She had a folder that could end his career.

She had recorded him confessing that their marriage was a corporate maneuver.

And none of it — not the ruin of his reputation, not the loss of the company title he’d schemed for years to seize, not the public humiliation — had put that particular look on his face.

Only the safe did.

Only the question of what she might find behind that oil painting could frighten a man who had just watched the rest of his life catch fire and stayed calm.

Which meant that whatever was in that safe was worse, to him, than everything else combined — worse than losing the company, worse than prison, worse than the whole edifice of his careful lies collapsing at once.