The Dead Woman Who Stole My Husband Was Coming For Me Next

The door had barely clicked shut behind Ryker before I was moving.

He'd said he needed air. That was the word he used—*air*—like the apartment had been slowly suffocating him and he couldn't last another second inside it. I'd nodded. I'd watched him put on his jacket with hands that weren't quite steady. And the moment I heard the elevator doors open down the hall, I walked straight into the bedroom.

Harper had said: *start with the places he'd least expect you to look.*

I went to his dresser. Third drawer down. Socks.

Ryker was meticulous about his clothes in a way that had always seemed like a personality trait and never like concealment. Everything folded, everything sorted by color. The black dress socks were at the back left corner, stacked in three neat pairs. I lifted the first pair. The second. The third.

My fingers touched leather.

It was small—maybe five inches by three—dark brown, the cover worn soft at the corners from handling. I pulled it out slowly. The smell hit me before I'd even turned it over. Faint. Floral. Something expensive and European that I'd smelled before without knowing where.

Elodie's perfume.

I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands were steady, which surprised me. I opened the cover.

French. All of it. Elegant slanted handwriting, dark blue ink, dates running down the left margin of each page like a ledger. November 14th. November 21st. December 3rd. The entries were dense, no doodles, no margin notes—just line after line of careful, deliberate script.

I opened my translation app. Held the phone over the first page and watched the words appear.

*Target: Ryker Sinclair. Junior partner, Sinclair Marine Holdings. Seventh on C.V.'s list. Trust-building window: estimated ninety days. Initial contact vector: the memorial group. He'll be present. He's always present for grief.*

I read it twice.

Then I set the phone down on my knee and just breathed for a moment, because the room had tilted slightly and I needed the floor to be where it was supposed to be.

Target.

Not *I met someone.* Not *I fell for a man who belongs to someone else.* Target. Vector. List.

Elodie had come for Ryker the way a researcher comes for a subject. She'd planned the introduction, calculated the timeline, chosen the angle of approach. Every coffee, every late-night call, every carefully filmed promise—all of it, engineered.

I started photographing the pages. Both hands, fast and methodical, the translation app running in split-screen so I could skim while I shot. I moved through November, through December, watching the entries shift from clinical to almost impatient.

*He's more porous than I expected. He needs to be needed. I give him that and he gives me access.*

January was thinner—only four entries. Then February, where the handwriting changed, became slightly looser, like someone writing faster.

*He's promised me everything. Leave her, start over, come to Lyon, all of it. He says it every time, and every time I believe he half-means it. But he is not the main objective. He never was. He's the door. C.V. is the room.*

C.V.

The initials had appeared six times already, scattered through the earlier pages. I hadn't caught the significance until now. I flipped back through the photos I'd taken, searching for context. *C.V.'s network. C.V.'s timeline. Ryker is seventh on C.V.'s list.*

Something was building at the base of my throat. Not nausea. Something more like standing at the edge of something very deep and looking straight down.

I kept going.

March, April—entries getting shorter. The ninety-day window had passed. Whatever Elodie had been building toward, she was running out of patience with the approach. *He stalls. He deflects. He doesn't know what Ryker knows, or he pretends not to. I need direct contact. The journal approach may be the only option remaining.*

Then I turned to the last page.

The date was seven days ago. The day before Elodie Marchand fell from the Cascade overlook.

The entry was only seven lines.

*Tonight I tell him the truth. All of it. He'll either help or he won't, but I'm done with the slow approach—it's taken too long and C.V. is moving faster than I anticipated. If I'm not back to write a new page tomorrow: give this journal to Caspian Vance. Vance Tower, fifty-second floor. Tell him the Lyon matter is confirmed. Tell him I tried.*

Below the words, she'd drawn a small symbol.

A dagger. Thin-bladed, detailed. Roses wound around the hilt and curled up the blade, thorns catching at the edges.

I stared at it.

The feeling that moved through me wasn't recognition—it was something slower and colder than that. The kind of feeling that comes just before understanding, when your body knows something your brain hasn't caught up to yet.

And then it did.

Ryker's tattoo. Left side of his chest, just below the collarbone. He'd gotten it in college—*a stupid decision, Willow, I was twenty and trying to be interesting.* I'd traced it with my fingers a hundred times in the dark without ever really thinking about it. A dagger. Roses twined around the hilt. Thorns.

Identical.

Not similar. Identical, line for line, the same configuration of petals, the same angle of the blade.

The last page had only two words at the top, written larger than everything else, underlined twice: *Caspian Vance.*

The name hung in my vision like a held note.

Ryker had never mentioned that name. Not once. Not in four years, not in passing, not in any context I could locate. But Elodie had written it as though Vance was the center of gravity for everything—the list, the network, the thing in Lyon, whatever that was. The thing she'd died trying to reach.

I was still sitting there, the journal open across my knees, the translation app still glowing, when the bedroom door swung open behind me.

I didn't have time to close it. Didn't have time to do anything except turn.

Ryker stood in the doorway. His face was a color I didn't have a name for—not pale exactly, more like something had been drained out of him all at once and hadn't been replaced. His jacket was still on. He'd been gone maybe twelve minutes.

His phone was in his hand, raised slightly, screen facing out. The way you hold something up when you want someone else to see it.

I looked at the screen.

A text message. The preview was visible in the notification banner, white text against gray. The sender's name sat above it in the small, plain font that contact names always displayed in.

*Elodie Marchand.*

The air went out of the room.

Elodie Marchand, who had been dead for a week, whose phone was presumably somewhere in an evidence bag at the county medical examiner's office, had sent my fiancé a text message forty seconds ago.

One line.

*She found the journal. Run.*

Ryker's eyes moved from the phone to my face. To the journal open on my knees. Back to my face.

Neither of us said anything.

Somewhere outside, a siren started up—distant, moving away—and then the apartment was quiet again, and the only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator down the hall and the soft, shallow sound of both of us breathing.