Thomas frowned.
“Carl never found you.”
“No.”
“Then the note was forged.”
Lucas looked exhausted.
“After that, Lenora told me Carl had accepted money to remain silent. I stopped trying.”
I thought of Lenora sitting in the conservatory, insisting she had protected everyone.
She had constructed separate prisons from lies.
Each person believed the others were gone, corrupt, or unreachable.
“Why keep you alive?” I asked.
Lucas looked toward the shelves of documents.
“The archive.”
He had discovered the rooms as a teenager, when Vale House was still under renovation. He and Evelyn used the underground corridors as a secret meeting place. Before the @ccident, he moved several crucial Bennett documents there, believing Lenora would never search beneath her own home.
After she found him alive, she realized he knew the location of records that could destroy her company.
“She needed me to identify which ledgers were genuine and which were decoys,” he said. “I refused.”
