Hudson shook his head, allowing himself a small smile. “So old,” he chided. The desktop faded in, with all of Garrison’s browsers, applications, and folders. Some folders were labeled with various vacations: Cabo, San Lucas, Seattle, Italy, El Rey.

Hudson repeated the last one under his breath. “El Rey,” he said, then, to Noelle. “Is that the name of a place?”

Her brows knit. She frowned. “Nowhere we’ve been together.”

Hudson clicked on the folder. It held dozens of documents—old photographs and newspaper articles. He opened an article that filled the entire screen with a grainy black-and-white photograph of Bennett Reynolds dressed in a suit and tie, sitting with his hands folded in front of him at a long, sleek desk. The headline read REYNOLDS ROYALTY: THE RIGHTFUL HEIR CLAIMS HIS THRONE.

“Eleanor Reynolds,” he whispered, putting it together.

Bennett looked hardly old enough to have graduated college in that photo, and yet as his eyes skimmed the columns of text, Hudson learned that Christopher Reynolds had acted as interim CEO of Reynolds Capital between the years that Clive was gone and Bennett was ready to step into his father’s shoes.

“What’s that?” Noelle’s voice jarred him from his reading.

“El Rey is code for Eleanor Reynolds,” Hudson explained. He paused, and then, “You knew he was working this for her, didn’t you?”

Noelle looked a little ashamed. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Ryan. He asked me not to say anything. To anyone.”

“No, I’m not—” He wasn’t … what? Blaming her? Mad at her? Upset with Garrison for keeping this secret? How could he be, when he’d been sleeping with Miserelli for the past six months? But this was different. Garrison was dead because of what he’d gotten himself into. And Hudson was … well … he was alive for now.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Noelle chewed on her lip. “He was finding some pretty crazy stuff. Dark stuff.”

“Like what?”

“He went all the way to Chicago one day. Came back with this ticket…”

Hudson’s pulse quickened. “The Ruins?”

She nodded. “What is that place?”

“Like you said, dark.” He didn’t have time to explain it all now. He needed to know something from her, though. “Did he ever say if he’d gone in there?”

“The place was burned from the inside out, I guess. He found the ticket in the parking lot.”

Hudson nodded, her statement confirming his belief that Garrison wouldn’t have ventured into that kind of place on his own. He scrolled through endless rows of documents. There were bank records and statements, insurance claims … He clicked on one that showed Clive filing for bankruptcy on one of his portfolio companies. And then a month later, another one. A month apart, every single portfolio company of Reynolds Capital had folded. But before that—he clicked to open another file—in April of 2000, Eleanor had purchased an eleven-million-dollar life insurance policy on her husband.

“Jesus.”