CHAPTER FIVE: Disclosure
893 Words
It was raining when the file arrived.
A quiet, unassuming manila envelope slipped into Naomi’s hands by a courier who left no name. No signature. No trace.
Inside: photographs. Time-stamped emails. A six-page report.
Celeste read it all in silence, the rain a steady hiss against her office windows.
Sienna had met Grant two years before she was hired.
Not during her interview. Not in the conference room. At a conference in London—the one Celeste had skipped at the last minute to close a settlement.
The report detailed drinks at the hotel bar. Surveillance photos of a hallway embrace. Flight receipts. Hotel overlap. A LinkedIn message that turned into personal emails.
The most damning? A text thread—screenshotted—between Grant and Sienna:
> Grant:
“She’ll never see it coming. She's too busy being perfect.”
Sienna:
“Then we time it right. Build the account. Then leak something. She breaks, we win.”
Grant:
“She won’t break. She’ll burn.”
Celeste didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink.
She simply closed the folder and whispered, “You’re right.”
---
That evening, Dorian called.
“I want you to meet someone,” he said.
Celeste hesitated. “Another investigator?”
“Not exactly.”
---
They met in a private townhouse in the West Village.
The doorman didn’t ask her name. Just opened the door like he’d been expecting her for hours.
Inside, the space was all dark velvet and soft gold. Quiet jazz played low in the background. Candles flickered without scent.
Dorian met her at the second-floor landing. No smile this time.
“Come on,” he said, leading her through a narrow corridor into a study.
There, waiting with a laptop and two burner phones, was a woman in her mid-forties. Chic blazer. Sharp cheekbones. Eyes like a hawk’s.
“This is Evie Mercer,” Dorian said. “She’s not on payroll. She’s not searchable. And she’s better than half the people working for Homeland.”
Evie didn’t offer her hand. Just nodded once. “I take bad men down for smart women.”
Celeste liked her instantly.
Evie spun the laptop around. “Here’s your live feed.”
On screen: a mirrored desktop—Grant’s. Someone had embedded surveillance software through a corrupted email Evie had drafted from Sienna’s “work account.”
Celeste leaned in. “This is illegal.”
“Not if I don’t get caught,” Evie said with a shrug.
“I don’t want fallout.”
“You won’t have any. Everything we find, we document and clean. Anything dirty stays off-grid. What lands in court is sanitized and bulletproof.”
Celeste turned to Dorian. “And why are you giving me access to this?”
He looked at her for a long beat.
“Because I want you to see what you’re up against. And because you deserve to win.”
Her eyes flicked away.
She hated that something in her chest moved at that.
---
For the next hour, Evie walked her through emails, bank transfers, encrypted files—some deleted and recovered, others actively being sent.
They had it all.
Grant’s plan wasn’t just to siphon money. He intended to sell privileged information from Celeste’s cases—leak them quietly, weaponize them later in a false whistleblower claim, all while appearing like the wounded husband of a controlling wife.
Classic.
Textbook.
And very poorly executed.
Evie left them alone after that, promising a “clean report” by Friday.
Celeste stood in the study, staring down at the firelit coals.
“I thought I was too smart to be played like this,” she said.
“You were,” Dorian said quietly. “This wasn’t a game. It was an ambush.”
She turned. “I let her into my life. I mentored her.”
“Which is why she needed to gut you to feel powerful.”
Celeste studied him.
“What did someone do to you?” she asked suddenly. “To make you this good at spotting betrayal?”
Dorian’s jaw flexed once. Then he answered:
“My father tried to embezzle from my mother. She was the one with the real empire. I watched her stay silent for too long. I promised myself I’d never let another woman pay the price of that kind of silence.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Celeste stepped closer. Her voice was low.
“I don’t need saving, Dorian.”
“I know,” he said. “But even dragons need firewood.”
That made her laugh. Quietly. Honestly.
She hadn’t realized how long it had been since she'd laughed.
---
At midnight, she stood in her living room, lights off, phone in hand.
She opened her message thread with Grant.
Typed a single word:
“Why?”
Then deleted it.
Instead, she called Naomi.
“I want every case Sienna had contact with reviewed. If anything was touched, flagged, or emailed twice, pull it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Naomi said. “And Celeste…”
“What?”
“If you need someone to testify… I’ll do it.”
Celeste’s throat tightened.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I won’t need anyone to testify.”
Her voice was steel.
“I’m going to end them before it ever gets to court.”
- Writer
