Chapter 48 The Fashion Week Invitation
Brittany's POV
Rosa's brother was found on a Tuesday.
Leo confirmed the location at eight in the morning, and David's security team had the boy off the property and in a safe house by noon. His name was Daniel, nineteen years old, frightened but physically unharmed, kept in a residential property by two people who had been paid to house him rather than hurt him, which was cold comfort but was better than the alternative.
Rosa sat in the surveillance room and listened to Leo's team confirm Daniel's safe extraction through a radio relay, and the sound she made when the confirmation came through was the kind of sound that belongs to a person releasing something they have been holding for so long it had become structural. She pressed both hands over her face and shook silently for about thirty seconds. Elena sat beside her, one hand on her back, and said nothing, which was the right thing.
I watched from the doorway and thought about how many people in this situation had needed someone to come and none had arrived.
Rosa was relocated to a secure property David maintained outside the city by Thursday, Daniel with her, both of them under protection, both of them out of reach of Webb's network. Before she left she sat with me in the studio for twenty minutes and told me everything she could remember about the instruction phone's communication patterns, the timing, the language, the specific phrasing that appeared in legitimate messages versus the variations that appeared when something was urgent or had changed.
It was detailed and useful and given without reservation.
"Thank you," I said when she finished.
Rosa looked at me with those serious eyes. "I'm sorry," she said. "For what I did to him."
"I know," I said. "He knows too."
She nodded and left and I turned back to the studio and the collection and the work that still had to be done before the gala.
The invitation arrived the following Monday.
Elena brought it to the studio on the morning tray, tucked beside my tea and the small vase she always included, a cream envelope with heavyweight texture that announced its own importance before it was opened. I finished pinning the sleeve seam I was working on before I picked it up, because the collection's momentum was not going to be interrupted by a piece of mail regardless of what it contained.
I opened it at the cutting table with Daisy beside me, both of us reading it at the same time.
It was formal and expensive, printed on card stock that had weight and presence, the kind of stationery chosen to communicate that the event it represented was significant and the people receiving it were being offered something rather than simply notified of something. The letterhead belonged to a prestigious fashion house I recognized, a senior industry institution whose involvement in any event lent it immediate credibility.
The event was described as a pre-season industry showcase. Fashion press, senior buyers, international industry figures. A curated evening of emerging and established work ahead of the main gala season.
Adam Williams's name appeared on the hosting committee in the third line.
His pre-launch teaser for a collection called The Sovereign Line was listed as the centerpiece of the evening.
I read that twice. Then I set the card down on the cutting table and looked at Daisy.
"He's doing a preview," Daisy said. Her voice was flat and precise. "Before the main gala. He's building press momentum. By the time the main event happens, the industry narrative will already be established. Critics will have formed opinions. The collection will have a head start on the story it wants to tell."
I picked the invitation back up and turned it over in my hands.
The event was in two weeks. The main gala was in four. The timeline I had been working with had assumed Adam's public launch happened at the gala, simultaneous with everything else, one moment, one controlled detonation. A preview two weeks earlier changed the landscape.
If Adam built significant press momentum at the preview, if The Sovereign Line became an industry conversation piece before we had a chance to expose its origins publicly, the exposure at the main gala would land differently. Not as revelation but as controversy, a he-said-she-said dispute about a collection that half the industry had already decided it admired.
He was not stupid. He was building insurance.
I turned the card over again. The venue was printed on the back in smaller text, an address in the city with the name of the event space beside it.
"This changes our timing on certain things," I said.
"Does it change the main plan?" Daisy asked.
"No," I said. "The main gala is still where everything lands. But the preview is a variable I didn't have before and I need to think about how to use it." I set the card down. "We don't ignore it. We attend."
Daisy looked at me. "As guests?"
"As observers," I said. "We go, we see what he presents, we understand exactly what the industry is being told about The Sovereign Line before we dismantle it at the main event."
Daisy nodded slowly. "David won't love the idea of you being in a room with Adam."
"David doesn't decide which rooms I walk into," I said.
Daisy's expression suggested she found this response both accurate and slightly entertaining. She picked up the invitation and looked at the venue address again.
"I'll check the guest list access protocols," she said. "David's name will get us in without advance registration."
She set the card back on the table.
I was reaching for my pencil to return to the sleeve seam when Leo's voice came from the studio doorway. He was standing in the frame with his laptop open in one hand, looking at the screen, and the particular quality of his stillness told me before he spoke that what he was about to say had weight.
"Brittany," he said.
I looked up.
"The preview venue," he said. "Look at the address."
He turned the laptop toward me. The screen showed a map with a location marker, cross-referenced against a property history database he had clearly just pulled up. The address matched the card in front of me exactly.
The property history showed a previous occupant. A studio space, listed thirty years ago, operating under a business registration I recognized immediately because I had seen the same name on the bottom corner of the oldest sketch on my studio mood board, written in my mother's handwriting.
The preview was being held in the building where my mother's studio had been.
The building where she had died.