Eleven More Days

Eleven More Days

She counted the days like a countdown she hadn't agreed to.

Day twelve. That was what it was. Twelve days since she'd walked into Kessler Group's thirty-fourth floor and sat across from a man who hadn't offered to share his coffee and hadn't needed to say a single threatening thing to make it clear that everything she did inside this building would be watched.

She'd been watched before. It had never felt like this.

Nadia arrived at seven forty-five, which was earlier than yesterday and later than she'd intended, because she'd spent twenty minutes in her car in the parking garage talking herself out of caring what time she arrived. The conference room was empty. She set up her laptop, opened the first of the document sets Rafael had cleared — he'd had it on her desk by four-thirty the previous afternoon, forty-five minutes earlier than he'd promised — and told herself the efficiency meant nothing.

She was on her third transaction cluster when the door opened at eight-oh-two.

She didn't look up.

"You're here early," he said.

"You're here late," she said.

A pause. Two seconds, maybe three. The particular quality of silence that meant someone was deciding whether to be amused.

He set something on the table. She looked up before she'd decided to.

Coffee. Two cups. One placed in front of her with the quiet precision of a man who had noted, without being asked, that she took it black.

She looked at the cup. Then at him.

"Don't," he said mildly, already moving to his side of the table, "make it a thing."

She looked back at her screen. "I wasn't going to."

"You were constructing a sentence."

"I was reviewing a transaction record."

"You were doing both." He opened his laptop. "The Sarawak filing you flagged yesterday — I had it pulled from archive. It's in the second folder."

She found it. Opened it. Ran her eyes down the first page and felt the particular stillness that came when a number was wrong in a way that was too clean to be accidental.

"This valuation," she said.

"Yes."

"The asset assessment is dated three weeks before the acquisition closed."

"Yes."

"That's not standard."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

She looked up. He was watching her with the expression she'd been cataloguing since day one — not quite neutral, not quite readable, somewhere in the register of a man who has already thought three moves ahead and is curious which direction she'll go.

"You knew it was there," she said.

"I knew something was there. I didn't know what."

"Why didn't you flag it?"

A beat. Careful. "I'm flagging it now."

She held his gaze for a moment. There was something in the answer she needed to sit with — the implication that he'd been looking, that whatever had unsettled him about the file had been unsettling him for longer than yesterday. She filed it next to the other things she was collecting about him and turned back to the document.

"I'll need the original asset assessment," she said. "The one that predates this."

"It may not exist in the system."

"Then I'll need whatever does exist."

"That," he said, "will take a conversation with Edmund."

Edmund Hale. Senior partner. She kept her face entirely still. "Is that a problem?"

"It's a variable." He paused. "Edmund takes an interest in active engagements. He'll want to know why you're requesting pre-acquisition documents."

"Tell him it's standard forensic procedure."

"It isn't, for a portfolio audit."

"Then tell him I'm thorough."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, quickly retracted. "I'll set up a meeting for tomorrow. You can tell him yourself."

She hadn't expected that. She didn't show it. "Fine."

"He'll like you," Rafael said, and his tone was so carefully neutral that she spent the next hour trying to decide if it was a warning.

They worked through the morning in the rhythm they'd settled into without discussing it — parallel, proximate, punctuated by the occasional exchange that was technically about documents and technically about something else.

At eleven-fifteen he took a call, stepping out with the brief economy of motion she'd started to recognize as his version of an apology for the interruption. She used the twelve minutes he was gone to photograph three pages of the Sarawak filing with her phone, which she wasn't supposed to do and which she did anyway, cleanly and quickly, because she had learned a long time ago that documents had a habit of not being there when you needed them.

When he came back he looked at her and then at the file on the table and then at her again, and she looked back at him with complete serenity.

He sat down. Said nothing. Pulled his own laptop closer.

She noticed, without meaning to, that he'd left his jacket in the room when he took the call. It was still on the back of his chair — a small domestic detail, the kind of thing you wouldn't register about someone you were only professionally aware of. She registered it.

Stop, she told herself.

Stop noticing things that don't matter.

At twelve-forty-five he said, without looking up: "There's a decent lunch place two blocks north. The kind that actually closes at two so they don't have to deal with the afternoon crowd."

She kept her eyes on her screen. "Is that a recommendation or an itinerary?"

"Whichever you'd like it to be."

The words sat in the room for a moment. She was aware of the precise nature of what was being offered — not a declaration, not an overture, just a door left open at a specific angle that she could walk through or not.

She saved her file. Closed her laptop halfway.

"I have forty-five minutes," she said.

"That's enough."

It was enough and it was not enough and she knew, walking back into the building afterward, that she had made the second mistake.

The first had been noticing the coffee.

The second was that she'd laughed — once, genuinely, at something he said about a deposition that had gone sideways in a way that was both professionally catastrophic and objectively funny — and he'd watched her laugh with an expression she hadn't been able to interpret fast enough to protect herself from.

She got back to the conference room. Opened her laptop. Opened the secret file — her file, the one that had his employer's name in it forty-seven times — and made herself read the first page.

The numbers were still there. The pattern was still there. Her father's company, reduced to a line item in a portfolio that Rafael Voss had been signing documents for since before she'd started looking.

She read it twice. Then she closed it and opened the Sarawak filing and went back to work.

Twelve days, she thought. Eleven more.

She was lying to herself and she knew it and she did it anyway, because the alternative was admitting that eleven days was not going to be enough to want less than she already did, and she was not ready to do that yet.

Not today.

Not with the smell of his coffee still in the room and the sound of her own laughter still embarrassingly present in her memory and twenty-three more transaction clusters between her and the evidence she'd come here to find.

She put her head down and worked.