A/N: Thank you to everyone who alerted and favorited this story. I'm glad that you are enjoying it. Here's the next chapter. Please let me know what you think!

From the moment Anne walked into the offices of Garvell Preston, the editor-in-chief of The Standard, she knew exactly what kind of man she would be working with. He was of middling height, slightly bald, a prominent aquiline nose, and two beady blue-grey eyes. Slightly overweight and pear-shaped, he carried himself with the self-contented complacence of an English squire who loved his dogs, his guns, and his women although not necessarily in that order.

There was also something rakish about him that was clearly out of place with the spic and span cleanliness of his fifth floor office. There were numerous photographs scattered all over of various beautiful actresses that had been autographed for him. As she surveyed the walls, nowhere could she see any photographs of a wife or a child.

It only confirmed for her what she already knew. Namely, that men like Preston were so rarely understood that they spent themselves in hopes deceived. They spent most of their lives searching for some ideal woman that would allow them to practice their contentedly without worrying too much about those other quotidian details like where they would buy their next lunch or how many shirts had been left unwashed by the maid. However, that had not been Preston's lot in life nor anyone else's. They were condemned to worry about these things just like any anonymous person that passed underneath their office windows. Not only this, but they contented themselves with allowing their fantastic mistresses to be only persons that lived in their dreams rather than their real lives. They were lovely, lifeless phantoms that floated through their lives and then disappeared leaving only their signatures behind.

As she sat in his chair with her crocodile bag in her lap, she noticed that the man standing before was frightfully nervous. He kept twisting his thumbs in different directions. Sometimes, he would look at his watch and let out a low whistle. It was almost as if he didn't want to be sitting in his office speaking to this beautiful young woman that he had hired sight unseen because his boss up at the big house in Boston had asked him, nay blackmailed him into taking her on as one of his business reporters.

"Tell me, Miss Boleyn," he finally said as he sat up in his chair and looked straight into her bewitching brown eyes. "Why should I take you on at The Standard and allow you to investigate VF Media Corp?"

"It is because Mr. Wolsey wishes it, sir."

"Don't play the obedient schoolgirl with me," Preston snapped. "I asked you an honest question. I expect an honest answer."

"To be perfectly honest, sir, I think that the public should know about the various scandals that have afflicted VF since Francis Valois took over the company upon his father's death."

"And what would those scandals be, Miss Boleyn?" Preston's voice showed how undisturbed he was by her sarcasm. "People's fingers ending up in the gravy at the Thanksgiving Day dinner? Francis Valoi's serial mishandling of the company finances?"

"What about the fact that his investors have sold off more shares within the last three weeks than in the last three years due to the pending merger with Synergy?"

"That is rather strange," Preston conceded, "but I still don't understand how that would make a newsworthy story. Let one that would make it onto the front page of one of the most prestigious newspapers in America."

"Mr. Preston," Anne smiled slightly. "You are clearly an intelligent man. Don't you think it the least bit suspicious that they are selling off shares now to shareholders in other companies and conglomerates rather than to Synergy?"

"I think that it is suspicious, but I don't find it the least bit disturbing. It is business as usual, Miss Boleyn."

"Except it's not, Mr. Preston. Francis Valois has always been known for being deceitful. He backed out of a merger with Synergy two years ago and then started toying with Suleyman Osmanli at the Ankara Bank."

"That Ankara Bank story was investigated by George Williamson at The Post and was proven to be an absolute fraud. Osmanli himself said so in a press conference."

"But there was nothing that came out of the Valois camp," Anne pointed out sharply. "They never denied anything. They mere issued a statement to shut everyone up."

"That's what most business do when they deal with bad news."

"Except that there was a transfer of ten billion Turkish lira to Valois on the same day that the deal with Synergy was cancelled. A transaction which can be proved, Mr. Preston."

Preston began rearranging the papers on his desk for what seemed to be the fifteenth time during the course of that interviewed. He moved them listlessly from one end to the other. Sometimes, he piled them together and tapped their ends so that they became a nice little pile. Only then did he try to suppress the yawn that had been encroaching on him all afternoon.

"Do you think, Mr. Preston, that investigating the transactions between Ankara Bank and VF Media Corp is something that you would be willing to take on?"

"I'll do it, Miss Boleyn," Preston sighed. "If only because I have no choice."

Anne smiled at the middle aged gentlemen behind the desk and made her desk as quickly as she could. She made her ways towards the elevator and took it down to the main floor. She pulled out her cell phone and quickly dialed Wolsey's number. The phone rang interminably before Cromwell picked up on the other end. "Thomas," Anne whispered rather secretively. "He took me on. Can you text me the directions to the New York branch of Ankara Bank?"

Within half an hour, a bus had brought her to an imposing imitation neoclassical building on the Upper East Side. In the Corinthian capitals of the columns and the gleaming marble of the steps, she saw an echo of St. Anne's in Paris and the magnificent Harvard library in Cambridge.

The classical interior, however, hid an interior that could have easily come from The Arabian Nights. On the walls of the main reception area, the management had hung up a series of Kars carpets. Each one was much more delicately woven than the last in vibrant, sun-drenched colors. On one of them the central attraction was a spider building an intricate web from its entrails that spread throughout the whole composition. Anne took a long breath as she admired the intricacies of the art work while numerous managers and tellers did a brisk trade around her in their glassed in cubicles.

She stood there for what seemed like hours transfixed by the beauty of it all: the carpets on the walls, the rose water perfume that floated through the air, the Turkish delight that was served in golden bowls. It was a decadent opulence that the Occident had only imagined in fairy tales, but which was part and parcel of the life of the Osmanlis and their friends at Ankara Bank.

"Can I help you with something?" an olive-skinned young man with a British asked Anne.

"Yes," Anne replied slightly startled. "I was wondering if I could meet with Mr. Osman Kuyuglu. My name is Anne Boleyn. I'm a reporter for The Standard."

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Kuyuglu is not here. He's out to lunch, but I can call you when he gets back and let you know where he is.," the young man replied.

"Thank you," Anne slipped a manila business card between the man's fingers. "Call my mobile number."

"I will."

Anne walked out of the bank and into the crisp autumn air. She took a bus towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then began wandering in a zigzag around Central Park until she ended up at the duck pond. It was a routine that she had practiced since childhood when she and Mary would chase each other around Kensington Garden while their exhausted, constantly out of breath brother, George, would try and catch up with them.

Wandering past the copses of oak and maples, she imagined that she was a little girl in a golden yellow dress running down a lawn with her blonde haired sister. Whenever they ended up at the imaginary goal line, they always gave each other a good ribbing about who came first. Anne was the faster runner, but she always pretended that Mary was the one who had been given their mother's long, stately, and muscled legs. "And what about me?" George would always ask as he came towards them and collapsed on the green lawn. "What on earth am I? The fucking maharajah of Mysore or something?"

All of three always collapsed as soon as he said. The two girls tickled the dark-haired boy while he would good-naturedly kick, scratch, and try ever possible technique he had to weasel his way out of their grasps. There were helpless giggles, there were bloody noses. There was that infamous day when Anne walked away from it with an arm that was broken in three places. It was a placed in a wrap-around cast and turned her into the laughing-stock of St. Anne's for a good quarter. She didn't mind it at all.

"What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger," she remarked to herself as she wandered past skate boards, pedestrians playing hip hop on their ancient silver stereos, and old women sitting on benches and discussing the latest family news: Hymie had his other hip replaced, Marty's granddaughter got a boob job for her birthday and a silver Lexus.

Walking past fountain after fountain and field after field, she allowed her gaze on the azure sky above. Suddenly, she felt completely lost. This was not her beautiful city, this was not her beautiful park. She was a dark-haired stranger in a cream trench coat wandering aimlessly from one point to another, an ant barely visible from an airplane, an anonymous dot to a satellite from outer space or someone that was look down at her from another planet or from heaven itself.

There were billions of dots all over the world going about their daily lives. Each one of them was making the linear journey from a beginning to an ending. Yet where the life of a firefly only lasts twenty four hours before it dies, these human flies could live for as long as seven or eight decades and feel that every day was absolutely, unbearably the same without any sense of forward motion. Only a monotonous inertia that seeped into one's blood and made a person so sluggish that she would stay in her pyjamas all morning fixated on the Style network or E! rather than doing something that could be more constructive and elevating such as writing a story or reading a book.

Anne knew as she sat on a bench in an isolated corner next to the remains of a recently deceased rose bush that New York was a place that could easily turn a perfectly normal person into an existentialist and vice versa. When she had first come here after her graduation with her Master's from Harvard, it had been the pinnacle of a dream that had started when she began writing for her school newspaper in elementary school. It had always been her dream to work at the center of the world among the trend setters, the writers, the poets, the opera singers, the critics, the journalists, the bankers, the hedge fund managers, and almost everybody else that made this city teem with life.

In her dream, she had not been practical nor had she calculated how expensive a life at the center of the world could be. For the first year and a half, she lived in a tiny shoe box apartment on the Upper West Side that could barely fit anything except a bed, a couch, desk, and some assorted bookshelves that she bought from Ikea. Her diet was reduced to whatever she could find at a surplus food store on West 36th Street that wasn't completely spoiled to the core. She lived for days on end on old bagels stuffed with vegetables.

There were whispers around the dining room table that Christmas. As she was on her way to the airport, her father pressed two thick wads of hundred dollar bills into her. "For a rainy day," Thomas whispered gently in her ear.

"Dad, I can't accept this," Anne stammered.

"Your mother and I insist," Thomas reiterated a little bit more firmly. "It's for your own good."

Things changed after that windfall. She began receiving calls from better newspapers and magazines. She moved into a one bedroom apartment on West 111th Street and Broadway. She bought a pet cat. She went on weekly Excursions to The Strand and rammed her pale hands through the dollar bins at Academy Records looking for 78 rpm records by obscure pianists with names like Mischa Levitzki, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Elly Ney, and Jose Iturbi so that she could stack them against the gramophone in her living room and pretend that knew more about the pianists than she actually did.

She remembered how easy it was to stand in front of a bin and run her fingers through the rough record jackets. Some of them had been torn by someone's rabid dog, another had a psychedelic picture of a composer's brain within the performer's brain while the violet and purple lettering advertise a concerto for piano solo by a man named Alkan or the complete Transcendental Etudes of Liapunov.

There were all kinds of people that she encountered on her weekly trip to academy. There was the usual group of navel-gazing record collectors. Most of them were men in their late fifties or early sixties who brought binders and lunch boxes full of index cards so that they could cross reference the store's collection with their own. They were so caught up in their collecting that they didn't bother with the usual courtesies and niceties that Anne had been brought up with. When one of them decided to haul out an entire stack of 45s before Anne had a chance to look through them herself, she gave him a long withering glare. His reply was simply, "I got here first. Finders keepers, lady."

There were others, of course, including a man in his early thirties who always waltzed into the record shop wearing giant silver headphones. Once he stood next to Anne and she could hear a soprano trilling like a nightingale. When she asked him who it was, he gave her a witheringly scornful look and replied, "Galli-Curci."

Apart from Academy, she had begun to gather around her a small coterie of friends whom she would meet for cocktails every Friday at a swank bar in Chelsea called Taylor's. Most of them were artists, poets, and students of various majors and orientations. One was Thomas Wyatt was working on a translation of obscure Greek poet who had espoused Communism during the civil war there as part of his MFA at Columbia while a British expat named Mark Smeaton was making a name for himself as a castrato because of a thyroid disorder that had prevented his voice from deepening during adolescence.

She smiled as the sun lit on the beautiful circle that was her face. Her eyes were fixed on the golden branches of the trees ahead of her and a small figure in a black coat that was coming her way. She took out a white handkerchief and waved it in his direction. He ran towards her and embraced. She asked him to sit down.

"You weren't at the duck pond," Henry feigned irritation.

"I didn't make it," Anne apologized by pulling out her lower lip. "I'm sorry. I got too caught up in thinking about things."

"Oh really?" Henry asked. "What kinds of things were you thinking about?"

"Life, I guess," Anne sighed as she gave him a good natured shove. "The big questions."

"Why am I here? What on earth am I supposed to do while I am here? Why the fuck am I supposed to care about what's going on?" Henry recited mechanically. "Believe me, I've thought about them a great deal."

"Did you come up with anything interesting?" Anne asked.

"Not really. Seeing as I don't really believe in anything except that I have to run the company as well as I can so that I can leave a legacy for my children."

"Except you don't run the company," Anne emphasized. "You told me as much yourself."

"That's true," Henry nodded, "but there will come a time when I will be running it without Wolsey and things would be different than they are now."

"I know this might sound like an impertinent question, but why haven't you done anything until this point?"

"I don't know," Henry shrugged carelessly. "In the beginning, I think it was because I was too young to run a company on my own. Then I decided that boozing and carousing with women was much more important than being a businessman."

"So, basically, you allow Wolsey to run your company for you because you were too irresponsible to run it yourself?"

"Yes," Henry blushed. "You could say that."

"And you've allowed Wolsey to become de facto head of the company while you go out with me," Anne noted ironically.

"What do you have against Wolsey?" Henry snapped. "He's doing a stand up job."

"I don't have anything against him, Henry. I just think…"

"You think too much," Henry interrupted her. "Has anyone told you that?"

"Yes, but…"

"Then maybe you should do less thinking and more doing. More arbeiten and less sprechen."

He rose from the bench and headed towards the hill. Although she was upset, she followed him until she was able to stop him by grabbing his hand and leading him to another bench.

"I understand," Anne replied quietly. "I completely understand what you are talking about, Henry, and I'm sorry."

"If you had said that two seconds ago, we would not be having this conversation," Henry noted coldly as took out a cigarette and lit up. "Wolsey is a good man, Anne. He did excellent work for my father. He's doing wonderful work for me. He's negotiating that deal with VF Media Corp and things are working out as smoothly as possible."

As he smoked one cigarette after another, Anne desperately wanted to tell him about Francis Valois and Suleyman Osmanli. The recent bank transaction that sent hundreds of thousands of lira from Ankara to New York was something that could potentially affect Synergy but she bit back her tongue. Until she had every single fact of the case, he probably wouldn't listen to her and, even if he did, she would only see more anger from his end and that was something that she wanted to avoid at all costs.

They sat on that bench for a good half hour in silence until Anne's phone rang and the young man she had seen at the bank told her that Osman Kuyuglu would meet her in half an hour. She explained it to Henry, but he merely gave her a vacant stare. He didn't kiss her goodbye. He didn't embrace her. He only said, "See you back in Boston" and that was the only farewell she received.

Anne marched through Central Park towards the Plaza Hotel without thinking about the tears that were streaming down her face or the fact that her hands were bitterly cold. Over and over again, she wondered whether her prince was really a beast in disguise. Whether a man who lavished every gift on her that she could imagine, wined and dined her at the finest restaurants, and sent her bouquets of flowers every morning with her breakfast was the same person who had told her that she should focus more on doing rather than on thinking. Essentially, reminding her to mind her own business and not place her nose in places where it didn't belong.

She tried to reconcile it every which way in her mind. She tried to excuse it by saying that he had had a bad day or that Katherine was nagging him again because he was withholding. Perhaps, Wolsey had called him into his office that morning and giving him a dressing down about his debauched lifestyle or yet another bastard baby being born to some two bit prostitute.

In making these excuses, she was trying to mask the shadow that had flitted across his face, the bulging vein in his neck, and the irate eyes that stared into the core of her being. She had never seen this side of him before although she had heard countless stories. In a telephone exchange with Thomas Howard, her uncle had cautioned her to look out for what he called Henry's "black moods." Yet she had shrugged him off saying and teasing, "How black are they?"

Yet there had been something righteous in Henry's eyes. His anger was warranted and he had been right about Anne no matter how many times she wanted to shift the blame for the outburst to him. She was overthinking everything and looking for smoke where there wasn't any fire to begin with. Just because she had had an unpleasant encounter with Wolsey and that he had blackmailed her into accepting the position did not meant that he was an awful human being or a monster. Even if he did Mr. Stote a dressing down that seemed a little too sharp-tongued for her tastes, she would have done the same thing if she had met a maid that didn't do her exact bidding at the moment she was told to do something.

Anne let out a deep sigh as she climbed the front steps of the Plaza and made her way towards the lobby. As she sat down in one of the plush leather armchairs, she felt humbled and chastened. She didn't know or understand anything about Wolsey, Henry, and Synergy, but she could always find out.

It was as an investigator rather than a mere journalist that she rose to greet Osman Kuyuglu, the president of Ankara Bank's New York branch. She noticed that he walked in long and elegant as if he didn't have a care in the world. His face lit up as soon as he saw her, he kissed her on the hand, and led her towards a darkened bar where they sat facing each other while she downed a glass of cognac and he slurped his way through a coke.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Boleyn?" he asked her as he pulled out a cigar and offered it to her.

"No, thank you," she waved it away. "I wanted to ask you if you were aware of a transaction between your bank and VF Media Corp a few weeks ago."

"We do a great deal of business with VF Media Corp, Miss Boleyn," Kuyuglu nodded understandably as he began to twirl one of his moustaches in boredom. "They are one of our top clients."

"I do understand that," Anne nodded, "but there was one transaction that took place at a particularly opportune time."

"I'm not certain what you mean by opportune time," Kuyuglu perked up with interest.

"Allow me to refresh you," Anne said as she pulled out a series of reports that Wolsey had clipped for her from various newspapers three days and laid them out on the table.

Kuyuglu picked them up, examined them over his golden-rimmed spectacles, and then passed them back to her.

"I'm sorry, Miss Boleyn, but I cannot comment on this. Company policy."

"I know," Anne said putting the articles away, "but would it be possible for you to say something on this matter off the record as a private person rather than as a representative of the Bank of Ankara?"

"Impossible," Kuyuglu crossed his arms. "You are wasting your time, Miss Boleyn."

"I promise you full and absolute anonymity, Mr. Kuyuglu. No one will ever know."

"Miss Boleyn," Kuyuglu addressed her sternly and rose from the table. "I cannot tell you anything. I'm sorry."

"Mr. Kuyuglu, my job depends on this story."

"And my head depends on not saying anything," Kuyuglu retorted. "Goodbye, Miss Boleyn."

"How much money do you want?" Anne blurted out without thinking.

"Excuse me?" Kuyuglu turned around and faced her. "Money?"

"Yes," Anne nodded. "How much money do you want for your anonymity? I'm willing to pay for it. I have my ways."

"$10,000," Kuyuglu replied suddenly reassured and calmed. "Have it wired to my bank by tomorrow afternoon and I will tell you everything."