Ethan’s reply hit my screen in forty seconds:
`ETHAN: I trust you with my life, Olivia. Just tell me what you need me to do.`
I set the phone down.
Then I walked to the corner wardrobe, reached behind my hanging bridal gown, and unzipped the concealed lining of my grandfather’s leather field trunk.
Resting inside, nestled in eighty-year-old green baize felt, was an unsealed, four-hundred-page federal grand jury indictment stamped with the raised red-wax dry seal of the **DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY // SPECIAL ADMIRALTY CHANCERY**, alongside an antique, four-inch rectangular keyway constructed of solid, non-magnetic brushed titanium, stepped with fifty-six analog cryptographic notches:
`KEY IDENTIFIER: MERCER-ARTHUR-010`
`CLASSIFICATION: STRATEGIC SOVEREIGN ESCROW // TITLE 50 CONTINUITY`
`TITLE: CONDUIT TEN // THE NARRAGANSETT COMMAND APERTURE`
I picked up the heavy titanium keyway, feeling eighty years of inherited sovereign steel bite into my palm.
Vanessa Reed believed she was competing for an eligible bachelor.
She had no idea that Ethan Cole was not an ordinary private-equity investor, that my family’s five-hundred-acre estate on the Newport cliffs was not a civilian luxury playground, and that **midnight tomorrow** was the statutory eighty-year maturity deadline for seventy billion dollars in classified national defense bedrock!
