KATHERINE'S POV.
The day of the will reading would always stick to my memory, like a bad smell the mind would never forget due to safety reasons.
It happened exactly four days after the cold murder of Wang Moira and after both the police and the whole world had labelled her dead.
I would never forget that day because that was the day my life had evidently changed, never to go back to the normal life I had before, possibly forever.
—----
The offices of Hargrove & Lim sat on the twenty-second floor of a building that had, in my opinion, entirely too much glass for a place where people came to receive bad news.
Everything was visible from everywhere. The elevator opened directly into a wide reception area with floor-to-ceiling windows that turned the city below into something distant and decorative, like a painting of a life rather than an actual one. I could see the conference room from where I stood at the front desk. A long oval table, leather chairs being filled one by one by people who I recognized from photographs and news articles and the particular expression they all wore when they looked up and saw me walk in.
I could already hear what they were thinking. They let their emotions show and didn't even have the decency to hide it.
The thoughts in their minds obviously being;
You don't belong here.
You have some nerve.
We will make you regret existing before this day is over.
I had arrived seven minutes early, which meant I was the last one there. I understood then that this had been deliberate. They had coordinated their arrival to ensure I would have to walk into a room already full of Wang Moira's people. To feel the weight of all that unified hostility pressing down on me before a single word of the will had been read.
Smart, I thought, giving credit where it was reluctantly due.
Petty, but smart.
I straightened my jacket, smiled at the receptionist, who smiled back with the careful neutrality of someone paid not to have opinions, and walked into the conference room.
—----
The table seated twenty four.
There were twenty of them and then there was I, and the distance between those three numbers felt, as I pulled out the empty chair at the far end of the table, like the distance between continents.
I recognized Wang Jian immediately. Moira's older brother. He had Moira's bone structure, sharp and architectural, but where Moira's face had always carried a kind of electric restlessness, his was still in the particular way of a man who had decided several years ago exactly what he thought and had not been troubled by new information since. He was looking at me the way people looked at something they fully intended to step on.
Beside him sat a woman I had seen only once before, at the edge of a photograph.
Moira's mother.
Celeste Wang.
She was in her mid-sixties, dressed in black that was too deliberate to be purely grief and too expensive to be anything but a statement. Her hair was silver and precisely arranged. Her hands, folded on the table in front of her, were completely still in the manner of someone who had trained herself out of every nervous habit over the course of a lifetime. She looked like the kind of woman who had never once raised her voice because she had never needed to.
She looked at me once.
Just once, and briefly, the way you glance at a door you intend to close.
Then she looked away, and I understood with the clarity of cold water that this woman was not going to shout or posture or make a scene. She was simply going to be certain. Certain the way walls are certain, the way ground is certain, that I would not walk out of this situation with anything that belonged to her daughter.
I filed that away and looked at no one else in particular.
—----
The lawyer arrived at precisely ten o'clock.
His name was Edmund Hargrove, and he was a small, immaculate man in his late fifties with the energy of someone who had sat at the center of many terrible rooms and found the experience neither surprising nor particularly distressing. He set his leather folder on the table, uncapped his pen, looked around at the assembled faces with the even gaze of a man reading weather rather than people, and sat down.
"Thank you all for coming," he said. "I recognize this is a difficult time, and I'll endeavor to move through the proceedings as clearly and efficiently as possible. Miss Wang Moira's last will and testament was amended most recently eleven months ago. Everything I read today reflects that final version, witnessed and notarized in this office." He glanced down at the document. "I'll ask that all questions and responses be held until I've finished reading in full. We can address concerns after."
Wang Jian looked like he had several concerns he wanted to address immediately. His jaw worked once. He said nothing.
Hargrove began.
—––---
The first few minutes were navigable.
A property in Jeju, left to a childhood friend whose name I didn't recognize. A collection of first-edition books, left to Moira's university mentor. A financial gift to three charitable organizations, earmarked specifically and with instructions for allocation. Personal items; jewelry, clothing, a watch that had belonged to her father, divided between family members with the particular specificity of someone who had known exactly how much distance lay between her wishes and her relatives' assumptions.
I watched the room as Hargrove read.
I watched the family receive each item with the thin patience of people waiting for the part of the story that actually concerned them. I watched Celeste Wang's folded hands. I watched Wang Jian's jaw. I watched the cousins, the family friends, the business associates seated along the sides of the table who were here less for sentiment than for the answer to a specific financial question.
Everyone in this room was waiting for the number.
Everyone except me, who already knew it and would have given every cent of it back if it meant not sitting in this chair at this table in this glass-walled room being looked at the way I was currently being looked at.
Then Hargrove turned a page, and the air in the room changed.
I felt it before he spoke, a collective held breath, twenty people pulling oxygen in and deciding not to release it.
"With regard to the primary estate," Hargrove said, his voice unchanged in its steadiness, "including all property holdings under Wang Enterprises, all liquid assets across domestic and international accounts, and all shares held in associated companies. Miss Wang Moira bequeaths ninety percent of the total to Miss Katherine Nicole Roberts."
The room did not explode.
It compressed.
That was the only way I would later be able to describe it. Not loudness but a total opposite, a total evacuation of sound so sudden it almost had a physical shape. I felt it in my ears. I felt it in the specific quality of stillness that dropped over twenty people simultaneously, the type that comes just before the body decides what to do next.
Then Wang Jian said very quietly, which was in my opinion, somehow worse than shouting "Repeat that."
"The primary estate. Ninety percent. To Miss Katherine Nicole Roberts." Hargrove did not look up. "The remaining ten percent is divided equally between the Wang family trust and the three charitable organizations previously named. Instructions for the management of Wang Enterprises during any legal transitional period are outlined in the appendix."
"That is not possible." Jian's voice had found its volume now, climbing steadily. "That document is not valid. Moira would never…"
"Mr. Wang," Hargrove said, patient as stone. "I ask that you hold your response until I've concluded the reading."
"You're concluded," Jian stated. He was standing, and I hadn't even seen him rise. "You think I'm going to sit here and listen to you tell me that my sister, my sister left ninety percent of everything she built to this…" he pointed at me without looking at me, which was somehow the most insulting possible way to do it, "...this Omega she knew for less than a year…"
"Jian." Celeste Wang's voice.
He stopped.
Not because the word was spoken loudly, but because it wasn't.
Celeste unfolded her hands, picked up the glass of water in front of her, and took a slow sip. Then she set it back down, precisely in its original position, and looked at her son with an expression I couldn't fully read from across the table.
"Sit down," Celeste said.
He sat.
Celeste turned to look at me then, and this time it wasn't a glance. She held it, deliberatly and extended it, and I held it back because I had made a decision approximately thirty seconds into this room that the only thing I absolutely could not afford to do today was look away first.
Celeste's expression, up close and sustained, was not what I had expected.
It wasn't fury.
It was assessment.
Cold, unhurried, the eyes of a woman calculating something. Not reacting, calculating, and for reasons I couldn't immediately comprehend, that frightened me more than Jian's open rage had.
She's not surprised, I realized.
She's angry, but she's not surprised.
Which meant she knew. Or suspected. Or…
"Miss Roberts."
Hargrove's voice pulled me back to the table.
"There is an attached personal letter from Miss Wang Moira, addressed to you specifically, which I'm legally required to present to you at the reading." He slid an envelope across the table toward me. Cream-colored. My name on the front in Moira's handwriting, extravagant looping letters that I had received on exactly two previous occasions and immediately associated with incoming disruption. "You're not obligated to read it aloud. It's yours."
I looked at the envelope.
I did not pick it up.
Not yet. Not here, in this room, with twenty pairs of eyes calibrating my reaction to every micro-movement I made. Whatever Moira had written in that letter, and knowing Moira it was probably considerable, probably the kind of thing that would rearrange my understanding of the past year. I made a decision immediately that I would read it alone, in my apartment, with the door locked and no one watching mt face.
I pulled the envelope to my side of the table and put it in my bag.
Wang Jian made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
—---
The remaining ten minutes of the reading were a formality that no one in the room was present for in any meaningful sense. Hargrove read the clauses regarding estate management, legal challenges, transitional governance. I wrote nothing on my notepad because my hands were not entirely steady and I did not want anyone to see that. I kept my face composed and my back straight and my eyes moving in a slow, unhurried circuit of the room, because looking still was not the same as being still and I needed the information.
What I gathered from observing was that;
The cousins were angry but directionless, waiting to follow whoever organized them first. The business associates were already doing their arithmetic, figuring out what my inheritance meant for their own positions, their own contracts, their own seats at the table of Wang Enterprises. The childhood friend who'd inherited the Jeju property looked genuinely devastated, which told me she had actually loved Moira, which was more than could be said for most people in this room.
And Celeste Wang had not looked at me again. Not once.
She was looking at the window.
At the city below, distant and decorative as a painting of a life rather than an actual one.
—---
Hargrove closed his folder.
"That concludes the reading. I'll be available individually for any follow-up consultations regarding the legal process going forward. Any formal challenges to the will must be filed within…"
"This isn't over." Jian said standing again, though this time his voice was controlled in the specific way of a man who has been told to sit down once and is ensuring it doesn't happen twice. He was looking at me now, directly, for the first time since I had walked into the room. "Whatever you think you have. Whatever she gave you. You should know that we will be contesting every single clause. In every jurisdiction available to us. For as long as it takes."
My eyes met his.
"I understand," I said.
My voice came out even. Quiet. The room had to lean in to hear it.
"I also understand that you buried your sister four days ago and you're in a great deal of pain, and I'm sorry for that. Genuinely." I kept my voice level and my meaning clear. "But please don't confuse my condolences for an indication that I'll be easy to move."
The silence after that was a different quality than the one before.
Jian stared at me.
I held it.
Then I picked up my bag, pushed back my chair with a soft scrape against the hardwood floor, and stood. "Mr. Hargrove. Thank you for your time."
"Miss Roberts."
I walked to the door.
I did not look back. Not at Jian. Not at the cousins, or the business associates, or the childhood friend who actually grieved.
Only, and I couldn't entirely explain why, did my eyes cut once more to Celeste Wang, who was still seated, still looking at the window, utterly composed in a room slowly coming apart at its seams.
She didn't look at the envelope, I thought, passing through the doorway.
Everyone else in that room looked at the envelope when Hargrove slid it to me. Jian looked. The cousins looked. Even Hargrove's assistant in the corner looked.
And I concluded my observation with one thought in mind.
Celeste Wang already knew it existed.
—---
The elevator doors opened and I stepped in. The city came level with me as I descended, twenty-two floors of glass giving way to twenty-one and then twenty and then street level rising up to meet me.
I waited until the doors closed.
Then I leaned back against the elevator wall, tipped my head up toward the ceiling, and exhaled. Long and slow, the kind of breath that carries the weight of a room out of the body.
Ninety percent.
Moira, you absolute catastrophe of a person, I thought, with something that was not quite grief but lived in the same neighborhood.
What did you do?
—----
My phone buzzed, bringing me out of extremely awful memory and back into my apartment.
My empty plate of the pitiful food I made stared back at me from the side table where I placed it.
Unknown number. No auto-preview this time. Just digits I have never seen before.
I stared at it, then I answered.
"Miss Roberts." The voice on the other end was male, unhurried, carrying the specific register of someone who had never in their life needed to raise it to be taken seriously. It was low and precise. The kind of voice that always arrived in a room before the person did.
"Who is this?" I asked, though something in my chest had already made an educated guess.
"Lucian Voss." There was a measured beat before the next words. "I think it's time we met."
I placed my legs down from my coach.
"I think," I said, "you should tell me why."
"Because Wang Moira is dead," he said, "and you and I are the only two people in this city who didn't kill her. And right now, Miss Roberts…" his voice dropped a fraction, which somehow made it carry further, "that makes us the only two people in this city who need each other."
The noise of the city below swallowed her whole.
I stood up.
"Where?" I said.