Page 76 of Viking Vengeance Cruise

“I don’t know. But it’s something. And sometimes something is all we’ve got.”

She wipes at her eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all this on you.”

“Don’t apologize. We all need to talk sometimes.” Besides, suspects who spill their hearts out on fortress walls happen to be my favorite to have a conversation with. I keep that part to myself.

“She’s broken,” Magnus says quietly. “Not guilty. Just broken. I know the difference.”

He would. By his own correction, the man wasn’t smitten with Astrid Storm—he was devoted. Devoted men learn everything there is to know about broken. Usually from the inside.

Sienna takes a shaky breath. “Astrid knew about my daughter. About the struggles. She was going to...” She stops. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.”

It matters. Things that truly don’t matter never get never-minded that fast.

And there’s something else. Back in Gothenburg, this woman swore she was never in Astrid’s inner circle. Yet somehow Astrid knew the most private heartbreak of her life. Astrid didn’t strike me as a woman who collected the secrets of casual acquaintances. She struck me as a woman who collected leverage.

“What was she going to do?” I press.

“Nothing. Forget I said anything.” She straightens and adjusts her jacket, and for a second I think I’ve lost her. Then her hands go still on the zipper, and whatever’s been holding her together decides it’s off the clock.

She sighs hard. “She was going to tell everyone.” The words come out flat and worn, the voice of a woman who has run out of prettier versions. “At the costume gala. In front of the whole club. About my daughter. About my family.” She swallows hard. “I won’t tell you what it is. I’m sorry, I know how that sounds. But it’s not mine alone, and my grandkids don’t deserve to have it aired out on a fortress wall to someone, even a kind someone.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I tell her, and I mean it, even as the question sits there anyway, patient as a cat.

“Astrid found out. I still don’t know how. She sat me down over tea, very civilized, cream and sugar and blackmail, and told me I could leave the club quietly or she’d share my family’s situation with the membership. Her word. Situation.” Sienna laughs, and there’s not a drop of warmth in it. “So I did something I’m not proud of. I went digging for something on her.”

The wind gusts hard enough to make us both grab the wall, and she keeps going anyway. Once a dam breaks, the water doesn’t ask permission.

“Let’s just say life has taught me more than I ever wanted to know about how embezzlement cases work. How they get built. Where the court records live. What the paperwork looks like when money walks out of a company sideways.” Something crosses her face, there and gone, a door easing shut. “Don’t ask me how I know.”

I tuck that away in the growing pile of things Sienna Caldwell isn’t telling me.

She leans in. “It took me three weeks of late nights after the grandkids went to bed. Because twenty years ago, somebody buried this thing deep.”

“Buried what?” My pulse has picked up to a jog.

“Astrid’s husband’s company lost two hundred thousand dollars over the course of a decade. His business partner was convicted for it. He’s still sitting in a cell to this day, swearing he never took a dime.” She turns to face me, and her eyes have gone hard behind those owl glasses. “And he didn’t. I followed the money, Trixie. Hotel receipts. Restaurants. A little rental cottage paid in cash, two towns over from where Astrid lived. She was having an affair with that partner the entire time. She took the money from her own husband’s company to fund it, and when he finally noticed the hole in the books, she aimed him straight at the man she’d been meeting at that cottage.”

I can’t manage a word. The seagulls fill in for me.

“The partner went to prison. Her husband dropped dead of a heart attack six months later. And Astrid inherited every penny and spent ten years playing the devoted widow.” Sienna’s chin trembles. “That woman stole, framed her own lover, buried her husband, and then had the gall to threaten my family over our shame. Ours.”

Beside me, Magnus has gone very still. Every ounce of swagger has drained right out of him, and what’s left looks smaller than seven feet has any business looking.

“I did her taxes,” he says, hollow as the wind. “Back then. Before the book club, before any of it. The numbers never added up, little one. I told myself I was reading them wrong.” He stares out at the water. “A man in love can talk himself out of arithmetic.”

And there it is. The sort that—, interrupted by my husband and a levitation stunt days ago, and now the sentence finally has its ending.

I wish it didn’t.

“Who else knows?” I ask Sienna. “What you found.”

“No one. I never told a soul. I told myself I’d only ever use it if she forced my hand.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist. “And then somebody killed her, and now I’m the woman who went hunting for dirt on a murder victim three weeks before she died and struck the mother lode. You see my problem.”

I do see her problem. Her problem has motive written across it in letters visible from the ramparts.

But my mind has already sailed past her, out across the water, all the way to a cell where an innocent man has spent two decades paying for Astrid Storm’s cottage. Men like that have mothers. Brothers. Children who grew up visiting Daddy through glass. People who love them.

People who book cruises.