Chapter Four: A Name From Before
1181 Words
Sebastian read the message four times before he let himself react to it.
I know things about your new secretary friend that might interest you.
The number wasn't saved in his phone, but he didn't need a name attached to know exactly who'd sent it. Only one person had both the motive and the audacity to reach out to him like this, after everything, like the last eighteen months hadn't happened at all.
Vanessa Cole.
His cousin. The woman who'd sat across from him at family dinners for a decade, who'd managed his logistics division with a smile he'd never once questioned, right up until the morning his auditors discovered four years of falsified shipping manifests and a shell company with her signature on it. He'd trusted her with access to systems he barely let his own board see. He'd trusted her, full stop, the way you trust family, without ever once checking whether it was earned.
She'd taken almost thirty million dollars before anyone caught it. She'd have taken more if he hadn't started noticing the pattern himself, quietly, in the six months before he ever brought in an outside auditor to confirm what his gut had already told him.
He'd had her arrested personally. Sat in the room while it happened. Watched her expression go from disbelief to fury to something colder, something that had stayed with him longer than he wanted to admit, right before security walked her out.
How did you get this number, he typed back, and immediately regretted giving her the satisfaction of a response at all.
The reply came fast, like she'd been waiting.
I still have friends in that building, Sebastian. You'd be amazed what people will tell you for the right price. Funny thing about loyalty. You taught me it doesn't really exist. I'm just applying the lesson.
His jaw tightened. Leave Nora out of whatever this is.
Nora. So that's her name. A pause, three dots blinking, then vanishing, then returning, the kind of theater Vanessa had always been good at. I don't want anything from her. I want something from you. And I think you'll find I'm very patient about getting it.
He didn't answer that one. He set the phone face down on the desk, hard enough that the sound of it drew a glance from the cleaning crew working their way across the far side of the floor, and sat very still, trying to separate the cold, clear part of his mind that handled threats like this from the part that was still thinking about the warmth of Nora's cheek under his fingers twenty minutes ago.
He needed both parts working. He only had one available right now.
Across the floor, Nora had finished at the printer and was gathering her things, the reports she'd needed done an hour ago finally tucked into a folder, and she glanced toward Sebastian's desk once, briefly, before she caught herself doing it and looked away. He noticed. He noticed everything about her lately, which was becoming a professional liability he didn't have the luxury of indulging, not with Vanessa surfacing after eighteen months of silence, not three days before a board vote that would determine whether he kept control of the company his own grandfather had built.
"Working late again," Nora said, stopping a few feet from his desk, her coat already over one arm. "You should go home. Whatever's in that email isn't going to get less complicated at midnight."
He looked up. She had no idea how right she was, or how much more complicated it had just become in the last five minutes.
"Just a work thing," he said.
"You went pale reading a work thing."
"Did I."
"You did." She studied him a moment, something careful and perceptive in her expression that reminded him, again, why he'd started paying closer attention to her than he probably should have. "You don't have to tell me. But you also don't have to pretend it's nothing when it very clearly isn't."
He almost told her. The impulse surprised him with how strong it was, an urge to hand her the entire truth right there in an empty office, his real name, the company, Vanessa, all of it, just to stop carrying it alone for five minutes. He didn't. He couldn't, not yet, not until he understood exactly what Vanessa was threatening and whether it was a bluff or something with teeth.
"It's an old family situation," he said instead, which was true enough to feel less like a lie than everything else he'd told her in the last three weeks. "Nothing you need to worry about."
Something flickered across her face, there and gone, a flash of hurt so quick he almost missed it, like she'd heard the door close on an invitation to know him better and was already deciding not to mind. "Right. Well." She adjusted the folder against her chest. "Goodnight, Sebastian."
"Nora."
She stopped.
He didn't have anything ready to say, no plan for what came after her name, only the pull of not wanting her to leave with that particular look on her face, the one that said she'd noticed exactly how much he was holding back and had chosen, out of some quiet grace he didn't deserve, not to push.
"Be careful walking to your car," he said finally, which wasn't at all what he'd meant to say, and sounded, even to him, like the kind of thing a man said when he was afraid of something he couldn't name out loud.
She tilted her head slightly, something almost soft entering her expression despite herself. "It's a parking garage with cameras, Sebastian. I'll be fine."
"Still."
A small smile pulled at the corner of her mouth, the first one he'd gotten from her all day that didn't look guarded. "Noted," she said, echoing the word he'd used on her that first day at the printer, and there was enough warmth in the way she said it that he felt it land somewhere under his ribs. "Goodnight."
He watched her walk to the elevator, watched the doors close behind her, and only once she was gone did he pick his phone back up and read Vanessa's last message again.
I'm very patient about getting it.
He typed a single line back, the only response he had the composure left to send.
Name your price. Leave her out of it.
The reply took longer this time. When it came, it wasn't a number.
My price isn't money anymore, Sebastian. Money's boring. I want my name cleared, and I want back in. And if you say no, I have a very interesting story ready for the board about why their new CEO candidate has been playing pretend in Operations for three months, using a fake identity to spy on his own employees.
Sebastian's stomach turned to ice.
How do you know that.
The three dots appeared, then vanished, and this time nothing came at all, and somehow that silence was worse than anything she could have typed.
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