“With me,” he said, and it was not a command so much as an offered hand.

He drew Cosima out through the servants’ passage before the footsteps reached the master door, down a back stair she did not know he knew, and into his own private study at the far side of the house — a room with a reinforced door he had installed years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the enemies a man makes in his line of work.

He turned the bolt.

And then, instead of doing what her father’s people did — instead of managing her, instructing her, deciding for her — he did the one thing no one in her life had done in ten years.

He put the phone in her hand and let her listen while he called, not a family doctor, not a fixer, but his own security detail and, on a second line, a contact at the office of the federal authorities who had, it turned out, been quietly interested in the Ravenscroft accounts for some time.

The footsteps arrived at the empty master bedroom and found it empty.