The Sins We Keep

The elevator opened directly into Holt Industries' executive floor, and Nadia Voss stepped out like she owned the place. She didn't. Not yet. But she'd learned a long time ago that the way you walked into a room determined everything about how people treated you inside it. Chin up. Shoulders back. Laptop bag over one shoulder, coffee in hand, her own, bought from the cart downstairs because she didn't accept hospitality from clients until she understood what it was costing them to offer it. The receptionist at the sleek marble desk looked up with the kind of practiced smile that meant you must be important, and I have no idea who you are simultaneously. "Nadia Voss," Nadia said. "I'm here for the audit." The smile flickered. Just barely. "Of course. Mr. Holt's assistant will be right with " "I don't need an escort. I need a workspace. Private, with network access and a door that closes. I was told this was arranged." Another flicker. "Let me just confirm -" "Take your time." Nadia stepped to the side and looked out at the city sprawling forty floors below. London in November, grey and relentless, the Thames a dark ribbon cutting through the concrete. She liked it. It matched her mood. She'd been hired three days ago by Holt Industries' board of directors. Not by Damien Holt himself, a distinction she'd noted immediately and filed away as significant. In her experience, when a board hired an outside forensic auditor without looping in the CEO, one of two things was true: either they didn't trust him, or they were using her to build a case. Sometimes both. She didn't ask which. She never did. She just did her job. The assistant who appeared was young, efficient, and visibly uncomfortable. His name was Theo, and he led her down a hallway lined with abstract art that probably cost more than her flat, past glass walled meeting rooms where people glanced up and then looked quickly away. "Mr. Holt would like a word before you get started," Theo said carefully. "I'm sure he would." "He's." Theo paused as if searching for the diplomatic version. "He was surprised by the board's decision." "I imagine he was." She smiled pleasantly. "Lead the way." Damien Holt's office was at the corner of the building, two full walls of glass looking out over the city. It was the kind of office designed to make visitors feel small, and it would have worked on someone who hadn't grown up sharing a bedroom with two siblings in a council flat, who hadn't learned early that men with big rooms were often compensating for something. He was standing at the window with his back to her when she entered. She used the seconds to observe him the way she observed everything clinically, completely. Tall. Dark suit, no tie, collar open in a way that felt deliberate rather than careless. Dark hair. The kind of stillness that wasn't calm so much as coiled. He knew she was there. He was making her wait. She glanced around the office instead, cataloging. Awards, but turned slightly away from visitors, not for show, then, or he'd have angled them outward. A single photograph on the desk, face down. Books that looked read rather than decorative. No flowers, no personal warmth, nothing that said this is where I live part of my life. It was a workspace. A war room. Interesting. He turned. Nadia had been told he was attractive. She'd filed that information under irrelevant without engaging with it. But there was a difference between being told something and standing in the same room as it, and Damien Holt was, she exhaled slowly through her nose, a problem. Not because he was handsome, though he was, in that severe, constructed way that looked like genetics and discipline in equal measure. It was his eyes. Grey and direct and already taking her apart the same way she'd just been taking apart his office. He didn't smile. Neither did she. "Ms. Voss." His voice was low. Unhurried. A man who'd never needed to raise it to be heard. "Mr. Holt." "Sit down." "I'm fine standing." Something moved across his face, so brief she almost missed it. Not anger. Recalibration. He pulled out the chair across his desk and sat himself, resting one hand flat on the surface, watching her with the focused patience of a man deciding whether to be annoyed or intrigued. "My board hired you without my knowledge," he said. "That's between you and your board." "You're in my building. That makes it between you and me." She met his gaze steadily. "Your board has the authority to commission independent audits under your company's governance charter, section 4.2. You signed off on that charter eighteen months ago. So technically, Mr. Holt, everything happening right now is exactly what you agreed to." The silence that followed was the kind that had texture. He leaned back slowly. "You've read our governance charter." "I read everything before I walk into a room." She let that settle. "I'm not here to be adversarial. I'm here to do a job. I'll need access to financial records from the past seven years, all subsidiary accounts, and any intercompany transactions above five hundred thousand. I'll also need a workspace that isn't visible to your general staff, not because I'm hiding anything, but because people behave differently when they know they're being audited, and I prefer clean data." "And if I obstruct you?" "You won't." His eyes narrowed slightly. "How do you know that?" "Because you're not stupid." She tilted her head. "You don't want whatever's in those records discovered through a messy process with lawyers and headlines. If there's something to find, you'd rather I find it quietly. And if there's nothing to find, you want me out of here fast." She picked up her bag. "Either way, cooperation is in your interest. So. Workspace?" Damien Holt looked at her for a long moment. There was something in his expression she couldn't quite name, not hostility, not attraction, not quite respect. Something more complicated than any of those. Something that made the back of her neck prickle. "Theo will set you up," he said finally. She nodded and turned for the door. "Ms. Voss." She stopped but didn't turn all the way. Just enough. "Be careful what you go looking for." His voice was quiet. Measured. "Not a threat. Just experience." She turned then because it deserved a full look. His face was unreadable, but his eyes weren't, quite. There was something there. Something that looked almost like warning. Like he was telling her the truth in the only way he knew how sideways, deniable, barely visible. "I always find what I'm looking for," she said. "That's why they hired me." She walked out. The workspace Theo arranged was a small glass-walled office off the main corridor, private enough, with network access and a lock on the door. Nadia set up methodically the way she always did. Laptop, external drive, her worn leather notebook where she still wrote observations by hand because screens could be accessed and ink couldn't. She pulled the first batch of records at eleven a.m. and started reading. By noon, she'd found the first thread. It was small, a series of transactions in 2019, routed through a subsidiary she almost wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been looking at the full seven year picture. Shell company. British Virgin Islands registration. The amounts weren't huge, not by Holt Industries' standards, but the timing was odd, and the counterparty didn't exist in any registry she could access. She didn't write it down yet. She just looked at it. Sat with the shape of it. In her experience, the first thread was never the whole picture. It was a doorway. What mattered was what you found when you opened it. She thought about Damien Holt's eyes when he'd told her to be careful. It's not a threat. Just experience. She turned back to the screen. She pulled a different file. Then another. The transactions appeared again, slightly different structures, slightly different amounts, same ghost counterparty under a different name. She cross-referenced. Matched. Made a note in her leather book in the shorthand only she could read. There was definitely something here. The question was how deep it went. She worked through lunch without noticing, the city going dark outside by three thirty because it was November, and London didn't care about anyone's schedule. At some point, coffee appeared on her desk, proper coffee, not the machine kind, in a ceramic cup. She hadn't asked for it. She didn't know who'd left it. She drank it without looking up. At five o'clock, she sat back and rolled her neck, the vertebrae cracking in sequence. She looked at what she'd assembled. Six hours of work, and she had the outline of something she couldn't fully name yet. A shape in the dark. Something that had been buried carefully and a long time ago by someone who knew what they were doing. Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. but the extension was internal. She answered. "You didn't eat." Damien Holt's voice. Low, unhurried, the same as it had been in his office. She looked at the untouched coffee. The absence of food she genuinely hadn't noticed until now. "I eat when I'm not busy," she said. "You're always busy." "How would you know that?" A pause. "Theo mentioned it." She didn't believe him. "Was there something you needed, Mr. Holt?" Another pause, longer. Something about the silence felt less like calculation and more like a man deciding whether to say a true thing. "No," he said finally. "Good night, Ms. Voss." The line went dead. Nadia set her phone down and looked at it for a moment. Then she looked back at her screen, at the shape in the dark that was slowly, patiently becoming something she could see. She thought about being careful. Then, she opened the next file.