Chapter 6

"Your husband arranged everything. We'll have you settled in two hours." He grins like this is a normal happy newlywed situation.

I don't correct him. I just watch as two guys start unloading furniture I've never seen before. A couch. A desk. Lamps. Bedding still in plastic wrap.

Archer bought me a whole setup. Like I'm a doll he's dressing.

The Lin house is smaller than I expected. It's tucked into an older neighborhood where the trees are thick and the walls are high. Two stories, gray brick, iron gate. The neighbors probably think some washed-up branch of the Lin family lives here. They'd be right, if Archer's cover story was real.

But I know better.

I unlock the front door with the key he left on the nightstand this morning. No note. Just the key and a text: *Don't touch my office.*

Like I'm a kid being told not to open the cookie jar.

The movers haul everything inside while I do a slow walk-through. Downstairs is open plan. Kitchen on the left, clean and modern but barely used. Living room on the right with a couch that still has tags on it. The furniture Archer bought me gets shoved into corners. It doesn't match. The guys don't care.

Upstairs is three bedrooms. Master at the end of the hall. That's where Archer sleeps when he's here. The bed's made. Military tight corners. No photos. No clutter. Just a nightstand with a phone charger and a drawer I'm definitely going to open later.

Second bedroom is an office. Locked. I try the handle twice just to confirm. Yeah. That's the one.

Third bedroom is empty. The movers set up my desk and boxes in there. One of them asks if I want the couch downstairs or up here.

"Downstairs is fine."

He nods and leaves. I sit on the floor of my new room and stare at the blank walls. This is where I'm supposed to live now. Where I'm supposed to play the role of the grateful rescued bride.

I pull out my phone. Claire sent me an encrypted file an hour ago. I open it.

Three years ago, Singapore. A private hospital in the Orchard district admitted a patient under the name Archer Lin. Gunshot wound to the shoulder, secondary injuries to the ribs and jaw. He stayed two days. Paid cash. Left no forwarding address.

Claire included a photo she pulled from hospital CCTV. It's grainy but clear enough. Archer, younger, thinner, blood on his shirt. And next to him, holding his good arm, is a woman.

Ivy Qin.

I zoom in. Her face is half-turned but I'd know that sharp bob and designer bag anywhere. She's smiling. He's not.

So they've been together since at least then. Three years. Long enough to plan everything. Long enough to decide my family was worth destroying.

I save the photo. Delete the file from my phone. Claire knows to wipe her end too.

The movers finish and leave. The house goes quiet. I'm alone.

I start in the kitchen. I open every drawer, every cabinet. Nothing unusual. Dishes. Glasses. A drawer full of takeout menus. The fridge has bottled water and expired milk. Archer doesn't cook.

I move to the living room. I check behind the couch, under the coffee table. I run my hands along the baseboards looking for seams or loose panels. Nothing.

Upstairs I go through the master bedroom. His closet is half-empty. Suits on the left, casual clothes on the right. Everything's organized by color. I check jacket pockets. Empty. I check the nightstand. Charger. Lip balm. A book in Mandarin I can't read.

Then I find the cameras.

First one is in the smoke detector in the hallway. I only notice because the lens catches the light wrong when I walk past. I stop. Stare up at it. It's small. Professional.

I check the other rooms. Living room has one in the bookshelf. Kitchen has one over the sink. My new bedroom has one in the corner near the ceiling.

He's watching me. Or he will be, when he checks the footage.

I smile at the camera in my room. Give it a little wave. Then I go back downstairs and make myself coffee with the machine he probably never uses.

I need to think. If there are cameras, there's a hub. Somewhere in this house is a server or a hard drive where the footage gets stored. And if he's paranoid enough to wire the whole place, he's paranoid enough to keep other things close.

The office is locked but I'm good with pins. I learned from a guy my dad hired once to test our home security. Took me six minutes last life to pick my first deadbolt. I've gotten faster.

I grab a paperclip from the desk in my room. Head back to the office door. The lock is standard residential. I bend the clip, slide it in, feel for the pins.

Click.

I'm inside.

The office is bigger than I expected. Desk facing the window. Filing cabinets along one wall. A safe in the corner that I'm definitely not touching yet. And on the desk, a laptop.

Closed but not locked. I flip it open. Password screen. I try the obvious ones. His birthday according to his fake ID. The date we got married. Nothing.

I try Ivy's birthday. It unlocks.

Jesus. He's not even trying to hide it.

I go through his files. Most of it's encrypted. Financial records I can't open without breaking the hashes and I don't have time for that. But there's a folder labeled "Archive" that's not locked.

I open it.

Video files. Dozens of them. Dates going back two years. I click one at random.

It's dashcam footage. Nighttime. A car on a mountain road. The timestamp says fourteen months ago.

That's one month before my parents died.

I click another file. Different angle, same road. Daytime. I recognize the curve. It's the turn where their car went off.

My hands start shaking. I click a third file.

This one's from inside a car. Passenger seat view. The driver's wearing gloves. The camera's aimed at the road ahead. And in the distance, I see my parents' car. My mom's white sedan with the dent in the bumper she never got fixed.

The driver accelerates. The distance closes. My parents' car swerves. The driver cuts them off. They swerve again. The guardrail breaks. The car tips. Falls.

The footage cuts.

I sit there staring at the screen. My mouth tastes like metal. I want to scream but I can't make a sound.

I click to the next file. It's the same crash from a different angle. A second car was filming. Which means at least two of Archer's people were there. Coordinating. Making sure the job got done.

I scroll through the folder. There are more videos. Surveillance footage of my dad's office. Audio files of phone calls. Photos of bank statements. Everything he used to destroy us, all saved in one place.

Why would he keep this? Evidence of murder and fraud, just sitting on his laptop?

Because he's arrogant. Because he never thought I'd get this far. Because he thinks I'm still the stupid girl who signed the contract without reading it.

I pull out my phone. Start copying files to an encrypted cloud drive Claire set up for me. The upload bar crawls. Ten percent. Twenty.

I hear a noise downstairs. A door closing.

I freeze. He said he'd be gone two days. It's only been two hours.

Footsteps in the hallway. Slow. Deliberate. Coming toward the stairs.

I close the laptop. Shove my phone in my pocket. The upload's only at forty percent but I don't have time. I move toward the door.

The lights go out.

Every light in the house cuts at once. The laptop screen goes dark. I'm standing in the office in complete darkness and I can hear him on the stairs.

"Stella." His voice drifts up from the first floor. Calm. Almost amused. "I thought I told you not to touch my office."

I don't answer. I feel along the wall toward the door. My heart's slamming against my ribs so hard I think he can probably hear it.

"The lock on that door cost three hundred dollars." His footsteps hit the top of the stairs. "You picked it in under a minute. Impressive."

I reach the doorway. Step into the hall. I can't see him but I know he's there. Close. Maybe ten feet away.

"What else did you find?" he asks.

The house is silent except for my breathing and his footsteps. One step closer. Then another.

"Nothing," I say. My voice comes out steady. Good. "I was looking for a charger."

"In my locked office."

"I didn't know it was locked until I tried the door."

He laughs. It's a low sound, almost a exhale. "You're getting better at lying. Last week you couldn't even look at me."

Another step. I can smell his cologne now. Something clean and expensive. The same scent that was on the sheets this morning.

"The power will come back on in thirty seconds," he says. "And then you're going to tell me what you copied from my laptop."

My phone feels like it's burning a hole in my pocket. Forty percent. Maybe fifty by now if the upload kept going after the wifi cut. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

"I didn't touch your laptop," I say.

"The motion sensors say otherwise." His voice is right next to me now. I feel his hand brush my arm in the dark. "You opened it. You went through my files. And you started uploading something right before I killed the power."

He knows. He knows everything.

The lights snap back on. I'm standing three feet from him in the hallway. He's wearing the same clothes from this morning. He never left. He was here the whole time, watching me on the cameras, waiting to see what I'd do.

He reaches out and takes my phone from my pocket before I can stop him. Unlocks it with my face while I'm still blinking in the light. Checks the screen.

"Fifty-three percent," he says, reading the upload bar. "Not bad. But not enough." He cancels the upload. Deletes the app. Hands the phone back to me. "Want to tell me who you're working with? Or should I guess?"