My own wedding had been chosen as the occasion, because my father would be too busy managing his own downfall to notice his daughter being removed from the board.

Lucas took my hand hard.

“That is why I couldn’t stay away from it,” he said.

“The moment I understood you were in the file, Victoria — the moment I understood what your father was mixed up in could reach you — there was no version of this where I stood aside and let it come.” And I understood, finally and completely, that the man my father had called a nobody had spent our entire engagement standing, unseen, between me and a danger I could not have named I did not know existed.

That the honor guard, the investigation, the secrecy — all of it had been Lucas, holding a line around my life, the same way he had held it around the lives of strangers, because holding the line for people who could not protect themselves was simply what he was made of.

Chapter 15 — The Mole