Married to the Wrong Billionaire

chapter 13

We had seven hours.

That was the math. The board meeting was scheduled for nine the next morning. Clara needed minimum four hours to prepare the preliminary package once we gave her the go signal. Caiden's regulatory contact — a woman named Dr. Amara Solis at the FCA's international division — was three time zones away, which meant reaching her before her working day ended gave us a hard deadline of midnight.

Seven hours to do what we'd planned to do in twenty-four.

Caiden was already on his phone before I'd finished explaining. Moving through the apartment with the operational focus I'd seen in Eleanor's kitchen — not the managed version of him, not the billionaire CEO performing confidence, just a man who had decided something and was executing it with everything he had.

"Marcus," he said into the phone. "The board meeting. Who called the vote." A pause. "All seven." Another pause, his jaw tightening. "He has the votes already. He wouldn't have called it if he didn't." He looked at me. "I need you at Clara's office in an hour. Bring everything Raymond secured before the Singapore unit was cleared." He hung up.

"He has the votes," I said.

"Six of the nine board members were appointed during my father's tenure." He was already at his laptop, pulling up files. "He's been managing that board for twenty years. If he calls a vote to restructure the historical assets division and formally absorb it into the main operational structure, it passes nine to nothing and every piece of evidence connected to that division becomes subject to company privilege." He looked at me. "We can't challenge that legally. Not quickly enough."

"So we have to move before the meeting," I said.

"We have to make the meeting irrelevant." He turned the laptop toward me. A contact file — Dr. Amara Solis, FCA International Division, a photograph of a woman in her forties with the specific look of someone who had spent twenty years being the most rigorous person in every room she entered. "I've worked with Amara for three years. She's the reason the Black company's operational division has a clean record — she audited us eighteen months ago and we passed because there was nothing to find." He paused. "She's going to be furious when she finds out what was sitting in the historical division."

"Furious enough to move tonight," I said.

"Amara doesn't need fury to move. She needs evidence." He looked at the drives on the counter. "Which we have."

---

I called Edward while Caiden contacted Clara.

He picked up on the second ring, which meant he'd been waiting. "Victor's moving faster than I can manage," he said before I could speak. "He knows about the drives. He doesn't know what's on them but he knows they exist and he knows you have them."

"Who told him," I said.

"Someone in the café." A pause. "I've spent three hours trying to identify who. I don't know yet. It wasn't anyone connected to my operation — whoever it was came from his side, which means he had someone watching the café independently." His voice was tight. "He doesn't trust me completely. He never has. He just trusted me enough."

"Can you still buy us time."

"I told him the drives are likely decoys — that Vivienne's case has always been circumstantial and that whatever you're carrying is probably copies of copies." A pause. "He believed it enough to slow down. But the board meeting is already set and he won't cancel it regardless of what I tell him about the evidence."

"We're moving tonight," I said. "Clara, Caiden's FCA contact, everything. We're not waiting for the meeting."

A silence. Then: "That's the right call." Another pause. "Lena. There's something I haven't told you." His voice shifted — careful in a new way, the careful of someone approaching something they've been deciding how to say. "The person in the café. I don't know who it was. But I know Victor got the information within twenty minutes of you leaving." He paused. "The only people who knew you were meeting me this morning were the people you told."

The apartment felt very still suddenly.

"I didn't tell anyone," I said. "I left before I told Caiden. The unknown sender told me to come alone."

"I know," Edward said. "Which means either your phone was compromised or someone was already watching you before you left the building."

I thought about the devices in the apartment. The one under the apple. The ones in the living room and the office that Eleanor had told us about. We'd been careful since finding the kitchen device — hadn't said anything actionable, had performed the narrative Victor needed to hear. But I'd received the message from Edward on my phone. In the apartment. Before I left.

"The phone," I said.

"If Ji-yeon had access to your device at any point," Edward said carefully, "she could have installed monitoring software. Everything on your phone — messages, location, calls — would go to Victor's network."

I looked at the phone in my hand. The device I'd been using to communicate with Edward. With Vivienne. With the unknown sender. With Marcus and Eleanor and Clara.

Victor had potentially seen all of it.

"Edward," I said. "If he's seen everything on my phone—"

"He knows about Vivienne," Edward said. "He knows about Eleanor's lawyer. He knows about Raymond Loh." A pause. "He may know about me."

The seven-hour window was suddenly feeling much smaller.

"How fast can he move against all of those people," I said.

"Against Vivienne — quickly. She has no institutional protection." His voice was very controlled. "Against Raymond — less quickly, he's in Singapore and Victor's reach there is significant but not immediate. Against Clara — she's Eleanor's lawyer, which means she has the Black family's historical legal standing as implicit protection, Victor will be cautious." A pause. "Against me — if he knows I've been working against him, immediately."

"You need to get out," I said.

"I need to make sure he doesn't know yet," he corrected. "If I disappear suddenly he'll know for certain. I need to stay in position long enough for you to move." A pause. "But Vivienne needs to be warned. Now."

I was already moving toward Caiden's office. Knocked and pushed the door open simultaneously. He looked up from the phone call he was on — Clara, I could hear her voice — and I held up my hand. Five fingers. The gesture for stop, wait, something's wrong.

He read it immediately. Said into the phone: "I'll call you back in two minutes." Hung up. Looked at me.

"My phone is compromised," I said. "Ji-yeon's software. Victor has seen everything — Vivienne, Edward, Clara, all of it." I held his gaze. "Vivienne is the most exposed. She has no protection."

He was on his feet before I finished the sentence. "Marcus will go to her."

"Marcus doesn't know where she is."

"Do you."

"The café she met me in yesterday. She said she'd be working there this afternoon." I thought fast. "But if Victor has my location history he knows the café too."

Caiden looked at me for exactly one second. Then he picked up his desk phone — the landline, nothing Ji-yeon could have touched — and called Marcus. The conversation lasted forty seconds. He hung up and looked at me.

"Marcus is already moving," he said. "He'll find her." He picked up a different phone from his desk drawer — a basic model, sealed in packaging, the kind you bought with cash. "I keep two of these," he said, opening the packaging with efficient hands. "Emergency use. Not registered to anything connected to me." He handed it to me. "From now on, this is your phone. Your other one we leave in the apartment saying things Victor needs to hear."

I took it. The clean weight of it, nothing installed, nothing watching. "Clara," I said.

"I'll reach her through the landline. Victor knows about her but she has enough legal standing that he'll be cautious about moving against her directly." He was already dialing. "The FCA contact is the priority. If I get Amara moving tonight, Victor can call every board meeting he wants and it won't matter — a formal FCA investigation supersedes any internal company restructuring."

He reached Clara. The conversation was thirty seconds — short because everything had already been said, short because Clara was the kind of person who needed one sentence to understand a changed situation and two sentences to have a response ready.

Then he called Amara Solis.

I stood in his office doorway and listened to him make the most important phone call of his life with the specific calm of a man who had spent four years building exactly this kind of trust for exactly this kind of moment. He didn't perform. He didn't manage. He told her the truth, directly, in the order it needed to be told, and I watched her respond on the other end of the line with the urgency the truth deserved.

When he hung up he looked at me. "She's opening a preliminary inquiry tonight. It'll be formal by morning." He paused. "The board meeting will happen. But it'll happen while an active FCA inquiry is in progress, which means any vote to restructure the historical division will be immediately flagged as potential obstruction."

"Victor walks into a trap of his own making," I said.

"He called the meeting to bury the evidence," Caiden said. "Instead it becomes the moment he's on record trying to obstruct an active investigation."

The office was quiet for a moment. The city outside, doing its evening thing, indifferent and lit.

"Vivienne," I said.

His new phone buzzed. Marcus.

He read the message. Something in his expression settled — not relief, the thing adjacent to relief that arrived when a specific fear was removed. "Marcus has her," he said. "She's safe."

I sat down in the chair across from his desk. The drives were in my pocket, both of them, and the clean phone was in my hand, and somewhere across the city an FCA inquiry was being opened with my father's name at the center of it, and somewhere else Victor Black was looking at whatever his monitoring software had last sent him and preparing for a board meeting that was going to become something very different from what he'd planned.

"Caiden," I said.

He looked at me.

"What did you mean this morning." I held his gaze. "Your message. *I've known since the restaurant.*"

He was quiet for a moment. The operational focus didn't leave his face exactly — it shifted, made room for something else alongside it. "I meant that from the moment you sat down across from me I knew you weren't whoever I was supposed to meet," he said. "Not because of anything you said. Just—" he paused. "You signed the document and then you told me immediately that you'd come through the wrong door. You didn't wait to see what you could get from the situation. You told me the truth before you knew whether the truth would cost you anything."

"That's not knowing something," I said.

"It's knowing what kind of person someone is," he said. "Which turns out to be the only thing that matters."

The city moved outside his window. Somewhere in it Marcus was with Vivienne. Somewhere in it Clara was building a package. Somewhere in it Amara Solis was opening an inquiry that would still be running long after tonight.

"We're not done yet," I said.

"No," he agreed. "But we're further than we were this morning."

His desk phone rang. Clara. He picked it up and I stood and went to the window and looked at the city and thought about wrong doors and what they opened into and whether any door, entered wrong enough, could become exactly right.

I thought it could.

I thought it already had.