Sebastian started having me investigated.
I had budgeted for that.
He wasn't going to find anything. Lena Voss had a Singapore passport, a clean education record at Imperial College London, two clean prior fund tours in Hong Kong and São Paulo, and a Cambridge address held under an LLC. Ezra had spent a year laying the brick, and I had not spent that year only learning to hate. I had spent it learning derivatives, M&A documentation, and how a hostile bid is structured. I slept four hours a night. When my chest seized I bit a hand towel and went on reading the deal book.
Because I knew what would actually hurt Sebastian Aster.
It wasn't crying at his funeral.
It was sitting across the table from him and making him lose.
The second time I met him was at a benefit gala.
I had been in the room three minutes when Annabel came at me.
She had been out of FCI Danbury for ten weeks. Sebastian had quietly withdrawn the civil-recovery action and her sentence had collapsed to a year and change. She had lost twenty pounds inside and the mascara on her eyes had not been steady when she put it on.
"Sloane!"
The room turned.
I stopped.
She came across the parquet pointing at my face. "You are Sloane Thorne. Stop pretending to be Lena Voss."
I looked at the security captain. "This woman is in distress."
He moved.
Annabel struggled. "Don't let her fool you! She didn't die. She came back to ruin all of us!"
I crossed to her.
"Miss Thorne. Have we met."
She froze.
I leaned in until my mouth was at her ear and I said, very softly, so only she would hear it:
"Knockoff."
Her face came apart.
Her hand went up to slap me.
Another hand caught her wrist first.
Sebastian.
He let go of her hard enough that she stumbled into the champagne tower behind us and the topmost coupes came down off the pyramid in a clean cold rain.
She stared up at him.
"Sebastian — that's Sloane. She lied to you."
He didn't look at her.
He was looking at my wrist.
There is a thin pale line on the inside of my left wrist from a length of melted hanger wire that had come down across me as I crawled out the east loading dock. It is two inches long. It only shows under bright light.
That night I had not put a sleeve over it.
He saw it.
The blood went out of his face.
"That mark on your wrist —"
I drew my hand back into the cuff of my dress.
"A childhood thing."
He said, hoarsely, "Sloane had one."
I smiled. "Mr. Aster's dead-girl filter is heavy tonight."
Annabel laughed, suddenly, dangerous. "Sebastian, look at her! She hates you. She came back to break you!"
He looked at her then.
The look was cold enough that her mouth shut.
"You don't get to say her name."
Annabel's eyes filled. "And me? I gave you years. You'd really wreck me for a dead woman?"
He said, "Every day you stole, you'll give back."
I picked up a glass of champagne and turned away.
Behind me Annabel was being walked out by security. Her crying carried across the floor.
I didn't look back.
When dogs settle dogs, the audience doesn't step in.
After that, Sebastian started turning up everywhere I was.
I underbid him on a fund placement; he stood down. I poached his head of structuring; he signed the release the same day. I cut into his supply chain on a defense-tech rollup; he sent me his counsel's contact list.
A Caelum board member said, dry, "Lena. The man across the river is not behaving like a competitor. He's behaving like a dowry."
I said, "If they're handing it over, taking it isn't waste."
By the end of the third month, the Aster Capital ticker was off ten percent on the consecutive concessions. The board pinned him in a closed session and demanded an explanation.
He gave them one line.
I owe her.
That line found its way to me by the time I was signing the day's outgoing courier slips.
The next morning a clean envelope arrived at the Caelum office.
Sebastian had transferred five percent of his personal Aster Capital equity into Lena Voss.
I had counsel return it.
The next day a second envelope. Three private offshore holdings. A villa on the Amalfi Coast. A Park City compound. A vineyard in Sonoma.
Returned.
The third day he came in person.
The intercom on my desk lit up.
"Miss Voss. Mr. Aster says he is happy to wait outside."
I looked at the time.
"Let him."
It started raining at three.
He stayed standing in front of the building from two in the afternoon until past nine in the evening. The intercom rang four times — he isn't holding an umbrella. He's still standing on the sidewalk. He hasn't come under the awning.
I signed the last document on my desk and walked over to the window.
Through the curtain of rain, the man on the sidewalk was holding the line of his shoulders straight.
He looked like a late confession.
I went down.
When he saw me his face came up brightly, then he closed it down.
"Sloane — Miss Voss."
I held my umbrella over my own head and stopped two steps above him.
"Mr. Aster. Was there something."
He held a folder out.
"The full investigation report on the warehouse fire."
I didn't take it.
He said, "It wasn't an accident."
That got my eyes onto him.
His voice was sanded down to nothing.
"The fire was meant for me."
"The man who set it — Curtis Locke. Locke Strategic. He was Aster Capital's quietest competitor. He paid the Seaport facility manager to start the burn."
"You were not the target. You were collateral."
The rain came down off the line of his hair.
He was looking at me the way a man looks who is waiting for a sentence to be pronounced.
I took the folder.
"And."
His face whitened.
I said, "You are telling me — that I was disfigured, put on a transplant list, sold by my family, and made to play another woman for three years — because I had bad luck."
"No."
His voice was barely there.
"Because I was stupid."
I laughed.
"Mr. Aster. That is the first true thing you have ever said."
His eyes filled.
"I am going to make Locke pay."
I tipped the umbrella on my shoulder and walked past him.
"That is your business."
He called after me into the rain.
"Sloane. What do you want me to do, before you give me a chance."
I stopped on the wet sidewalk.
"Sebastian."
"Yes."
"Die first. I'll consider it."
The sound behind me went out completely.
I did not turn around.
Curtis Locke went down two weeks later.
Sebastian did it the ugly way.
He turned over offshore-laundering records, naked short positions, the arson contract. The Bureau intercepted Curtis at the Logan general-aviation terminal trying to clear customs in a sport jacket.
On the way to the federal lockup Curtis shouted across the press line.
"Sebastian — you've gone insane over a woman."
Sebastian said four words.
"She isn't one."
The reporters lifted their mics. "Not what?"
He looked into the camera.
"Not a woman."
"She is the one person in my life I should have saved. And I didn't."
That clip went to the top of the Globe homepage and the Twitter trending column on the same afternoon.
I watched it through and turned my phone face-down.
Ezra was across the kitchen table peeling a clementine, slow and methodical.
"You aren't enjoying it."
I said, "Too loud."
He flicked a section onto my plate.
"He's pulling your treatment records, by the way."
I stopped flipping pages.
"Let him."
Ezra raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you afraid?"
I laughed. "The more he pulls, the more it'll cost him."
That turned out to be the case.
Sebastian found the Davos clinic.
He read the English-language progress chart.
Seventeen critical-status events. Four cardiac arrests. Longest CPR run, thirty-seven minutes.
He spent a night sitting in a hallway on the cardiology floor at Brigham, where Ezra found him at six a.m. when his rounds began.
When Ezra came home that evening his face was strange.
"He asked me whether you ever called for him during the resuscitations."
My fingers paused on the tab.
"What did you say."
"I said no."
I lifted my eyes. "Because I didn't."
Ezra nodded. "But you did curse him out, the second time you were under."
I let out a small laugh. "What did I say."
"Sebastian Aster, you blind son of a bitch."
The laugh thinned.
It was true. He was blind.
Sebastian stopped sending equity. He stopped sending villas.
Now what arrived were dossiers.
Records of the Thorne family's quiet asset transfers in the year before the indictment. Receipts for Maggie's covert sale of my grandmother's estate jewelry. Screenshots of Annabel paying a Hong Kong tabloid to publish a piece smearing me, dated to the week she boarded the plane back to Boston.
Each dossier was pre-built for a fresh civil filing.
I took them, every one.
I wasn't going to refuse a useful blade because I hated the man holding it.
Annabel was subpoenaed again. The morning of, she came to Caelum's lobby and went down on her knees on the wet pavement waiting for me.
She was wearing a dress with a coffee stain across the front and her hair had gone gray at the temples in eleven months.
"Sloane. You won. Let me go."
I looked down at her.
For three years she had texted me photographs of Sebastian eating dinner with her in Geneva. She had sent voice notes that started, little sister. She had sent me a video on my twenty-fifth birthday — Sister, you can copy me all you want; you'll only ever look like me.
Now she was on her knees with her forehead on a Boston sidewalk.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
I crouched and pushed her wet hair back behind her ear.
"Sister. Do you know how I was able to carry Sebastian out of that fire."
Her lip trembled.
"Because I wanted to live."
"Now it's your turn."
"Live. Pay it back."
The marshals took her shortly after.
I stood up. My pulse was running quick.
Sebastian was standing across the street in a black overcoat, hands in his pockets.
He didn't come over.
That afternoon, on consolidated counts, Annabel went back inside. This time the count included aiding the coverup of the original fire. There would be no early release.