Lena sat in her father’s library with seven years of intelligence reports spread across a long oak table. She had come back to the house where she grew up, but she did not feel at home.

Home had once been Adrian’s kitchen at midnight, while he ate reheated pasta and told her about his day. Home had been his jacket over the back of a chair, his footsteps in the hall, his hand finding hers in sleep during the first years of their marriage — before ambition and resentment turned every room cold.

She had not left the Marlowe Accord because she feared responsibility. She had left because the network had consumed her father. Conrad Marlowe had died believing every relationship was an arrangement and every kindness concealed leverage.

Lena had wanted one honest life. She had chosen Adrian because, when they met, he was direct — he hadn’t pretended to be gentle or respectable; he had shown her his ambition and his rough edges, and, for a while, his loneliness.

She fell in love with the man beneath the armor. Then, over seven years, he began treating her quietness as proof that she had nothing worth hearing.

Sarah Monroe, Lena’s chief analyst, came into the library carrying a sealed document. “Crestwood filed a dissolution claim.”