Blood and Boardrooms

Chapter 5

Chapter Five: The Truth Costs

I looked at the image for five seconds.

Then I picked up Gregor’s phone and really looked at it, held it under the light, zoomed into the clearest frame, studied what was actually there versus what the grain and blur were filling in. It was a discipline I’d learned early: don’t react to what you think you see. React to what you can confirm.

What I could confirm: female, five-six to five-eight, dark coat, hood partially up.

The personnel file in her hands was visible — my name on the tab, the Bureau’s internal formatting on the cover sheet. Which meant she hadn’t pulled it from Morozov’s HR system.

She’d pulled it from somewhere else entirely.

“This isn’t someone inside your organization,” I said.

Both of them looked at me.

“The file she’s holding isn’t from your HR records. The formatting is federal.” I set the phone down. “She has Bureau access. Or she had it.”

The silence in the room shifted.

Nikolai watched me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Not suspicion, if anything, he looked like he was quietly rethinking something.

Gregor, on the other hand, looked like a man who had just realized there was a piece missing from a puzzle he thought he’d already solved.

“You’re saying someone from your agency is in my building?” Nikolai asked.

“I’m saying someone with access to federal personnel records was in your stairwell the day of the shot.” I kept my voice steady. “That’s not the same thing. The file could have been sourced, traded, or sold. But it came from a federal origin.”

“That’s a careful distinction.”

“It’s an accurate one.”

He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he said something I hadn’t expected. “Sit down, Ms. Vasquez. There’s something I need to show you.”

Gregor left without being asked. Whatever Nikolai was about to do, his head of security already knew about it and had chosen to be somewhere else. That told me enough to keep my guard exactly where it was.

Nikolai walked to the glass partition at the back of the room, the server rack I’d noticed when I arrived but hadn’t been given access to. He pressed his thumb to the panel beside it. The partition unlocked.

“I need you to keep an open mind,” he said.

“I need you to never say that to me again. People who ask for open minds are usually about to say something they already know won’t land well.”

He looked back at me. That almost-smile appeared, there for a second, then gone. “Fair.”

He pulled a slim drive from the rack, brought it to the table, and plugged it into one of the screens. What loaded was footage, interior, high quality, a corridor I didn’t recognize. Industrial concrete, somewhere lower in the building than any floor I’d been on.

The timestamp read eleven days ago. 2 a.m.

A figure moved through the corridor fast. The camera caught him at an angle, caught the exact moment his hand went through a steel security door.

Not through the lock. Through the door itself. His fingers sank into reinforced steel like it was something softer and ripped it sideways off the upper hinge.

I watched it twice.

“Who is that?” I asked, though some part of me was already quietly updating its threat assessment of the man standing three feet away from me.

“One of my people,” Nikolai said. “Handling a situation.”

“Your people can”

“Yes.”

I looked at him directly. “What are you?”

He didn’t flinch at the question, which I respected. He pulled out the chair across from me, sat down, and rested his forearms on the table. The posture of a man who had made a decision and intended to follow it through.

“Werewolf,” he said. “Born, not made. The pack structure is separate from the business, but the people overlap significantly. What you saw in that footage isn’t exceptional for my senior team.”

The room went very quiet.

I ran through the inventory in my head, because that’s how my brain works under pressure: the way he’d stopped when he first saw me in the interview.

The brief handshake. The controlled distance he kept. The fact that he’d known about the secondary agent without any visible surveillance trail. The way Gregor moved. The way Nikolai had said unusual instincts like it was an understatement.

It all landed differently now.

“How long have you known what I am?” I asked.

“The moment you walked in.”

“Scent.”

“Yes.”

I sat with that. Being readable in a way I hadn’t accounted for was not a comfortable feeling. “What do I smell like to you?”

“Federal government,” he said so dry I almost laughed. “And something else I haven’t placed yet.”

I didn’t ask him to explain that. “Does this change the terms of your offer?”

“No.”

“Does it change how you plan to use me in this building?”

“It changes how much of the truth I’m able to give you.” He held my gaze. “Which is more than I’ve told anyone outside the pack in a long time.”

I stood and walked to the window. Forty stories below, the city carried on, loud, busy, completely indifferent to whatever was happening in the offices above it.

I’d worked organized crime for six years. I’d sat across from people who’d done things that didn’t fit into clean categories. I had a working relationship with moral complexity.

A werewolf running a criminal empire was, objectively, not the strangest thing I’d encountered.

“I need a drink,” I said.

“There’s scotch in the cabinet beside the server rack.”

“Of course there is.” I didn’t move toward it. “The woman in the stairwell, if she had federal access to my file, she knows what I’m actually here for. She knows I’m not just an accountant.”

“Yes.”

“And she took a shot at your window from the floor I was working on.”

“Yes.”

“So either she was trying to kill you and frame me.” I turned from the window. “Or she was trying to kill me and make it look like an internal hit on you.”

Nikolai went very still.

“Either way,” I said, “she needs me gone before I finish the matrix. Which means she’s connected to Reiss or Sokolova or both.” I came back to the table. “I need those physical access logs by tomorrow morning.”

“You’ll have them.”

“And I need full system permissions. Not auditor access. Administrator.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded once.

My phone buzzed on the table between us. Bureau phone, not personal. I turned it over.

A text from Davis. Official channels. Timestamped two minutes ago.

Internal review opened. Subject: Vasquez, L. Allegation asset compromise with organized crime target. Pending recall.

I read it twice.

Nikolai read it once, from across the table, because reading distance apparently wasn’t a limitation he shared with the rest of us.

“They think you’ve turned,” he said.

“Someone told them I have.” I set the phone down. “Someone with enough standing inside the Bureau to open a formal review in under a week.”

We looked at each other across the table.

“The woman in the stairwell,” he said.

“Had my file,” I finished. “And apparently my supervisor’s ear.”

My recall notice would hit official channels within the hour. After that, no badge, no cover, no Bureau protection. I’d be alone in a building full of people I hadn’t finished vetting, with a shooter who already knew my name.

“How fast can you finish the matrix?” Nikolai asked.

“Faster than they can process the paperwork.”

I sat back down and opened my screen.

I had maybe twelve hours before the Bureau made me disappear.

I was four keystrokes into the administrator login when the screen went black.

Not a power cut, the other screens were still running. Just mine. Just now.

A single line of text appeared in the center of the dark screen, white letters, no sender, no trace header.

Stop looking, Lena. Or the next shot won’t miss.

I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Nikolai was already on his feet.

Because on the screen, just below the message, a live feed had opened up.

It was Davis’s office.

And Davis was already on the floor.