LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TWELVE

She called David before she called Kael.

That was deliberate. She needed her lawyer's mind on it first — clean, clinical, unattached to anything personal — before she allowed herself the conversation that was going to be harder to keep purely professional.

David picked up on the second ring. She heard the sound of papers in the background, which meant he was still at his desk at nine in the evening, which was one of the many reasons she paid him what she paid him.

"I read the transaction records," she said.

"So did I. Your friend sent me a copy an hour ago."

She noted the word friend and set it aside. "Fotso Advisory initiated the entire thing. This wasn't opportunistic — it was constructed."

"Agreed. And the financial information they fed Meridian came from somewhere inside your operation. The level of detail is too specific for anything publicly available." A pause. "I've been looking at Raymond Mbah."

"So have I."

"His previous employer — a consulting firm in Douala — dissolved eighteen months after he left. One of the founding partners of that firm had a joint venture with EkoCorp in 2021. The venture failed, but the relationship didn't." Another pause, longer this time. "It's circumstantial. But it's the right shape."

"It's enough to move on," Aisha said.

"Not legally. Not yet. We need something direct — a payment, a communication, a document that puts him in the room." David's voice was careful, measured. "If we move too early and he lawyers up, we lose the thread entirely."

She stood at her window, the city spread out below her in its familiar nighttime arrangement of lights and noise. "How long do you need?"

"Another week. Maybe ten days."

"You have seven." She paused. "David. Nobody outside this conversation, your office, Kael's team, and Sule. Not even whispers."

"Understood." A beat. "Aisha. Be careful. Whoever built this was patient. Patient people don't stop when they're close."

She thanked him and hung up.

Then she stood at the window for a moment, letting the weight of that last sentence settle properly before she allowed herself to pick up the phone again.

Kael answered before the second ring.

"You read it," he said.

"All forty-seven pages." She moved away from the window and sat in her chair. "Fotso Advisory initiated contact with Meridian. They brought the deal to the table and dressed it up as an opportunity."

"Yes."

"Which means whoever is behind this didn't just want TechNova to fail. They wanted to control who bought the debt. They needed a specific buyer." She paused. "They needed you, Kael."

The silence on his end was brief but substantial. "Because of our history."

"Because of our history. A distracted CEO fighting a personal war on two fronts — emotional and financial — is considerably easier to defeat than one who is simply fighting for her company." Her voice was steady. She had processed the anger already, in the forty minutes between reading the documents and making this call. What remained was colder and more useful. "Someone knew about us. About what we were to each other."

"That narrows it considerably," Kael said quietly. "Three years ago, very few people knew the details of our relationship."

"I've been thinking about that." She pulled her notepad toward her. "On your end — who knew?"

A pause while he thought. "My PA at the time. My brother. Two close friends, neither of whom have any connection to the Cameroonian business world." Another pause. "And my cardiologist. Who knew I left because of the diagnosis and who knew your name because I —" He stopped briefly. "Because I mentioned you more than once during treatment."

She absorbed that quietly. "On my side — Sule knew we had been together, in general terms. My mother. And one person I trusted completely at the time and haven't spoken to since."

"Who?"

She looked at the name she had written on her notepad twenty minutes ago, when the thought had first arrived and she had needed to make it concrete before she could look at it properly.

"Her name is Diane Ngo," she said. "She was my co-founder. Before TechNova was TechNova — when it was still an idea and a shared Google Drive folder. We built the first version of the product together." She paused. "We had a falling out eighteen months before the loan crisis. A serious one, over equity and direction. She left and took nothing, which I thought at the time was either generous or proud."

"And now?"

"Now I think it might have been strategic." She set the pen down. "She knew everything, Kael. The business, the finances, the internal structure. And she knew about you. She was there at the beginning of us. She was the one who told me you were worth trusting."

The irony of that sat between them like something with edges.

"Do you know where she is now?" Kael asked.

"I know exactly where she is." She had looked, in the quiet hours of Tuesday night, when the question had first begun to form. "She runs a boutique consulting firm in Douala. Established fourteen months ago." She paused. "The same month Raymond Mbah joined TechNova."

The silence that followed was the kind that meant two people had arrived at the same place simultaneously and neither of them was entirely ready for what it meant.

"Aisha." His voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "This is bigger than a business dispute."

"I know."

"If Diane Ngo and Martin Eko have been coordinating this from the beginning — the insider access, the debt engineering, the buyer selection — this is coordinated corporate sabotage. Possibly fraud. Definitely actionable."

"I know that too." She looked at the notepad. Two names. A shape that had been assembling itself for weeks was now fully visible, and it was uglier than she had imagined and cleaner than she had feared. "David needs seven days. Can your legal team work in parallel without crossing wires?"

"I'll make sure of it."

"And Kael." She paused. "Whatever happens with the legal case — I need you to understand something. If Diane is behind this, it isn't just a business betrayal. She was my friend. She was the first person who believed in this company almost as much as I did." Her voice remained steady, but only just. "I need to know that when the time comes to face her, I have the full picture. Every piece of it. No surprises."

"You'll have everything I have," he said. "I promise you that."

She believed him. The belief arrived without argument, which was its own kind of answer to questions she had not quite finished asking herself.

"Get some rest," she said.

"You too." A pause. "Aisha. You're handling this with extraordinary composure."

"I'm handling it," she said. "The composure is something I'll assess later."

A quiet sound — that low, real laugh she had come to recognise. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Kael."

She did not rest immediately.

She sat at her desk and wrote three pages of notes in longhand — everything she knew, everything she suspected, every connection she had mapped, laid out in the clear sequential logic her father had taught her. Engineering thinking, he had called it. You don't solve a problem by staring at it. You break it into what you know, what you don't know, and what you need to find out. Then you work the list.

She worked the list until midnight.

Then she closed the notepad, washed her face, and stood in her bathroom looking at her reflection for a moment — not critically, just honestly. The woman who looked back at her was tired and certain and undefeated, which was the only combination that had ever mattered.

She went to bed.

She thought, in the last moments before sleep, about what her mother had said. How a thing begins is not the same as what it becomes.

Someone had tried to use Kael as a weapon against her. Had calculated, coldly and precisely, that his presence in her life would divide her attention and weaken her position.

What they had not calculated — what they could not have known, because she had not known it herself until recently — was that the opposite was true. That having him back, for all its complexity and history and unresolved geography, had made her sharper rather than softer. More certain rather than less.

She fell asleep thinking about that.

Outside, the city breathed its night breath, unhurried and indifferent.

And somewhere in it, two people who had been used as instruments in someone else's plan were quietly, steadily, becoming the most inconvenient thing their enemy had not accounted for.

A united front.

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