She surfaced in Rome first.
Adrian’s security team had been moving quietly since the morning after Daniel’s file, tracking Victoria’s trail through the kind of channels that did not appear on corporate expense reports and were never discussed in board meetings. They were good at this. Very good. The kind of good that comes from years of protecting someone who had spent decades making enemies and knew it.
Rome took thirty-six hours to confirm. Then Zurich. Then Rome again briefly, then back to Zurich. The same circuit, Daniel noted, that Crestfield Capital’s senior executives used when conducting business they did not want documented. She was not wandering. She was working.
And she was not alone.
The photographs arrived on Daniel’s desk on a Wednesday morning, passed through a contact h
