Watched By The Billionaire

Chapter Ten — He'd Been Here Before

A man was parked outside her building when she went to shut the window that night — dark car, decent suit, an article held open like he actually intended to read it. He glanced up, caught her watching, and smiled before going back to the page.

Adrian's man. Fast work, if it was.

She checked every lock before bed anyway. At least someone was watching her on purpose now.

He was still there in the morning, same car, same article, like he hadn't slept or didn't need to.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning." She studied him a beat longer than politeness required. "Did Adrian tell you where he'll be today?"

"No, ma'am. I'm just here to protect you."

Either true, or exactly what he'd say either way. She decided she preferred not knowing.

"Just don't break anything in my apartment," she said, and left him working out whether that had been a joke.

The office was busier than usual when she got in — a political convention coming up meant every desk had been called in early, briefings stacked on briefings. She got two hours of real work done before her concentration started slipping, her father's file pulling at the edge of her thoughts the way it always did now, uninvited.

The call came just before lunch, pulling her out of a note she'd been staring at without writing anything.

"Ms. Bennett? This is Tiana, from the library. You asked me to call if anything new came in on those files."

"Go ahead."

"We pulled some boxes from the old archive. Looks like a few documents belong with what you were already looking at."

She was there within twenty minutes of her break starting.

The new pages were mostly what she expected — contract notes, delivery records, more names threading through the same web of dissolved oil companies. She photographed what she could and started sliding the folder back into place.

One document had been filed crooked. It slipped loose as she pushed the folder home.

She caught it before it hit the floor, and her stomach caught with it.

A list of names — Conman Oil's old management, the same men who'd resurfaced across three shell companies since. Signatures beside each one, formal, notarized, the kind of paperwork that only existed because someone had once needed to prove a deal was legitimate on paper, whatever it actually was underneath.

Beneath the stamp at the bottom: Kane Industries.

She sat down without deciding to. Read it again, hoping the second read would say something different.

It didn't.

She had his number dialed before she'd fully thought through what she was going to say.

Adrian excused himself from a boardroom mid-sentence when her name came up on his screen.

"Hey."

"How long have you known your company was doing business with Conman Oil?"

A pause, but not a long one — not the pause of a man caught off guard. "I don't know what you're referring to."

"Don't." Her voice came out sharper than she'd planned. "I'm holding the contract. Your company's name is on it."

"I'm sorry you found out this way."

"That's not an answer."

"A couple of years," he said, finally. Steady, the way he said everything.

"That's it? A couple of years?"

"Some things are better controlled than exposed, Nora."

She didn't say anything. There wasn't a version of the next sentence that wouldn't have made it worse. She thought about every time he'd told her to trust the process instead of the evidence, every time that had sounded like wisdom instead of what it apparently was — a man managing exposure the same way he managed everything else.

"Are you still there?"

"I have to go."

She hung up before he could say anything that might have almost made sense, because she didn't trust herself not to believe it.

She photographed the document, slid it back where it belonged, and went back to her desk for the rest of the day without absorbing a single word of anything she read.

That night, alone, she opened the photo again on her laptop and zoomed in — the date, the signature, the seal — turning it over the way she'd turned over her father's report a hundred times, looking for the detail that would finally make the shape of it hold still.

Her fingers stopped scrolling.

Something smaller than the company name. Almost invisible, folded into the shadow beneath the official signature — a second one, fainter, half-erased by time but not gone.

Adrian Kane.

Not the company. Him. Personally.

She sat back slowly, chest rising and falling like the air in the room had thinned.

Every warning he'd given her. Every time he'd redirected her research, every time he'd claimed to be protecting her from something he wouldn't name —

He hadn't been protecting her from a stranger's crime.

He'd been standing inside it before she ever walked into his office.

Adrian sat alone in his office long after the boardroom had cleared, her voice still sitting in his chest where he hadn't asked it to.

I have to go.

Three words, and somehow they'd landed harder than anything the board had thrown at him all year. He was used to people being angry with him. Anger he could manage — it had a shape, a predictable half-life. This had been something else. Disappointment, maybe. The specific kind that only mattered because it was coming from someone whose opinion he'd stopped being able to file away as noise.

That was the part he hadn't planned for.

He'd told himself, at the start of all this, that keeping her close was strategy — contain the risk, control the story, manage the fallout before it reached her. He'd believed that, mostly, right up until the moment today when she'd hung up the phone and the first thing he'd felt wasn't concern about exposure.

It was the fear of having lost something he hadn't fully admitted he wanted.

He thought about the board's growing unease, the tabloids already circling, Bidwell's quiet, pointed questions about how much latitude he was giving "the journalist." A marriage would silence half of it in a single announcement — solve the optics, solve the access problem, put a legal wall around her that even Conman Oil's remnants would think twice about testing.

Strategy. That was the word he reached for first, the way he always did.

It didn't feel like the whole truth anymore.