Chapter 6 Ledger

~Richard's POV~

The office hadn't changed in twenty years. Same locked cabinets lining the walls, same smell of old paper and older secrets. I'd used this lawyer exactly three times in twenty-five years, and every single time it had been for the same dead subject.

Gerald Finch was already seated when I walked in, a thin folder squared perfectly in front of him on the desk, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.

"Richard," he said, not rising. He never rose for me anymore. We were past that. "You look like a man who already knows he isn't going to like what I have to say."

"Tell me anyway."

He opened the folder. "The trust. The dormant one, set up under the Hale name three decades ago. It was reactivated this morning."

"By whom?"

"That's the question, isn't it." He slid a single sheet across the desk. "Someone filed an inquiry into its status. Not a withdrawal. Not yet. Just confirmation that it still exists, and that it's still attached to your name."

My hand tightened around the head of my cane. "I didn't authorize that."

"I know you didn't. Which means someone else knows it exists. Someone who shouldn't."

"Trace it."

"I already did." Gerald removed his glasses slowly, the way he always did when he was about to say something he'd rather not. "The inquiry was filed by a legal firm on retainer to Ashford Holdings."

"Ashford," I said quietly.

"You know them?"

I didn't answer him. I was somewhere else, twenty-five years in the past, standing outside a church I never should have walked into, hearing a name I'd spent half my life trying to bury.

"Celeste," I murmured, so quietly I wasn't sure Gerald had even heard it.

He had.

"Richard." His voice dropped, careful now, the way you speak to a man standing near a ledge. "Is this connected to the arrangement? The one you've had me managing quietly for twenty-five years?"

I didn't look at him. I looked instead at the row of locked cabinets along the wall, each one holding a piece of a truth I'd spent my entire adult life keeping buried under money and silence.

"Pull everything you have on Harold Ashford," I said instead. "His companies. His family. His history. Thirty years back."

"Richard…"

"Everything, Gerald."

He studied me for a long moment, then sighed and reached for his laptop, fingers moving across the keyboard while I sat in silence.

"This is going to take a moment," he said. "There's less here than there should be."

"What do you mean, less?"

"I mean exactly that." He turned the screen toward me. "Public record on Harold Ashford only truly begins twenty-two years ago. Before that, there's almost nothing. No tax filings, no property records, no employment history. It's as if the man simply appeared out of thin air with capital already in hand."

"That's not possible. Men like that don't just materialize."

"No," Gerald agreed. "They don't. Which means either the records were destroyed, or they were never meant to exist in the first place."

I sat with that for a long moment, my mind turning over every version of the past I'd tried so hard to forget. Twenty-two years. That number sat wrong in my chest, close enough to another number I'd spent a quarter century trying not to think about.

"There's something else," Gerald said carefully. "If this firm is digging into the trust, they're not doing it out of idle curiosity. They're preparing for something. A challenge. A claim. Possibly a merger that touches your daughter's inheritance in ways neither of us can predict yet."

"Then we move first,"

"Move how?"

"Draft the paperwork. I want Victoria named outright beneficiary of everything. The company, the trust, all of it. Effective immediately. Regardless of her marriage status, regardless of anything Ethan Cole has signed or will sign."

Gerald's eyebrows rose slightly. "You want to do this without telling her?"

"For now, yes."

"Richard, she's your only child. Don't you think she deserves to know what she's inheriting, and why, before someone else forces her to find out the hard way?"

"She'll know everything," I said. "When it's safe for her to know it. Not before."

Gerald studied me for a long beat, then finally nodded and reached for a fresh legal pad. "I'll have preliminary documents ready within the week."

"I don't have a week."

"Richard…"

"I need it by tomorrow."

He set his pen down slowly. "You're frightened."

"I'm careful."

"I've known you twenty-five years. I know the difference."

I didn't answer him, because he wasn't wrong, and there was no point pretending otherwise in front of the one man who'd watched me carry this weight for so long.

—-----------

I stood to leave a few minutes later, my cane tapping softly against the hardwood floor, my mind already three steps ahead, planning who I needed to call next, what I needed to move before anyone else could reach it first.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket just as I reached the door.

A filing alert. State corporate registrar.

I stopped walking and pulled the phone out, my eyes scanning the notification twice before the words fully registered.

Ashford Holdings and Cole Technologies have submitted a joint pre-merger marriage stipulation for state registration.

My chest went cold.

It was real. Not a rumor, not a threat whispered in a corridors. A filed document, sitting now in a public registry where anyone with the right access could pull it and read every detail written into it.

I scrolled down, searching for the one number that mattered more than any other on that page.

Effective date.

Five days.

"That's not enough time," I whispered, and I heard my own voice crack in a way I hadn't allowed it to crack in twenty-five years.

Gerald looked up from his desk, startled by something in my tone. "Richard? What is it?"

I didn't answer him. I stood frozen in the doorway of the office, the phone trembling slightly in my grip, and for the first time since I'd buried a woman I loved and a truth I swore I'd carry to my grave, I felt something I hadn't let myself feel

in a very long time.

Fear. Real, cold, undisguised fear.