The email arrived just after midnight, while Peter was still in his study reviewing Isabella's access logs and Caro sat at the desk in her room, supposedly doing the same — a second set of records, cross-referenced against the first.
The sender's address looked official. Beri Family Trust — Legal Correspondence. A name she recognized — her father's old lawyer, someone who'd handled the family's affairs for fifteen years.
Caro — I need you to see this before anyone else does. There's a clause in the original asset transfer that Shey's team either missed or buried. If it surfaces the way I think it will, it implicates your father in something far worse than debt. I've attached the relevant page. Please — for your family's sake — don't mention this to Shey until I've had a chance to look further. I'll call tomorrow.
Caro's stomach dropped. She opened the attachment — a single scanned page, official letterhead, a clause highlighted in yellow. Legal language she didn't fully understand, but the gist was unmistakable: if this clause was real, her father hadn't just defaulted on debts. He'd falsified records to hide a second set of liabilities — fraud, not just failure.
And if it became public before Peter's team could control the narrative, it wouldn't just destroy what was left of her father's reputation.
It could unravel the entire transfer agreement that had saved her family in the first place and take Caro's place in this house down with it.
Don't mention this to Shey until I've had a chance to look further.
Caro stared at the screen, torn. Every instinct from the past two weeks told her: tell Peter. Now. Before anything else happens. But the lawyer had handled her family's affairs for fifteen years. He'd been there the night everything collapsed. If there really was a buried clause — something that could be quietly corrected before it became a crisis — wouldn't it be better to let him look first, rather than hand Peter something that might make things worse for her father before anyone understood what they were dealing with?
She thought about the access logs sitting open on her own screen. About Isabella, somewhere in this house, three steps ahead of a game neither of them had fully started.
This could be exactly what Peter and I are looking for, she told herself. Or it could be nothing. A scare tactic. But if I bring him an unverified document at midnight and it turns out to be wrong, another false story, like the gala, I become the person who cried wolf. Again.
She made a decision. She'd verify it herself first. Quietly. The same way she'd sat on the Larson discrepancy for three days before using it, except this time, she told herself, it wasn't about waiting for leverage. It was about not handing Peter a live grenade before she knew whether the pin was even real.
She began cross-referencing the clause against the files Peter had given her access to that morning, the same files where she'd have access to verify a transfer agreement.
She didn't get far.
"Are you trying to convince yourself," Peter's voice said from the doorway, "or me?"
Caro froze. She hadn't heard him come in.
"Peter, I didn't hear you."
"I can see that." He stepped into the room, his eyes moving from her face to the screen and then narrowing, sharpening, in a way that made her stomach drop before he'd said another word. "You're accessing the original transfer files. At midnight. Without telling me." A pause. "That's not like you, Caro. You tell me things now. Or you did, twelve hours ago."
"I was going to tell you," she said quickly. "I just wanted to verify it first—"
"Verify what?"
She turned the laptop toward him, the email and attachment still open. "This came in an hour ago. From my father's old lawyer. He says there's a clause in the original transfer, that my father may have—" Her throat tightened. "That it might be a fraud. Not just debt. And he asked me not to say anything to you until he'd looked into it further, because if it's wrong—"
"And you agreed to that," Peter said, voice dropping, "less than a day after we discussed exactly this. Information surfacing at exactly the right moment to do exactly the most damage."
"I know how it looks," Caro said, "but Peter — this is my father. If this is true, and I bring it to you unverified, at midnight, with everything that's happening right now—"
"You don't think," Peter said slowly, "that someone showing you a document, at midnight, urging you to keep it from me, the same week we started investigating exactly who's been watching this house, might be designed to look exactly like this?"
Caro's breath caught.
"I—" She looked back at the screen. At the sender's address. At the sudden, urgent timing. At the instruction to keep it quiet, exactly when quiet was the most dangerous thing she could be.
"Oh god," she whispered. "I didn't even check if this address is real."
"Don't," Peter said but not at her. He was already moving, pulling up something on his own tablet, cross-referencing the sender's email header against the actual law firm's domain. His jaw tightened as the results came back.
"It's spoofed," he said. "Close. Close enough that you wouldn't catch it at midnight, half-convinced your father's freedom was on the line. But it's not your father's lawyer. The actual domain has a hyphen. This one doesn't."
Caro's hands were shaking now not from fear of Peter, but from the sick realization of how close she'd come to doing exactly what someone had wanted her to do. "I almost—"
"You almost did nothing," Peter said, more gently than she expected. "You found it before you sent anything. Before you even finished verifying it. That's not nothing, Caro. That's the opposite of what they were counting on."
"But if I'd gone another twenty minutes—"
"You'd have realized it was fake on your own," Peter said. "Or you'd have come to me anyway, at one in the morning, panicking: which, frankly, is what I would have done in your position." He sat down across from her, his expression unreadable for a moment before something in it softened, just slightly. "Caro. Whoever sent this wanted you isolated. I wanted you to make a decision alone, at night, based on fear for your family, the same fear that put you in this house in the first place. They were counting on you not telling me."
"And I almost didn't."
"But you would have," Peter said. "Within the hour. I know that now because you didn't delete it. You didn't act on it. You sat here trying to verify something that frightened you, instead of either burying it or believing it blindly. That's not betrayal, Caro." His voice dropped. "That's exactly the kind of caution that's kept you ahead of whoever's doing this so far."
Caro let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Isabella."
"Almost certainly." Peter's eyes returned to the spoofed email, something hardening behind them. "She knows about your father. She knows the exact pressure point that would make you hesitate to come to me. And she knows or guessed, that tonight, of all nights, you'd be sitting somewhere with access to exactly the files that would make this look real."
"She's been planning this for longer than tonight," Caro said slowly. "This isn't a reaction to the access logs. This was already in motion."
"Which means," Peter said, standing, "she knows we're looking at her logs. Which means she's about to do something faster, and louder, than a spoofed email." He held out his hand, not commanding, this time. An offer. "Come with me. If she's accelerating, I'd rather find out what she's accelerating toward before she's ready to show us."
Caro took his hand, and for once, neither of them let go once they were both standing.
"Peter," she said quietly, as they reached the door. "If this had worked — if I'd believed it, and panicked, and done something based on it before telling you — what would have happened? To me. To the agreement."
He paused at the doorway, and for a moment his expression carried something she hadn't seen from him before — something that looked almost like guilt, aimed not at her, but at the version of events that hadn't happened.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "Because I would have figured out the truth eventually and when I did, I'd have known exactly who needed protecting, and who'd been trying to take that protection away from her." He met her eyes. "You were never the target tonight, Caro. You were the door they were trying to get through to reach something else."
"What else?"
Peter's jaw tightened, and for the first time, Caro saw something she recognized immediately because she'd felt it herself, every time someone asked about the library.
Fear. Not of Isabella. Of what Isabella might already know.
"Tomorrow," he said again but this time it sounded less like deflection and more like a promise. "Tonight, we find out how far ahead of us she actually is. And Caro—" His grip on her hand tightened, just slightly. "Whatever happens next. You're not on the outside of this anymore. Whatever I'm protecting, you're protecting it too, now. Whether either of us planned for that or not."
Down the hallway, somewhere in the dark wings of the house neither of them had fully explored, a door closed softly, the kind of sound that, in daylight, would have meant nothing at all.
Tonight, it meant everything.