Under a Borrowed Name

Chapter 4: Questions With No Good Answers

Sofia Kane had a talent for ambushing people in places where walking away looked rude.

This time it was the executive kitchen, a glass walled room on the fortieth floor stocked with better coffee than the rest of the building deserved, where Elena had gone at nine in the morning specifically because she thought it would be empty.

"You look like you didn't sleep," Sofia said, perched on the counter like she owned it, which in a way she did.

"Late night with your brother and a shell company."

"Halloway Group." Sofia said the name like she was testing its weight. "I heard. Whole floor's buzzing about it."

Elena poured her coffee slowly, giving her hands something to do besides betray her. "You seem well informed for someone who isn't technically on the board."

"I make it my business to be well informed. Family trait, unfortunately." Sofia hopped down from the counter, closing some of the distance between them with the kind of casual movement that felt anything but casual. "Can I ask you something, Marchetti?"

"You're going to whether I say yes or not."

A small, sharp smile. "You're very good at this job. Suspiciously good. You walked in three weeks ago and already my brother trusts you with things he doesn't even tell our family's own lawyers."

"That's called competence."

"Sure. Or it's called someone who already knew exactly what she was walking into." Sofia's eyes did not leave her face, and Elena had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of being read like a document someone already suspected was forged. "I ran a background check. Standard stuff, nothing invasive. You know what I found?"

Elena kept her expression perfectly neutral, though her pulse had picked up in a way she despised. "Enlighten me."

"Nothing." Sofia let the word sit there. "Not nothing bad. Just nothing. No university records before your consulting career started. No family listed anywhere public. It's like you were built starting six years ago, fully formed, with excellent references and absolutely no history."

"Some of us prefer privacy."

"Some of us don't have a reason to erase an entire childhood." Sofia tilted her head, and for a moment the sharpness in her expression softened into something closer to genuine curiosity. "I'm not trying to threaten you. I actually don't think you're dangerous, not in the way that matters to me. But I watch my brother, and I watched the way he looked at those Halloway documents last night like his whole world was cracking open again, the way it did when our mother died and he found out our father had been lying to her for years too. I don't know what you're hiding, Marchetti. But if it's going to hurt him, I'd rather know now than after."

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and stopped.

"I'm not here to hurt anyone," Elena said, and hated that it was, in its own complicated way, no longer entirely a lie.

"Everyone says that right before they do." Sofia picked up her own coffee, already turning to leave, tossing one last look over her shoulder. "For what it's worth, I hope you're telling the truth. He doesn't let many people in. Would be a shame to watch him do it again just to get burned."

She left Elena alone with a coffee going cold in her hands and a warning that felt less like a threat and more like a mirror.

Two floors below, in an office with far less glass and far more paper, Damian sat across from his head of communications, staring at an email that had just landed from a reporter at the Financial Herald.

Following up regarding irregularities in the 2021 Voss Real Estate acquisition. Specifically interested in the role of Halloway Group and any consulting arrangements tied to Richard Voss's departure from the company. Happy to discuss before publication.

"How did they get Halloway's name," Damian said, low and controlled in the way that everyone in the building had learned meant he was one wrong answer away from losing his temper entirely.

"We don't know yet. Could be a leak inside legal, could be something from the Whitfield board meeting, could be an old employee talking. We're looking into it."

"Find out. Today." Damian closed the laptop, jaw tight. "And get me everything we have on the Voss deal. Everything. Not the sanitized version legal keeps for the board. The real file."

"Sir, that predates your time running the company, most of it would be in your father's private archives, not corporate records"

"Then get me access to my father's archives." He stood, already reaching for his jacket, some old cold feeling settling into his chest that he recognized from childhood, the specific dread of realizing his father had built something on a foundation nobody was allowed to look at too closely. "I want to know exactly what happened to Richard Voss five years ago, and I want to know before some reporter tells me instead."

He did not yet know the name meant anything beyond a line in a shareholder filing.

He had no idea it was the name of the woman standing three floors above him, hands wrapped around a cooling cup of coffee, staring out at the city and wondering how much longer she had before the ground gave way beneath both of them at once.