My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Twelve: Marcus's Ledger

Marcus's POV

Marcus had started the file almost by accident.

It began as ordinary due diligence, a request from Robert Ashworth's office, routed through Marcus because Callum was occupied at the shared office and someone needed to process the paperwork, for a set of financial records related to Voss & Marsh's recent contract history.

Nothing unusual on its face. Firms researched each other constantly, especially during a joint bid; it was practically standard practice.

What caught Marcus's attention was the specificity. The request wasn't for the kind of general due diligence a firm might run before a merger, public filings, standard credit checks, the usual. It asked, instead, for anything related to the Brindlewood contract collapse specifically, anything involving Dane Okafor by name rather than the firm generally, and a note, buried at the bottom in Robert's own clipped handwriting:

*anything embarrassing.*

Marcus had processed a great many strange requests in two years working for the Ashworth family. He had never processed one phrased quite that plainly.

He didn't say anything, not yet. He filed the request the way he was asked to, and he also, quietly, without telling anyone, made a copy of it for himself, tucked into a folder on his personal drive labeled, with the specific dry humor he reserved for things he suspected he'd need to reference again someday, *just in case.*

Over the following weeks, the folder grew.

A request for background on Claire Vasquez, oddly specific, oddly timed to right after the gala where she'd been seen standing protectively at Dane's side. An email thread between Robert and someone at a law firm Marcus didn't recognize, subject line redacted from the version Marcus was meant to see but visible for half a second before the attachment reloaded properly.

A calendar entry, deleted almost as soon as it was created, labeled only

*Contingency_ H.M.*, which Marcus was fairly certain stood for Halloway Museum, though he couldn't yet say what a contingency plan for a museum contract needed to contain that required this much secrecy.

He didn't fully understand what he was building yet. He only understood, with the specific instinct of someone who'd spent two years learning to read the smallest shifts in the Ashworth family's temperature, that whatever it was, it wasn't good, and that Callum, currently happier than Marcus had ever seen him, currently humming off-key over blueprints with a man his father had all but called a target, had no idea how large the thing gathering above him had already gotten.

Marcus thought, more than once, about telling Callum directly. Each time, he talked himself out of it, not yet, not until he had something concrete enough to be useful rather than just alarming, not until he understood the shape of what his boss's father was actually planning instead of just its edges.

It was, he would realize much later, exactly the same mistake Callum was making with Dane. Waiting for a better time to say the hard thing, and letting the waiting cost more than the saying ever would have.

For now, though, the folder just grew, quietly, on a personal drive nobody else knew existed, evidence accumulating in the dark the way evidence tends to before anyone realizes exactly how much of it there's going to be.