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T HE VAULT DOOR GLEAMS IN FRONT OF ME.

The repairmen did clean work. No indication of the explosion remains on the cool metal of the door. No remnants of drilling, no damage to the surrounding stone. It’s perfect. Impenetrable.

Past the imposing, ten-foot slab of shining metal waits everything I’ve come here for.

I don’t even know the precise numerical figure my grandmother’s fortune comprises. I know the vault contains gold. Diamonds. Enough to found a new world.

Not yours or mine. Ours.

My heart pounds. I don’t pull my gaze from the sleek metal—not even when I hear footsteps coming down the stairs into the dungeon.

“Andrew thought it was ironic, installing a vault in the castle’s dungeon.”

I don’t react to my grandmother’s voice. I say nothing when Leonie comes up next to me.

The Owens matriarch has outdone herself in grandeur, I’ll give her that. Her dark and sparkling gown fits the premise of her event, New Year’s Eve fete meets her own funeral.

“Dungeons are meant to imprison those we seek protection against or those we merely wish to forget. Vaults protect things we hold dear, preserving their contents forever,” she explains. “Two entirely different objectives, and yet one shared location.”

I eye her with genuine curiosity now. My mention of the Knives scared her enough to lure her down here, but she betrays no nerves now. Her expression is closed as flawlessly as the metal in front of us.

She looks, in fact, as if she planned this chat in the dungeon as much as I did.

“Maybe they aren’t so different,” I posit. “The only way to be truly safe is to be locked away, alone.”

Leonie returns my inquisitive gaze. The mirror of a dozen exchanges we’ve had this week—understanding each other, pushing each other.

There’s value in a perfect enemy, an opponent who drives you, who inspires you, who sharpens your instincts for resourcefulness and reinvention. Who understands your weaknesses and forces you to remedy them. Who reminds you who you could become if you just walked a little deeper into the darkness.

“Well, Olivia,” my dear enemy says. “You’re here, but you have no drill, no explosives. No combination. What’s your plan?”

I smile. I thought you’d never ask, Grandmother. “You could always just let me in,” I say lightly.

She laughs. “That’s not how this game is won.”

“No, I suppose not,” I reply. “You set this game up to lure a murderer. Someone who would have gotten the combination from the man who engraved it on your wedding ring— the only other person who ever knew the combination . Your words. Except… Your wedding ring’s engraving doesn’t unlock the vault.”

“You didn’t think I would let you steal it from me if it did,” Leonie prompts.

“So why drop hints to the contrary? Why tell your own children that the combination was engraved on your wedding ring?” I ask, not needing the answer.

Eagerness lights her expression. I was just noting her seamless cool, her evasiveness practiced in decades of cunning. If her ruse forces greedy excitement into her, it must be really, really important. “You tell me, Granddaughter.”

I don’t need a mirror to know my expression matches her eagerness.

“You made it clear that if someone got into this vault it was because they got the combination from Andrew, presumably, before or as a result of murdering him.” I continue before she can interrupt, letting the momentum of my deductions carry me forward.

“Except the truth is—Andrew never knew the combination, did he?”

Leonie smiles. I’ve uncovered the secret, the lie, in the heart of Leonie’s schemes this week, and she only smiles.

“You loved him,” I elaborate, “but you knew better than to trust him. He was too generous with the ones he loved. Dash asked him about your vault combination, and Andrew never told him. Not because he was withholding it, but because he never knew.”

What is love without trust? I can’t help wondering. How controlling and possessive, how racked with suspicion, must she have been?

Her eyes harden. I wonder if she’s remembering the decision herself.

“Our family suspects my father killed Andrew,” I say into the silence. “I think we both know that’s not true.”

I expect her to feign confusion. To refute me.

Instead, she doesn’t react. Her expression remains a mask, the same one she’s worn every day this week. She remains very still.

“So who did kill him?” My voice comes out clear, steady.

“I know you know the answer. You as much as told me,” I chasten her.

“You kept saying how alike we are. You knew I came here for the vault, and you knew I dragged Jackson into it. Just like you coerced Grandpa into stealing from the Knives after you had him join. He was a self-made man. New money , you said. He never would have known about an old-money group like the Knives. No, the only way he would have known to even join them was if you directed him to.”

I pull up my sleeve, intentionally drawing Leonie’s gaze to the cuff links. On second viewing, her regard is rueful, not fearful.

“You took them off Mia,” she remarks. “Coldhearted, even for my progeny. She so wanted the distinction of joining the club.”

“It didn’t concern you that someone so close to you was trying to align with your enemies?” I ask. The complication of Mia’s connection to the Knives intrigued me, admittedly. Was Mia my grandmother’s ally or not?

Leonie scoffs. “Mia was never going to pull off the job she needed to do to join. I was never worried.”

I don’t bother pretending to be surprised Leonie knew of Mia’s heist even before the debacle yesterday. I’ve sharpened my own knives. It’s time to strike.

“Andrew stole from the Knives, and he was killed for it,” I say.

Leonie goes very still.

I push the point in deeper. “And yet your game wasn’t designed to lure in a Knife.

It was designed for your family,” I say, summarizing the contradictions I contemplated all night while Jackson slept.

“You mentioned the vault, as good as waving it in front of our faces before announcing you would be buried with the contents. You pretended to be dying to set a ticking clock. You suggested Andrew Owens possessed a combination he never did so we would dig into motives for his murder,” I point out.

“You forgave Dash after a decade of silence. Why?”

Leonie does not look frightened. She looks fascinated. Enthralled. Waiting for me to finish her story, as if everything she planned is on the verge of realization.

I slow my pounding heart, or try to. Leonie’s not the only one on the edge of everything. The week, the night, the heist—my own master scheme comes down to this deduction, this moment.

“I thought you arranged all this to trap the murderer,” I say. “But really, you wanted to frame someone for your own crimes. My father.”

It’s what I realized after Dash’s revelations yesterday.

The answer to every contradiction of the week.

Leonie’s maneuvering was never designed to lure any killer out, from the ranks of the Owens family or otherwise.

Everything she did had an entirely different purpose—one I only understood late last night.

Nothing could steal the zealous vanity in Leonie’s expression now. The cold gemstones of her eyes glow with fierce fervor. “My crimes,” she repeats. “Olivia, please. I am proud of my crimes . Stealing from the Knives is the king of heists. I planned it for years and executed it brilliantly.”

I don’t waver under her denial. “Was pulling the heist together what drove Andrew away? Is it why you got divorced?” I ask.

Leonie smiles. “Yes and no. The heist is why we divorced.… But only because our divorce was the first stage in my—our—plan. Designed to protect us both,” she says.

“No one would think we, two acrimonious exes who couldn’t even raise their children in the same country, would execute a job like that together.

Of course, no one, not even our children, knew how frequently we continued to see each other.

You’ve been planning this job for months, right?

” She laughs. “We pulled our heist years after our divorce.”

Leonie has dealt me her first surprise of the night.

In constructing my timeline of Leonie’s crimes, I’d figured either Leonie and Andrew’s romance had been more on-and-off than their marriage records indicated…

or Andrew had done the job to try to win her back, or it had been something they did together just out of necessity.

But to know the divorce had been carefully planned—that they’d sacrificed years together, the happiness of their children, for this…

It stuns me, and I feel hollow echoes of a phantom explosion in this dungeon.

Suddenly, Leonie’s uncommon fondness whenever she mentions Andrew makes sense.

With everything else I’ve figured out, I never, ever expected my grandmother’s painful split from my grandfather was, in reality, only part of their ongoing relationship, and a criminal partnership prevailing, hidden for decades.

A new world. Not yours or mine. Ours.

I focus on the facts. The plan. “The Knives discovered what was stolen,” I continue, “and Andrew paid the price.”

Her expression shadows.

“The heist was nearly perfect,” she says. Resentment simmers in her voice, and underneath it—shame. “One small crack, one suspicious ally. I hid here in Volenvell. But it wasn’t enough. They found him decades later.”

They found him. The euphemism is a punch to the heart. Of course Leonie does not mean they’d literally located him. Owens Group CEO Andrew Owens had been easily found in his public life.

No, she means they’d found the right moment, the right way, to kill the man my grandmother loved.