My Husband Doesn't Know I'm His Mistress

Chapter Six — Second Ring

He picked up before the second ring finished.

"Leah."

Not Elena. He always used my real name on the secure line, which was one of the small disciplines Jonas maintained without being asked. Clean channels, clean names, no unnecessary performance when the audience was only the two of us.

"Reid Parker knows something is wrong," I said. I was through the lobby doors, the January air hitting me like a correction. "He doesn't have a name yet but he has enough. He's having dinner with Daniel on Thursday."

A pause. The kind Jonas used when he was deciding how much of his thinking to share.

"How much does he have?"

"He clocked my methodology as government-trained. He caught the Vertex Capital reference from week two. He asked me my middle name." I turned up my collar against the wind. "He's been watching Elena since at least the second week and I missed it."

"You didn't miss it," Jonas said. "He's good."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be." Another pause, shorter. "File the report tonight. I'll have your extraction paperwork processed by morning. You're done, Leah."

I stopped walking.

Around me the street continued — a cab sliding past, two people arguing cheerfully outside a bar three doors down, the city's complete indifference to the particular shape of my problem.

"I'm not done," I said.

"The assignment is done. You have Camille. You have the access logs. You have ninety-six percent match rate on the data fragments." His voice was patient in the way of a man who considers patience a professional tool rather than a personal quality. "That's what you were hired to find."

"Reid goes to Daniel on Thursday regardless of whether I've filed the report. Filing tonight doesn't change that timeline. It just means I lose control of how the information lands."

Silence.

"Jonas." I kept my voice level. "If Daniel finds out from Reid before I've had the chance to manage the situation, the report becomes secondary. Every conversation after that point becomes about Elena Marsh and not about Camille Voss. You lose the clean prosecution of the leak and I lose —" I stopped. "The situation becomes complicated in ways that are bad for both of us."

I heard him exhale. Not quite a sigh. More the sound of a man recalibrating.

"What are you proposing?"

"Three more days. I need to control the circumstances of the report delivery so that Camille is the story and not me." I started walking again, slower. "I can do that. But I need Thursday to still be mine."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Three days," he said finally. "File preliminary findings tonight so the firm has something on record. Full report by Thursday morning, before Reid sits down with Daniel."

"Agreed."

I waited. Jonas didn't hang up immediately, which was unusual. He was efficient on calls in the way of someone who considered lingering a form of imprecision.

"Is there something else?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Get somewhere warm. It's cold."

The line went dead.

I stood on the pavement outside a closed dry cleaner with my phone in my hand and the January wind doing something unpleasant to the back of my neck and I thought about the thing I hadn't asked yet because the right time to ask it wasn't during a negotiation about timeline.

He had answered on the second ring.

I had called from the lobby immediately after Reid's corridor conversation. The walk from the elevator to the lobby doors took approximately forty-five seconds. The conversation with Reid had ended less than two minutes before I called.

Jonas had answered before the second ring finished.

Not because he was near his phone. Jonas was always near his phone. He answered on the second ring because the second ring was when he chose to answer — not too fast, not too slow, calibrated.

He had been expecting my call.

Not eventually. Not today. In that window, at that time, after that specific conversation.

Which meant he knew about Reid.

Which meant he had known about Reid before I did.

I put my phone in my bag and walked to the car and sat in it without starting the engine for a moment, the heat not yet running, the cold settling around me with democratic thoroughness.

Jonas had sent me into this building knowing Daniel was the CEO. That was the first thing I had found. Now there was a second thing — Jonas had known Reid Parker was closing in on Elena before Elena knew it herself. Which meant Jonas had a source inside Hargrove Ventures that wasn't me.

The question was what else that source had told him.

And what Jonas had chosen not to pass on.

I started the car.

The apartment building was twenty minutes in light traffic and I used all twenty of them running the Jonas question in the background while the part of my brain that was still Leah on autopilot navigated the streets and found parking and took the elevator to the nineteenth floor.

The apartment was lit when I got in. Lamps on in the living room, the specific warm light of someone home rather than a space waiting. I hung up my coat and heard, from down the hallway, Daniel's voice.

Low. The particular register he used on calls he considered private.

The bedroom door was half open.

I should have gone to the kitchen. Made tea, filed the preliminary report, done the seventeen reasonable things available to a woman who has decided to maintain professional boundaries in an increasingly unprofessional situation.

I stood in the hallway.

"The Vertex connection is the problem," Daniel was saying. "If the review finds it before we've restructured the agreement, Marcus has leverage we can't —" A pause. He was listening. "No. No, I understand that. But Marcus Trent doesn't forgive oversights, Reid. He catalogs them."

My hand found the wall.

Marcus Trent.

Daniel knew Marcus Trent.

Not as a name in a competitor's filing. Not as the background detail I had assembled in forty minutes of research. He knew him the way you know someone whose particular capacity for damage you have already learned to calculate.

And he was telling Reid about it.

Which meant Reid already knew about Marcus Trent too.

Which meant the dinner on Thursday was not Reid going to Daniel with a suspicion about Elena Marsh.

It was two men who already shared information about Marcus Trent deciding what to do about an operative who had gotten closer to that information than she was supposed to.

I walked very quietly to the kitchen.

I filled the kettle.

I stood at the counter while it boiled and understood that I had not, in two weeks, been investigating Hargrove Ventures.

I had been walking deeper into something that already knew I was coming.