“Why would a woman like that marry me?” he asked.

Nobody answered.

Marcus spent the next six hours rebuilding Lena’s history. Before she ever met Adrian, she had advised governments through hostage negotiations, kept a regional bank from collapsing, and exposed a shipping fraud that spanned three international corporations.

When Conrad Marlowe died, Lena had been twenty-nine. She inherited control of the Accord — and then she walked away. She closed its headquarters, moved its assets into inactive trusts, and disappeared from the world that expected her to lead it.

Two years later, she met Adrian at a hospital fundraiser in Manhattan. He had believed she was a quiet legal researcher with a modest inheritance. He never checked further, because she never asked him for anything.

At 4:20 that afternoon, Marcus set a forty-three-page report on Adrian’s desk.