FIFTEEN BILLIONAIRES AFTER ME

Chapter Eleven — The Leak

Chapter Eleven — The Leak

Julian arrived at her office that afternoon without calling first, which she would have found presumptuous from anyone else, but from him it read instead as urgency — the particular controlled speed of a man who'd found something he didn't want to say over the phone.

"I traced the source," he said, closing her office door behind him before he'd even fully caught his breath. "The car outside Hale's farmhouse. The plate that led to Ibarra's shell company. It wasn't Ibarra."

"You said that already. Someone using his structure."

"No — I mean I found who actually authorized the vehicle's lease, three shells down, past the point I could trace two days ago." Julian set his laptop on her desk, turned it toward her, and Amara felt the floor of her stomach drop before she'd even finished reading the name on the screen. "It's a shell owned in trust by Bryant's own firm. Not Bryant personally — I checked, extensively — but someone inside the firm authorized that lease eleven days before Cornelius Hale died. Eleven days, Amara. Before the will was even filed for probate."

The office went very quiet. Amara sat back slowly, feeling six years of trained instinct assemble the shape of the problem before her conscious mind fully caught up. "Someone inside Bryant's firm knew Hale was going to die, or was planning to make sure he did, eleven days before it happened."

"Or someone inside the firm has been feeding information to one of the fifteen names on that list since before the will was public, which means whoever it is has been watching you — watching us — from inside the one place that was supposed to be protecting you." Julian's jaw was tight, the calm precision she'd come to associate with him fraying at the edges for the first time since Bryant's office. "I don't think we can trust anything Bryant's firm has told us at face value anymore. Not the timeline. Not the paperwork. Possibly not even the cause of death."

"You think Hale was murdered."

"I think a man who spent six years building the most carefully cross-collateralized trust structure I have ever seen, specifically designed to protect one woman from fifteen powerful men, died three days before that woman was told any of it existed, at an age and in circumstances Bryant's office described to me in exactly four vague sentences when I asked directly." Julian met her eyes, and there was no calculation in his expression now, only the plain, frightened honesty of a man who'd run out of ways to soften what he'd found. "I think we need to find out who inside that firm authorized the lease before we tell anyone else what we know, including Adrian, including Reyes, including whoever comes through Bryant's door next. Because if the leak is inside the firm, then every single one of the fifteen men on that list may already know more about what's happening to you than you do."

Amara looked at the screen again — the shell company, the lease, the date that predated everything she'd been told to believe about how this had all begun — and felt something in her settle into the same cold, focused clarity that had carried her through six years of finding exactly the discrepancy someone had built an entire structure to hide.

"Then we stop waiting for the truth to come to us," she said, "and we go get it ourselves. Bryant's office. Tonight, after hours. I want to see the original probate filing, the actual one, not the summary his associate handed me on day one."

Julian didn't argue. He simply reached for his phone, already dialing, already three steps ahead the way he always seemed to be, and said only, "I'll bring the tools. You bring the nerve. I have a feeling we're going to need both before this night is over."