The Sunday Mirror was where Victoria went when she needed to think.
It was a small park in the center of the city, centered around a fountain that had been built in the nineteenth century and had been running continuously since then, its water catching the morning light and throwing it across the surrounding trees in patterns that changed with every passing cloud. On Sunday mornings, the park was empty of everything except joggers and dog walkers and the occasional parent with a stroller. It was peaceful, quiet, the kind of place where a person could sit and think without being disturbed.
Victoria sat on a bench near the fountain, watching the water catch the light, and tried to organize her thoughts. Sebastian was missing. The evidence she had gathered was gone, deleted from her computer sometime during the night while she slept. Maren Blackwood was not answering his phone, and Harrison Blake had suddenly become unavailable for any reason whatsoever. It was as if the entire network of people she had been working with had simply vanished overnight.
But the evidence was not entirely gone. Victoria had copies, stored in places that the people hunting her would not think to look. She had been in this business too long to trust any single source of information, any single location for her files. She had backups, paper copies, fragments scattered across a dozen different systems that she had been building for years without ever knowing why.
She had been preparing for this. Without knowing it, she had been preparing.
The woman who sat down beside her was someone Victoria had seen before, though she could not quite remember where. She was older, perhaps sixty, with gray hair pulled back in a severe bun and eyes that looked like they had seen everything and been surprised by none of it.
“You’re Victoria Hartwell,” the woman said. It was not a question.
“And you are?”
“My name is Eleanor Vance. I was a friend of your mother’s.”
Victoria went very still. Her mother had died when she was twelve, killed in a car accident that Victoria had survived with nothing more than a broken arm and a collection of memories that she had spent her entire life trying to understand. Her mother had been a collector, an authenticator, a woman who had moved in the highest circles of the art world and had died with secrets that she had never shared with anyone.
Or so Victoria had always believed.
“You knew my mother.”
“I was her partner,” Eleanor said. “In the investigation. We were working together, for years, trying to expose the network that had been stealing art and selling it on the black market. We got close, too close, and then your mother died and I had to disappear. I’ve been watching you, Victoria. Watching you build the same career, gather the same knowledge, ask the same questions that your mother asked before you.”
“You think my mother’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“I know it wasn’t,” Eleanor said. “She was killed, Victoria. Killed because she was about to expose something that certain people needed to keep hidden. And now you’re asking the same questions, building the same case, and they’re going to kill you too if you don’t stop.”
Victoria felt the weight of Eleanor’s words settle into her bones. “I’m not going to stop.”
“No,” Eleanor said, and something like a smile crossed her face. “I didn’t think you would. You’re exactly like her. That’s why I’ve been waiting.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder, old and worn, the kind of folder that had been carried for years and opened many times.
“Your mother left this with me before she died. It’s everything she knew, everything she discovered, everything she was working on when they killed her. I was supposed to give it to you when you were ready. And I think, Victoria, that the time has come.”
The folder was heavy in Victoria’s hands. She opened it and began to read, and as she read, she understood why her mother had died and what she had been fighting against. The enemy was larger than she had imagined, older than she had known, and more deeply embedded in the world than she could possibly have suspected.
But she was not alone. That was the important thing. She was not alone, and she was not the first, and the war had been going on for much longer than she had ever realized.
The Sunday Mirror caught the light and held it, and Victoria Hartwell began to read the truth about her mother and the world she had left behind.