LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The transaction records arrived on Wednesday evening, as promised.

Aisha was in a meeting when the email came through — she felt her phone vibrate in her jacket pocket and knew without checking that it was him. She had developed, without intending to, a specific awareness of Kael's communications. The timing of them. The weight they carried before she even opened them. It was the kind of awareness she would have found alarming if she had stopped long enough to examine it, so she had made the practical decision not to.

She finished the meeting, said the right things to the right people, and waited until she was alone in her office before she opened the email.

The records were extensive — forty-seven pages of transaction history, internal communications, intermediary agreements, and financial transfers, all organised with the precision of someone who understood that information was only useful if it was navigable. At the top, a single line from Kael:

Read pages 12 through 19 first. — K.

She went directly to page twelve.

What she found there took her breath away in the specific, quiet way that serious things did — not dramatically, not with any outward sign, just the sudden stillness of a mind that had found what it was looking for and needed a moment to absorb the weight of it.

Fotso Advisory had not merely been inserted into the transaction chain. It had been the origin point. The firm had approached Meridian Finance first — not the other way around — with a proposal to acquire TechNova's loan at a structured discount, framed as a distressed asset opportunity. Meridian had been reluctant initially. There were three rounds of negotiation over six weeks before they agreed.

And throughout those six weeks, Fotso Advisory had been feeding Meridian a carefully curated picture of TechNova's financial vulnerabilities — information that was accurate in its details but dishonest in its framing. Numbers presented without context. Projections stripped of the conditions that made them reasonable. A portrait of a struggling company painted from the inside, by someone who knew exactly which colours to use.

Someone with access.

She set the documents down and looked at her hands for a moment. Then she picked them back up and kept reading.

By page nineteen she had three names circled, two timelines mapped on a fresh sheet of paper, and the particular cold clarity of a woman who had built a company from nothing and knew, bone-deep, what it felt like when something she had created was being used against her.

She called Sule first.

He answered on the second ring, the background noise of his apartment filtering through — television, the sound of a child laughing somewhere nearby. She had forgotten, sometimes, that her team had lives outside of the work. That they went home to warm rooms and ordinary evenings. It was one of the things running a company did to you — compressed your sense of other people's dimensions.

"I need to meet tomorrow," she said. "Early. Before the office fills."

"Seven?" he said immediately. No questions. No complaint about the hour.

"Seven. Bring what you found on EkoCorp and anything else you've turned up since we last spoke."

"I'll be there."

She thanked him and hung up. Then she sat in the silence of her office and looked at the city for a long time, the documents spread across her desk like a map of something that had been built in the dark, piece by careful piece, while she was busy building something in the light.

The audacity of it, she thought. The patience.

Whoever had constructed this had taken their time. Had planned carefully, moved quietly, and covered their tracks with the confidence of someone who did not expect to be found. They had underestimated her. That was their first mistake.

Their second was involving Kael.

Because whatever complications his return had introduced — and there were several, none of them small — he had also introduced resources, a legal team, and a perspective on the transaction chain that she could not have accessed alone. He had become, entirely against anyone's intentions, an asset rather than a liability.

She almost smiled at the irony of that.

She called him last.

It was late — past ten — and she hesitated for a moment before dialling, conscious of the hour and of the line between professional necessity and something else that she had not yet fully mapped.

He answered immediately. "I was wondering when you'd call."

"You knew I'd read it tonight."

"I know how you work." Said simply, without self-congratulation. Just a fact about her that he had stored carefully and retrieved accurately. "Pages twelve through nineteen."

"Yes." She leaned back in her chair. "Fotso Advisory initiated the whole thing. They went to Meridian with a ready-made case for acquiring the debt. Someone gave them that case from the inside."

"That was my read too." His voice was steady, focused — the version of him that matched her frequency when there was serious work to do. "The level of financial detail in the documents they presented to Meridian couldn't have come from public sources. Quarterly projections, internal cost structures, pipeline forecasts. That's not information that leaks accidentally."

"It was given deliberately," she said. "By someone who wanted TechNova to appear weaker than it was."

"And who wanted a specific buyer at the end of the chain." A pause. "Me."

"Yes." She said it plainly. They had both been circling this conclusion for days and there was no longer any point in approaching it carefully. "Someone who knew our history decided that your presence in this situation would be the most effective way to destabilise me. Two problems in one transaction — a company in financial difficulty and a CEO too distracted by the past to fight properly."

The silence that followed was brief and weighted.

"They miscalculated," Kael said quietly.

"Significantly." She looked at her notepad. "I need your legal team to start building a formal record of the Fotso Advisory communications. Everything timestamped and sourced. David is working the Meridian angle — I don't want the two lines crossing until we're ready to move."

"Understood. I'll have my team briefed by morning."

"And Kael." She paused. "Thank you for sending the records unredacted. For trusting me with the full picture."

A beat. "I told you — we're in the same fight."

"I know." She looked at the documents spread across her desk. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Aisha. Go home."

"I'm in the office."

"I know. Go home anyway."

She looked around her office — the files, the cold tea, the city outside the window doing its patient nighttime thing. Then she closed the documents, stacked them neatly, and began shutting down her laptop.

She was not going home because he had suggested it. She was going home because it was the sensible thing to do and she had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

She told herself this all the way to the car park.

It was almost convincing.

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