Chapter 4— Four Days Of Pretending
1192 Words
(Nikolai Voss POV)
I'm not watching her leave.
That's what I tell myself, and then I spend the next ten minutes standing at my office window watching the black
sedan pull out of the parking structure below. Firm-assigned. She sits in the back and doesn't look up, and I have no
idea why that feels like a small wound.
I turn away from the window before Marcus can catch me at it.
The rules are simple. Keep my distance. Be professional. Be available for the review. Treat Naomi Carter exactly
the way I would treat any other auditor — with polite, impersonal efficiency.
I manage it for exactly four days.
Monday, she's installed in the dedicated workspace on the twenty-eighth floor. Tuesday, she requests three years of
project expenditure files and my finance team spends the better part of the afternoon pulling them together.
Wednesday, a list of follow-up questions arrives through official channels — addressed to my office, signed N.
Carter, Mercer & Holt, every word exactly where it should be. Not a single syllable out of place.
She's handling this better than I am.
Thursday I'm in back-to-back meetings from eight until three, and I don't think about her as much. I allow myself that
as a small victory — right up until Marcus drops a catering receipt on my desk at four.
"She hasn't left the building for lunch since Monday," he says, settling into the chair across from me uninvited, as
always. "I've been sending food down."
I look at the receipt. "That's considerate of you."
"She's here until nine most nights too." He picks up a pen from my desk and turns it in his fingers — a habit I've
never managed to break him of. "She's moving through those files fast. Faster than I expected."
"Good. That's what we're paying for."
"Stanley doesn't think so." He sets the pen down. "He stopped by her workspace yesterday. I don't know exactly
what was said, but she came to find me right after and asked that all future document requests route through you
directly rather than his office."
I go still. "She said that?"
"Word for word." Marcus studies me in that way he has — measuring, careful. "I like her, boss. She knows how to
handle herself."
"What did Stanley say to her?"
"No idea. Whatever it was, she managed it cleanly — no complaint filed, no report, just a quiet redirect. That's not
easy. Stanley can be..." He tilts his head. "A lot."
Stanley Cross has run this company efficiently for seven years, and I've overlooked certain things because the
results justified them. I'm beginning to think that math no longer adds up the way it used to. Naomi's going to give
him a run for his money — and I'm putting mine on her without a second thought.
"Keep an eye on it," I say.
"Already am." Marcus stands, then pauses. "Oh. And she found something."
I look up.
"Came to me this morning, before sending anything through official channels." He reaches into his jacket and
produces a single sheet of paper — a printed table of figures with three lines highlighted in yellow. "She said she
wanted to flag it informally first. She's being careful."
I take the paper.
The numbers are clean on the surface: project disbursements from a subsidiary account, quarterly, going back two
years. But the highlighted lines tell a different story — three transactions, identical amounts, landing in the same
account on the last business day of each quarter. The receiving account number is partially redacted, standard practice for preliminary documents, but the routing code is fully visible.
It's enough.
I've seen that routing before, buried in a different file, in a context I hadn't thought to connect to this one.
My jaw tightens.
"She flagged this in four days," I say.
"Four days," Marcus confirms.
I set the paper down before I do something I'll regret.
"Tell her I'd like a meeting tomorrow. Eight o'clock. My office."
Marcus raises an eyebrow. "Should I be in the room?"
"No."
He studies me for a moment, reads something in my expression, and has the good judgment to leave without
saying whatever's sitting behind his eyes.
I work late.
The building empties floor by floor while I sit at my desk pulling every file connected to that routing code — building
the picture line by line, thread by thread. By ten o'clock I have enough to make me furious. By eleven, the fury has
given way to something worse.
How did I miss this?
I'm reaching for my jacket when I hear the elevator.
I step out into the corridor, and there she is.
Same blazer as this morning. Hair slightly less composed than it was at nine. A stack of folders under one arm,
phone in the other hand, reading something on her screen. She doesn't see me until she's nearly at my office door.
She stops.
We look at each other across the empty corridor, and the quiet between us is the most charged thing I've stood in all
week.
"I was just leaving," she says.
"So was I."
Neither of us moves.
She looks tired — not the falling-apart kind, but the kind that comes from running on willpower and black coffee for
four straight days and being too stubborn to admit it. I recognize it the way you recognize something you've seen in
the mirror.
"You found something," I say.
It's not a question. She knows Marcus brought that document upstairs.
"I found the beginning of something. I need more files before I can say anything definitive."
"You'll have them."
She nods and shifts the folders under her arm, and she's about to walk past me when she stops again. "Nikolai." A
beat. "Who requested me for this assignment?"
Something happens to me every single time she says my name — something I have absolutely no business feeling
in an empty office corridor at eleven o'clock at night.
"You can call me Nik," I say. "And your firm assigned you here. Months ago, when we first put in the request."
She's going to push. I can see it in her eyes, that particular set to her expression that means she's already three
steps ahead. So I cut it off before she gets there.
"Get some sleep, Naomi." I hold her gaze. "I'll see you at eight."
I go back into my office and close the door.
Behind it, I hear her exhale at exactly the same moment I do.
I stand there for a moment, listening to her footsteps retreat, the elevator open, the quiet that follows. Then I sit back
down at my desk and look at the routing number on the page in front of me.
The account doesn't belong to anyone on my board.
It belongs to someone I trusted. Someone who has been here long enough to know exactly where to hide things,
and who is now — I realize with a cold, settling certainty — a great deal more dangerous than I've been treating
them.
Damn it, Voss. What have you done?
- Writer
