FIFTEEN BILLIONAIRES AFTER ME

Chapter Thirteen — Fortieth Floor

Julian killed the records room light and pulled the door until it sat closed but not latched, and Amara pressed herself against the wall of cabinets in the dark, coat heavy with a folder she wasn't supposed to have, listening to footsteps cross the reception floor outside with the unhurried confidence of someone who believed they were alone in the building.

Not Volkov's patient stride. Faster. Younger.

A second set of footsteps followed the first, softer, and a voice — female, clipped, professional — said, "Security log shows the loop's been running since nine-forty. Someone's already in here."

Amara felt Julian go rigid beside her in the dark. "That's not one of the fifteen," he breathed, barely audible. "That's Bryant's own security team."

"Then why does it feel like we're the ones who need to hide from them?"

"Because," Julian whispered, already moving toward the far end of the cabinets, toward a service door she hadn't noticed, "if Bryant's firm has been feeding information to someone on that list since before Hale died, his own security team answers to whoever's paying them extra, not necessarily to him."

The footsteps stopped directly outside the records room door.

Amara didn't breathe. Six years of sitting across tables from executives who lied for a living had taught her exactly how loud her own heartbeat could feel in a silent room, and she used the same trick now that she'd used then — counted backward from ten, slow, deliberate, until her pulse obeyed her instead of the other way around.

The door handle turned.

Julian pulled her through the service exit a half-second before it opened, into a narrow stairwell smelling of dust and cold metal, and eased the door shut behind them with a care that made no sound at all. Behind them, muffled, she heard the security team's voice again, irritated now. "Cabinets are locked. Nothing's moved. Might've been a glitch on the loop." A pause. "Log it anyway. Boss wants every anomaly flagged since the reading."

The boss. Amara filed the phrase away with the same cold precision she'd used on every scrap of information the last four days had handed her. Not Bryant. Someone above him, or beside him, someone with enough authority to have security flagging anomalies related specifically to Hale's estate.

They didn't speak again until they were three blocks from the building, in an all-night diner Julian apparently knew by name from the waitress who greeted him without looking up from her register.

"Someone above Bryant," Amara said, once they'd settled into a booth in the back, the folder still folded inside her coat like a live coal. "Not the leak. The person the leak answers to."

"I have a guess," Julian said, quietly, "and I don't like it."

"Say it anyway. We agreed. Everything, as it happens."

Julian exhaled, and for the first time since the lobby four days ago, he looked genuinely uncertain — not calculating, not strategic, just tired and afraid in the plain way anyone would be. "Theo Whitfield. Number seven on the list. Old-money finance, the kind of family that's owned pieces of law firms like Bryant's for three generations without ever putting their name on the letterhead. I haven't met him. Nobody outside his own circle really has, not properly. But if there's one man on that trust with the kind of institutional reach to have Bryant's own security answering to him before the will was even public—"

"It's the one none of us have met yet."

"It's the one," Julian said, "who's had four days to prepare for exactly this conversation, while the rest of us have been improvising."