The Rival Who Warned Me

Nothing Stays Buried Forever

For a long moment, nobody moved. Voss stood at the end of the aisle, silhouetted by the weak emergency lighting, his hands relaxed at his sides in a way that somehow made him more unsettling than if he’d been holding a weapon.

“Put the folder down, Ms. Bennett,” he said calmly. “This can end quietly, or it can end badly. I’d genuinely prefer quietly. I find the other option distasteful.”

Damian stepped in front of Mia without hesitation, his voice low and dangerous in a way she hadn’t heard from him before. “You threatened her two hours ago. Now you’re standing in an abandoned building at midnight telling us to hand over evidence of a felony. I don’t think you’re in a position to negotiate, Voss.”

“On the contrary.” Voss took a slow step forward, unhurried, like a man who’d never once needed to rush anything in his life. “I have a phone in my pocket with a single call already queued, ready to alert building security that three trespassers broke into a restricted Hale Industries facility tonight. I have a legitimate business reason to be here. You do not. Whatever you think you’ve found in that box means considerably less once the police are asking why you broke in to steal it.”

Marcus’s voice cut through the tension, steadier than Mia expected. “I have facility access, Grant. Legitimate access, from the archival transfer. I brought them here as part of a documented internal review.”

Something flickered across Voss’s composed expression — the first c***k Mia had seen in him, brief but real.

“You always were sentimental, Marcus,” he said quietly. “I did wonder how long your conscience would hold out.”

“Longer than I’m proud of.” Marcus stood a little straighter. “But it held.”

Voss’s eyes moved back to Mia, calculating something behind that flat, unreadable gaze. “You should understand what you’re holding, Ms. Bennett. That journal implicates people beyond Julian. Beyond me. There are board members, investors, entire departments who’ve built their careers on looking the other way. If you release what’s in that box, you won’t just be taking down one man. You’ll be taking down an empire that a great many powerful people depend on.”

“Good,” Mia said, surprising herself with how steady her voice came out. “Then maybe it’s time it fell.”

For a moment, something almost like respect crossed Voss’s face — gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the same clinical stillness he’d worn since he walked in.

“You have no idea what you’re inviting into your life,” he said. “Elena didn’t either, and look what happened to her.”

“What did happen to her?” Damian’s voice cracked with three years of unanswered questions. “You handled her exit personally. You know exactly where she is. Tell me.”

Voss studied him for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted — not quite guilt, but perhaps the closest thing a man like him was capable of.

“She’s alive,” he said finally. “I can tell you that much, because it happens to be true, and because I suspect you’ll find out regardless of what I say tonight. Beyond that, I’m not authorized to share anything further.”

“Not authorized,” Damian repeated bitterly. “You mean Julian won’t let you.”

“I mean exactly what I said.” Voss’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he glanced at it briefly before returning his attention to the three of them. “I’ll give you one piece of free advice, since apparently that’s the only currency that seems to work on people like you. Whatever you’re planning to do with that folder, do it fast. The board session tomorrow isn’t just about acquiring your father’s company, Ms. Bennett. Once that vote passes, every document in this building becomes property of Hale Industries’ legal department, including anything currently sitting in your hands. You have until nine AM before all of this becomes considerably harder to use.”

He turned to leave, unhurried as ever, pausing only once at the end of the aisle.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, not quite looking back at them, “I didn’t enjoy any of what I did to Elena Cole. That doesn’t change what I did. But I’d ask you to remember, when you’re deciding how to use what’s in that folder, that not everyone caught in Julian Hale’s orbit chose to be there.”

He disappeared into the dark building, footsteps fading, the heavy door groaning shut behind him.

Nobody spoke until they were back in the car, the records box secured in Mia’s lap, her hands still trembling from adrenaline that had nowhere left to go.

“He let us walk out with it,” she said finally. “Why would he do that?”

“Guilt, maybe,” Marcus said quietly. “Or he’s smarter than we’re giving him credit for, and this is exactly what he wants — us thinking we have leverage, walking straight into whatever trap Julian’s already planned for tomorrow.”

“Or he’s tired,” Damian said, staring out the window at the passing streetlights. “Three years of doing this job leaves marks on a person, even someone as controlled as Voss. I’ve seen it happen before, with people close to Julian. Eventually the cost of staying loyal outweighs whatever fear kept them in line.”

“Do you believe him? About Elena being alive?”

Damian was quiet for a long moment. “I want to. I’ve wanted to believe it for three years, every time someone gave me a scrap of hope and then took it away again. I don’t know how to trust it without proof.”

“Then let’s get proof,” Mia said, opening the folder in her lap, flipping past pages of Elena’s handwriting until she found what she was looking for — the last entry, dated just three days before the sealed lawsuit was filed. “Look. She mentions a friend. Someone named Priya, from the compliance department, who helped her copy some of the files before everything happened. If this Priya still works there, or if we can find her—”

“She might know where Elena actually is,” Damian finished, hope cracking through his exhaustion for the first time in hours.

“It’s a start,” Mia said. “But we don’t have much time. Nine AM, Marcus said. That’s less than eight hours to find this woman, get whatever else we need, and figure out how to stop that board vote before it’s too late.”

Marcus, who’d been quiet since they left the archive, finally spoke, his voice heavy with something Mia hadn’t heard from him before — real fear, not for himself, but for her.

“There’s something else you should know before we go any further,” he said. “I didn’t want to say it in front of Voss, in case it gave him something to use against us. But your father called me an hour before you texted about the servers that first night.”

Mia’s stomach tightened. “Why?”

“He’d heard rumors about accelerated closure clauses buried in the contract. He was worried, Mia — worried enough that he asked me to look into whether there was any way to slow things down if it came to that.” Marcus met her eyes in the rearview mirror, his expression grim. “He’s known something was wrong with this deal longer than either of us realized. He just didn’t want to tell you, because he was afraid of what you’d do once you knew.”

“Where is he now?”

“That’s the problem.” Marcus’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I tried calling him twenty minutes ago, right before we left the archive. He didn’t answer. And when I checked the location on the shared family tracker he set up years ago, for emergencies—”

“Marcus.” Mia’s voice had gone dangerously quiet. “Where is my father?”

He hesitated only a second before answering, and the answer landed like a physical blow.

“The tracker shows his phone is inside Hale Tower,” he said. “Right now. And according to the timestamp, it’s been there for almost two hours.”