him.
Mostly because the person who did was standing ten feet away.
Celeste.
She stopped denying it before I even asked.
“I removed it during the final dressing.”
The words were so calm I almost missed what they meant.
I stared.
“You touched my dead father.”
Her expression hardened.
“I replaced the ring.”
“With what?”
“A replica.”
My stomach turned.
I remembered kissing my father’s forehead before the coffin closed.
Remembered seeing the Savelli crest on his hand.
Never looked for the dent.
Why would I?
I was burying my father.
Not inspecting evidence.
“Why?”
Celeste glanced toward Nolan.
Wrong.
I saw the entire hierarchy of guilt in one look.
Nolan wanted something.
Celeste carried it out.
“Who told you?”
She said nothing.
I turned to Nolan.
“Your father?”
His face changed.
Warren Graham.
Dead two years now.
Longtime Savelli ally.
The man who stood beside me at my father’s funeral and told me I would never stand alone.
Apparently he made sure of it.
Nolan sat down slowly.
“My father said Domenico left the family unstable.”
“My father had been dead twelve hours.”
“He’d been sick for months.”
“Yes.”
“Your father refused to prepare anyone except you.”
“That was his decision.”
“And Dad thought it was dangerous.”
There.
Justification.
Always available.
“So he stole Domenico’s voice.”
Nolan flinched.
“That wasn’t how he saw it.”
“I don’t care how thieves describe the room.”
Celeste stepped forward.
“Warren believed the family needed continuity.”
“And you?”
She looked at me.
“I believed you would collapse.”
That hurt differently.
Because she had known me then.
Not intimately.
But enough.
“I was grieving.”
“Yes.”
“So you decided grief made me governable.”
Her face tightened.
“We helped you.”
I almost laughed.
“You wrote orders in my dead father’s name.”
“They were good decisions.”
There it was.
The most dangerous sentence yet.
Not denial.
Success as absolution.
I looked at the ring.
Seven false orders.
Four years of family structure built partly on them.
Arthur had not stolen from my father.
May you like
He had discovered a dead man being impersonated.
And I had banished him for noticing.
