Chapter 1 - THE CAKE ON THE FLOOR
Daniel Stellan knew something was wrong before anyone spoke. The birthday room had been full of music when he stepped away twenty minutes earlier to take a call, but when he returned the room had gone strangely quiet. Lily was kneeling on the marble floor in her pale birthday dress, crying while she wiped frosting and crushed cake into a cleaning cloth. One side of the three-tier cake lay collapsed around her shoes, and Vanessa stood rigidly beside the party table with the expression she used when she wanted everyone to believe a situation was already under control.
Daniel crossed the room without greeting the remaining guests. He took the cloth from Lily’s hand and lifted his three-year-old daughter against his chest. “Who made you do this?” he asked. Lily buried her wet face against his suit jacket, then pointed toward Vanessa. “Mom said I ruined the cake.” Vanessa stepped forward immediately and said Lily had knocked the cake while reaching for decorations and that she had only asked her to help clean before someone stepped on the glass cake stand.
Daniel would have accepted the explanation if Lily had not tightened her arms around his neck when Vanessa approached. It was a small reaction, but Daniel knew his daughter well enough to feel it. He turned toward the ruined cake and saw that one side of the decorative base had not broken outward like the rest. A rectangular section had been cut cleanly through the foam support, then pressed back into place.
He set Lily on his hip and pulled the section loose.
A home-security tablet was hidden inside.
The screen was awake. Across the center, beneath the logo of the company that managed the mansion’s cameras and alarms, two words appeared in red.
REMOTE ACCESS — ACTIVE.
Daniel looked at Vanessa. “Who’s accessing my home cameras?”
She did not answer.
The silence changed the room. Most guests had already moved into the adjoining gallery after the cake fell, but a handful remained close enough to notice Daniel’s tone. One of them was Evan Mercer, a forty-two-year-old man Vanessa had introduced earlier as a consultant she knew through a charity board. Daniel had exchanged perhaps six sentences with him all afternoon.
Evan took one step backward.
Daniel saw it.
At the same moment, Evan’s phone lit up in his hand. Daniel caught a glimpse of moving figures on the screen and crossed the distance between them before Evan could lock it. He took the phone and stared at a live video feed from the exact room they were standing in. The camera angle came from the molding above the fireplace.
“Who are you?”
Evan did not answer immediately. Vanessa turned pale enough that Daniel looked at her before looking back at him.
“Give me the phone,” Evan said.
Daniel’s expression hardened. “Try again.”
Lily suddenly shifted in Daniel’s arms and pointed beneath the long gift table. “Daddy. That.”
Something black protruded from beneath the antique walnut tablecloth. Daniel crouched, keeping Lily against him, and found an old USB drive secured to the underside of the table with brittle yellow tape. The casing was scratched and thick compared with modern drives. On one side remained the faded blue-and-silver logo of Stellan Systems.
His father’s company.
The company had collapsed twelve years earlier in one of the most humiliating bankruptcies in New York business history. Daniel had been twenty-seven. He still remembered cameras surrounding the courthouse, his father refusing interviews and commentators describing Thomas Stellan as either incompetent or fraudulent depending on which network happened to be broadcasting.
Daniel peeled the USB free.
Evan’s face changed.
Not surprise exactly.
Recognition.
Daniel noticed. “You’ve seen this before.”
“No.”
“You just reacted to it.”
Vanessa whispered, “Daniel—”
He turned sharply. “You don’t get to ask me to calm down while a stranger is watching my daughter’s bedroom cameras.”
“They weren’t on Lily’s bedroom.”
Daniel looked at her.
Vanessa realized what she had admitted.
Evan closed his eyes briefly.
Daniel put Lily down behind him and told the nanny waiting near the doorway to take her into the family room and stay there. Lily resisted until Daniel promised he would come in five minutes. Only after she disappeared through the doorway did he place the USB on the table between himself, Vanessa and Evan.
“Start talking.”
Evan looked at the old company logo, then at Daniel. “How long has that table been in this room?”
“What?”
“The table.”
“It was brought out of storage this morning for gifts.”
“Whose was it?”
Daniel thought about the question. The antique had belonged to Thomas. It sat in his father’s executive office at Stellan Systems for as long as Daniel could remember and moved to the mansion after the bankruptcy. Daniel had never used it. Vanessa chose it that morning because the party planner needed a long table.
Evan exhaled slowly.
“That drive may have been under there for twelve years.”
Vanessa pulled out a chair and sat down.
Daniel’s irritation became something colder. “You knew there might be something hidden in my father’s furniture.”
“We suspected.”
“We?”
Vanessa looked at Evan.
That was answer enough.
Daniel picked up the security tablet. “So you gave him remote access to my house.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“To see who else already had it.”
Daniel almost laughed because the explanation sounded too absurd to deserve anger. “You hacked my home to investigate somebody hacking my home?”
Vanessa’s eyes filled, but she held his stare. “Three months ago I found logs showing someone had been opening archive-room cameras from outside the house. I changed passwords. They came back. I hired Evan because I didn’t know who on your security team I could trust.”
“You hired a man I barely know and brought him into my daughter’s birthday party.”
“I needed him inside today because—”
“Because what?”
Evan answered.
“Because someone has been searching this house for evidence from Stellan Systems.”
Daniel looked at him.
“My father’s company has been dead for twelve years.”
Evan’s expression remained steady.
“No.”
Daniel waited.
Evan pointed toward the USB.
“Your father didn’t go bankrupt.”
Daniel went completely still.
May you like
Evan continued.
“Someone made sure it looked like he did.”
