Linnea had spent enough years reading financial statements to know that the most important number on any page is the one someone tried hardest to hide.

Dorian had spent this entire confrontation managing his fear, calculating, spinning, flipping strategies.

The safe was the one thing he could not manage his way around, and his face, for one unguarded second, had shown her the size of it.

She did not yet know what was inside.

But she knew, watching him, that it was the true center of everything — that the affair and the fraud and the scandal were all just the outer rings around whatever six digits would open, and that he had given her the combination not out of surrender but out of a gambler’s terrible bet that she would open it too late to stop what was already in motion.

After a long pause, he murmured six digits.