The driver wouldn't take me to the pier. He stopped three blocks short, under a streetlight that flickered and buzzed.
"That's as far as I go, lady." He eyed the dark, rain-slicked street in his mirror. "Dead zone down there. Rats and junkies, nothing else."
"This is fine." I handed him a twenty. "Keep it."
I stepped out into the rain. It fell heavier here than in Manhattan, colder, smelling of salt and rotting wood. I pulled my coat close, but the chill came from inside, from the pit under my ribs.
Old Dock No. 4. I knew it, or the girl I used to be did. Twenty years ago this stretch was alive; my father brought me on Saturdays to watch the cotton come off the barges, when the air smelled of hot tar and ambition. Now it smelled of a grave.
I walked past the shells of abandoned warehouses, their broken windows dark. The only sounds were the water slapping the pylons and my heels on the cobbles.
My hand was in my pocket on a small can of pepper spray, a thin defense, but all I had.
Why did you come? The voice in my head again. This is a trap. Run.
I couldn't. The white rose was burned behind my eyes. Whoever sent it held my life. If they took it to Maxwell Sterling, five years turned to dust, or to a fraud charge.
At the end of the pier stood a brick building with half its roof gone, the sign above the door long worn to nothing. The iron door stood ajar on a slot of black.
I stopped, my heart going hard.
"Hello?" The wind took my voice at once.
Nothing.
I breathed in rust and pushed. The door gave a long, grinding groan.
Inside was all shadow. Moonlight came through the holes in the roof onto piles of debris and old machinery. The damp was everywhere.
Then I saw it. Far at the back, on a table of stacked crates, a laptop, its screen a pale blue glow, the one light in the place.
I crossed to it, stepping over coiled rope and broken glass. Nearer, I saw the rest of the table. Beside the laptop lay a gun, a heavy black revolver. And beside the gun, the white rose. Real. Here.
I reached to touch the petals, to prove it wasn't in my head.
"Don't." A voice came rasping out of the dark. "The oil off your skin will spoil it. Your father always said you had heavy hands for a florist."
I went still. I knew the voice, deeper now, rougher, but the cadence the same.
"Mr. Henderson?"
A shape came off a rusted pillar and into the blue light, and I bit my lip not to make a sound.
Arthur Henderson had been a giant in my memory, tall, broad, a laugh that shook the walls of my father's factory. He'd been chief technologist, the man who invented Falcon Blue, the dye that put us on the map.
The man in front of me was a wreck. Gaunt, his clothes hanging off him, his hair thinned and gray. But the eyes were the same, lit with a feverish, fanatical intelligence.
"Hello, Clara," he said.
My real name out loud hit like a fist.
"I thought you were dead," I got out. "After the bankruptcy, the trial, no one saw you again."
"That was the idea." He coughed, wet and rattling, and lit a cheap cigarette with shaking hands. "Dead men are hard to sue. Harder to see coming."
"You sent the rose. Where did you get it? That strain is gone."
He showed yellow teeth. "I saved a cutting. Kept it alive in a Jersey basement five years, same as I kept myself. Waiting for the right season."
He drew on the cigarette. "You've grown up. You've got your mother's face. Your father's stubborn chin."
"My name is Estelle now," I said. "If you brought me here to reminisce, you're wasting my time. Why threaten me?"
"Threaten you?" A dry bark of a laugh. "I didn't threaten you, girl. I woke you up."
He tapped a key. The screen filled with documents, bank statements, emails, surveillance photos.
"I've been watching you build this. Estelle Grey. Very polished. I watched you graduate. I watched you fetch coffee for fools at LVMH. I watched you get ready."
"You stalked me."
"I vetted you." His eyes flared. "I had to know whether you had it in you, whether you were soft like your mother, or the fire took your heart too."
He leaned in, his face close, smelling of stale smoke and old anger. "I know why you're at Sterling House, Clara. You want to make the son pay for the father."
"That's not your business."
"It's entirely my business." He hit the table; the gun jumped. "Who do you think put your résumé on top of the pile? Who deleted the traffic-cam footage from the semester abroad you never took? Who scrubbed you clean enough that Sterling's security couldn't find a seam?"
I stared. I'd thought I was good. I'd thought I was lucky.
"You did that."
"Of course I did. You're good, kid. You're also an amateur running a long con against sharks. Without me you'd have been eaten by lunch."
He turned the laptop to me. A schematic, a web of shell companies and offshore accounts.
"The Sterling empire," he said. "Looks solid. Looks indestructible." He tapped, and red lines ran through it like cracks in ice. "It's rot. The father built it on stolen patents, blackmail, and blood. Our blood."
The madness in his eyes thinned for a second, and under it was grief.
"He took my life's work. My name. He drove my wife to suicide when we lost the house. And he killed your father as surely as if he'd held the gun."
Tears came up hot. I pushed them down. "I know what he did."
"Then you know we can't just hurt them," he said. "We burn it down to ash. And Maxwell, the Prince, falls hardest."
"Maxwell isn't his father." It was out before I could stop it.
His eyes narrowed. "Don't tell me you're falling for the suit. He's a Sterling. The poison's in the blood."
"I'm not falling for anything," I lied. "I met him. He seems different. He seems tired."
"He's a wolf in a good coat. He's rebranding, washing the blood off the money so he can sleep. Don't let him."
He took a small silver thing from his pocket. A flash drive. He held it out.
"What is it?"
"A key. I wrote a worm. Undetectable. It doesn't steal data, it mirrors it, every email he sends, every file he opens, every keystroke, straight to me."
He pressed it into my hand, cold and heavy. "I have the map, but I'm locked out. You're inside, right next to him. I need it on his personal machine, the physical one in his office, not the network. The network's too well guarded."
I looked at the little thing in my palm. So harmless. A weapon. Taking it meant a line I couldn't step back over.
"If I'm caught—"
"Then you go to jail and I vanish. If you succeed, we take back everything they stole, and we watch them come apart."
He turned the rose in his fingers. "Your father used to say the Snow Queen was the hardest rose to grow because it couldn't take heat. It needed the cold to open." He looked at me. "So do you, Clara. You have to be cold." He held it out. "Are you with me? Or do you walk away and let them keep winning?"
I looked at the rose. At the ruined man who'd been my father's friend. Then at that sterile, gleaming office on the forty-fifth floor, and the arrogance of it.
I closed my hand on the drive. I took the rose. "I'm with you." This time my voice held.
"Good." Henderson smiled, and it was the worst thing I'd seen all night. "Go home, Estelle Grey. Sleep. Tomorrow we go to war."
I went back out into the rain with the rose against my chest. Manhattan's lights stood far off, bright and indifferent. Somewhere up there Maxwell Sterling was asleep in silk, not knowing his father's ghosts had just armed themselves.
I caught a cab on the main road. Sliding in, I looked at the drive once before it went into my purse.
Henderson was right. I had to be cold.
But as the water fell away behind us, I couldn't stop the thought: if I burned it all down, what would be left of me?