My Billionaire's Dirty Secret

Ryan Mast

Ryan Mast was twenty-nine years old when he died.

I sat with his obituary open on my screen until the words stopped meaning anything, then I read it again. There were no details about the circumstances and no mention of family. Just a name, an age, a date, and the word suicide at the end of it like a period on a sentence that should never have been written.

He had this assignment before me. I searched his name through every database I had access to. His bylines at Walsh Digital were still cached, sharp, and well-sourced investigations into corporate fraud and financial misconduct. He was good. The kind of good that made editors nervous when the story got too close to something personal.

Was it really suicide? I thought to myself.

His last published piece was two months before he died. After that, there was nothing else. I tried replying to the anonymous email. It bounced immediately. I realized quickly that whoever sent it didn't want to be found, they just wanted me to look.

I closed my laptop at one in the morning, lay down without undressing, and stared at the ceiling. I was in the middle of something I had walked into voluntarily, for sixty-one dollars and a byline, and a man was dead, my father was dead, and Derek Walsh will be sitting in his office tomorrow morning like none of it had ever happened.

I made a decision somewhere between one and two in the morning. I was going to find out what Ryan Mast knew before I let Derek look me in the eye one more time.

His sister wasn't hard to find. Maya Mast, thirty-one. She was a graphic designer in Brooklyn. I sent her a message through LinkedIn at seven in the morning, kept it short, and told her I was a journalist with questions about her brother's work. I didn't mention Derek and didn't mention the assignment.

She called me back within the hour. "You're from Walsh Digital," she said, but not as a question.

"I was," I said carefully. "I'm working on something independently now."

"He told me about that place," she said. "Before he died. He said he had found something that was going to be the biggest story of his career."

My pulse spiked. "Did he tell you what it was?"

"No," she said. "But he told me the name of the man he was investigating."

I already knew what she was going to say.

"Aiden Blackwood," she said.

I closed my eyes. "Maya, did Ryan ever mention his editor in connection with the story? Derek Walsh?"

The silence on her end lasted long enough that I pulled the phone away to check that the call was still connected.

"Ms. Chen," she said finally, and her voice had dropped to something very careful. "Three days before Ryan died, he called me. He said if anything ever happened to him, I should look at who benefited from the story never running." She stopped. "He said his editor had a personal stake in Blackwood's reputation being destroyed, and that the story was never really about journalism."

My hand was gripping the phone so hard my fingers ached. "Did he say anything else?"

"He said he had proof," she said. "Documents. He hid them somewhere Derek would never think to look." She paused. "Ms. Chen. Do you actually work for Derek Walsh right now?"

I opened my mouth and closed it.

"Please don't lie to me," she said quietly. "I've had enough of that."

"Yes," I said. "But not for much longer."

I was still sitting at my kitchen table with Maya's words turning over in my head when my phone buzzed with a calendar notification.

Property viewing confirmed. Today, 2 pm. Blackwood private appointment.

I hadn't scheduled a fourth showing. I looked at the notification again, at the sender address attached to it, and it was Aiden's assistant. He had scheduled it himself and had his assistant notify me directly, bypassing Derek's referral network entirely.

He's pulling me out of Derek's channel, I thought. Why?

I showed up anyway, but it wasn't a property. The address was a private members club in Midtown, quiet and expensive, the kind of place that didn't have a sign outside because the people who needed to find it already knew where it was.

Aiden was at a corner table when I walked in, jacket on this time, no folder, no property brochures, nothing that looked remotely like a real estate meeting.

He stood when he saw me, which surprised me enough that I stopped walking for half a second.

"Ms. Lin," he said. "Sit down."

I sat, and a server appeared immediately and disappeared just as fast after Aiden said two words I didn't catch.

"This isn't a showing," I said.

"No," he said.

"Then what is it?"I asked.

He looked at me across the table with that same unreadable expression, the one I had spent four meetings trying to decode. "I want to know who sent you," he said.

The air left the room. "I'm sorry?" I said.

"You're not a real estate agent," he said. "You haven't been from the first day, and whoever built your cover identity did a competent job, but they made one mistake." He reached into his jacket and placed a photograph on the table between us, face up.

It was me outside the Walsh Digital offices. Taken from across the street, maybe three weeks ago, before any of this started.

"I had you identified before our first meeting," he said. "I've been waiting to see what you would do with the access." He held my gaze. "Now I'm done waiting."

My mouth had gone completely dry. "Aiden…"

"Who sent you?" he said. "And what did they tell you about me?"

I looked at the photograph on the table between us and understood two things simultaneously.

Aiden Blackwood had known who I was from the very beginning, and he had let me in anyway.