THE BILLIONAIRES BODYGUARD

Chapter 6: What the Cameras Saw

The morning after, Adrian Vale did the thing she least expected. He made her coffee.

She found him in the kitchen at six, sleeves shoved up, working a machine that had clearly cost more than most people's cars and that he operated with the unbothered competence of a man who did his own small tasks precisely because he could afford not to. He slid a cup across the counter to her without a word, as though the night had quietly rearranged some furniture between them that neither of them was going to name out loud.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"Neither did you."

"No." He wrapped both hands around his own cup, and in the flat gray light coming off the drawn curtains he looked less like a magazine cover and more like a man — younger and older at once, the fatigue in him no longer hidden because there was no one here to hide it from but her, and she'd already seen the worst of it in a stairwell. "Tell me what happened to my cameras. In words I can be angry about specifically."

So she told him. That the north feed had been replaced with a loop — recorded footage of an empty street, played back over the live signal so that anyone watching the monitors saw nothing at all while two men studied his building at their leisure. That a loop like that couldn't be set from outside the system. That it required access to the very kind of software Vale Dynamics itself built and sold, turned around and pointed inward, at him, in his own home.

"Aegis," he said. The word came out of him flat.

"You keep hearing that word in your meetings. Now I'm hearing it too, in your walls." She turned the cup slowly without drinking from it. "Somebody with the keys to your own house is standing at the door letting people in. I need to know what Aegis actually is, Adrian. Not the version you give the board. Not the brochure. The real one."

It was the first time she'd used his given name, and she watched him notice it — a small flicker, quickly mastered, the same way he'd mastered the laugh in his office.

He was quiet for a long moment, the machine ticking as it cooled. Then: "Come to the office. I'll show you the thing everyone's trying to steal, and you'll understand why they'd kill to have it."

* * *

Sloane Aldrich met them at the executive elevator with a tablet and an attitude sharpened overnight into something harder.

"We've pulled the logs," she said, falling in on Adrian's other side as the doors closed. "Someone accessed the building's camera subsystem at 11:40 using credentials that shouldn't exist. My team's tracing them now."

"Your team," Naomi said. "Not the vendor. Not an outside firm with no stake in the answer."

Sloane's eyes cut across Adrian to her, cool and flat. "This is an internal matter."

"It stopped being internal when it walked into his bedroom." Naomi kept her voice even, unprovoking, laying the disagreement down flat where everyone could see it wasn't a fight. "I want a copy of those logs. All of it — timestamps, credential IDs, the authorization chain, everything your people are looking at. In parallel, not after."

"That's not your—"

"Give her the logs," Adrian said.

The corridor went still. Sloane looked at him a beat too long — surprise first, and under it something harder that Naomi clocked and set aside for later — then inclined her head a precise, controlled degree. "Of course."

When she'd gone, Naomi watched the elevator doors slide shut on the space where she'd stood. "She didn't like that."

"She's territorial. She built our security architecture from nothing, with her own hands, when we couldn't afford to hire it out."

"And she just learned it isn't secure. In front of the boss and a stranger." Naomi turned the observation over. "People react to that two ways. They panic, or they perform. She performed. That's not guilt — performing under humiliation is the most human thing in the world. But I noticed it, and I'm going to keep noticing things, and I need you to let me, even when the thing I notice is about someone you trust."

"You notice everything," he said. It wasn't quite a compliment and wasn't quite a complaint.

"That's the job."

"You say that like a prayer. Like if you say it enough times it stays true." He held her eyes a moment longer than the words needed, and then he turned and led her through a set of doors that read his handprint before they'd open — into the windowless room where Vale Dynamics kept the thing worth killing him for.