The handcuffs did not care who she was.

That is one of the few genuinely just things about the law when it finally arrives: it is gloriously indifferent to the social standing that people like Wendy spend their whole lives accumulating precisely because they believe it makes them untouchable.

And at the same hour, on an entirely different front, the bank’s fraud division froze the family company’s operating accounts, flagging the one hundred eighty-six thousand dollars in diverted funds that my documents had traced.

Luca, frantic, drove to my hotel that evening and could not get past the building’s private security.