The billionaire investment

Chapter4

Chapter 4: Digging

I didn't sleep again that night — not with Marcus's words still looping in my head, over and over, until they'd worn a groove I couldn't climb out of.

*I know what I said. But this isn't just another acquisition, and you know exactly why. She doesn't know. And she's not going to, not until I'm sure it won't blow up everything I've spent two years trying to fix.*

Two years. That number kept snagging on something in my memory I couldn't quite place — some overlap with the timeline of my father's illness, of the company's slow decline, of everything that had led me to that office with the burgundy suit and no other options. I told myself it was probably nothing. Coincidence. The mind's tendency to build conspiracies out of loose threads when it's exhausted and scared.

I didn't believe myself, even as I thought it.

By morning, I'd showered, dressed, and rehearsed three different versions of how I might casually bring it up to him — *so, funny thing, I overheard you on the phone last night* — and discarded all of them before I even reached the office. If he'd wanted me to know, he would have told me. Whatever this was, he'd built a wall around it deliberately, and something told me pushing on that wall directly would only make him build it higher.

So I decided to go around it instead.

---

I started with the one thing I could actually control: the leak. Halden's contract review hadn't come out of nowhere — someone inside this building had handed them numbers that should never have left it, and if I was going to trust Marcus with anything right now, trust had to run both directions. I needed to know my own house wasn't the problem before I went looking for problems in his.

I pulled the access logs myself, quietly, before Marcus arrived for our 8 a.m. — the digital footprints of everyone who'd touched the financial file in question over the past month. It wasn't hard to narrow down. We didn't have that many people with clearance that deep into the system.

Three names had touched that file. One was me. One was Toke, which I ruled out within about four seconds — she'd have set the building on fire before she leaked anything that could hurt us. The third made my stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with Marcus at all.

**Dele Okafor. Head of Finance.**

My father's oldest friend. The man who'd taught me how to read a balance sheet at our kitchen table when I was nineteen, who'd sat across from me at every family dinner for as long as I could remember, who'd cried harder than I had at my father's funeral. The idea of Dele selling us out felt so absurd that I almost dismissed it outright.

Almost.

But a login timestamp wasn't proof, and Dele deserved better than an accusation built on nothing more than access logs and my own exhaustion talking. I closed the file, resolved to watch quietly instead of confronting anything yet, and told myself I'd know more once I had something solid to bring to him.

I didn't tell Marcus about any of it. Not the logs, not Dele's name, not the suspicion sitting like a stone in my chest.

I told myself it was because I didn't have proof.

If I was honest — and I was trying, lately, to at least be honest with myself even when I couldn't be honest with anyone else — some smaller, more petty part of me also liked having a secret of my own to hold onto. If he could keep things from me, I could keep things from him too.

It wasn't a healthy thought. I had it anyway.

---

When Marcus arrived at eight sharp — he was always sharp, always precisely on time, as if lateness were a moral failing he refused to be guilty of — he dropped into the seat across from me with the same unreadable composure he wore like a second suit.

"Halden bought the revised numbers," he said, sliding a folder across the table. "We have breathing room. Not much, but some."

"Good." I kept my voice even, professional, betraying nothing. "What's next?"

"Next, we find out who leaked it." His eyes flicked up to mine, and for one unsettling second I had the distinct impression he could read every thought I was working so hard to keep off my face. "You already have a guess. I can see it on your face."

I hated how easily he saw through me. I hated more how badly I wanted to know if I could do the same to him.

"I'm not ready to say a name I can't prove," I said, which was at least true.

"Fair enough." He studied me a beat longer than the moment strictly required — long enough that the silence started to feel like its own kind of conversation. "You're different today."

"I'm tired."

"That's not it." He didn't push further. He never pushed further than the wall would let him, which was, I was starting to realize, exactly how he protected the things he didn't want examined too closely. It made me wonder, uncomfortably, whether that instinct was the same one keeping whatever secret he was sitting on locked away from me.

Neither of us said what we were actually thinking. We finished the check-in discussing supply chain projections instead, both of us fluent in the particular language of two people who'd decided, independently and for entirely different reasons, that today wasn't the day for honesty.

I watched him leave twenty minutes later, and something in my chest ached in a way I didn't have a tidy explanation for — not yet suspicion exactly, not yet hurt, just the quiet unease of realizing that the man I was starting to trust with my father's company might be the same man keeping the biggest secret of all.

*Whatever you're hiding, Marcus,* I thought, watching the elevator doors close behind him, *I'm going to find out. One way or another.*

I had no idea yet how close — and how far off — my guesses about what that secret actually was would turn out to be.