I FELL FOR MY DADDY'S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND

Chapter Three

Rena didn't sleep. By seven the next morning, she was standing outside Lucas's office, waiting for him to arrive.

He walked in holding a coffee, unbothered, like Friday hadn't happened. "You're here early”

“I want the file back, “Rena said” The reconciliation, the one you took from me yesterday.

“It's already been reassigned. He set his coffee down, unhurried, like her whole life hadn't just been rearranged twice in one week. Standard process is nothing for you to worry about.

“There was a transfer in there. The week before my parents' crash. She kept her voice level, even as her pulse wasn't, Routed through an account I didn't recognize.

Something flickered across Lucas's face, gone before she could name it. "You're grieving Rena, numbers start looking strange when you're staring at spreadsheets and thinking about your parents at the same time. It happens to everyone eventually.

“I know what I saw”.

“Do you?” He said it gently, almost kindly, which somehow made it worse. Because from where I'm standing, you saw a routine transfer and built a story around it because it's easier than sitting with what actually happened. A truck lost its brakes on a wet road. I wish it were more complicated too, if it meant they were still here.

She had no answer for that. He said it with enough certainty that for a moment she almost believed she'd imagined the whole thing.

“Go home” Lucas said, not unkindly, “Rest” I'll have something lighter on your desk tomorrow. You don't need to be chasing shadows on your second day.

She left his office with nothing, and went looking for the one person who might actually tell her the truth.

Raymond was on a call when she walked into his office without knocking. He raised a hand, finished his sentence, and hung up.

You said there were things I didn't know about my parents' death. Rena shut the door behind her. Tell me now, or I go to the board myself.

“Sit down”

“I don't want to sit down. I want an answer”

Raymond studied her for a long moment, the same unreadable calm from the boardroom, except this time she thought she saw something underneath it — calculation, maybe Or fear.

I put you on that reconciliation project on purpose,”he said finally”

Rena went still. “What?”

I've suspected irregularities in the finance department for six months. Numbers that don't reconcile, transfers routed through shell accounts, approvals that don't match anyone's actual signature. I couldn't investigate directly without whoever's responsible finding out and covering their tracks faster than I could follow them

“So you used me”

“I placed you somewhere Lucas would never think to watch closely, “Raymond said” An intern Grieving. Easy to underestimate, You found in one afternoon what I couldn't get access to in six months of quietly asking questions no one wanted to answer. That's not nothing, Rena. That's more than anyone else in this building has managed to do.

The room felt smaller suddenly. “You could have just told me”.

“Would you have believed me? Raymond's voice sharpened. “Three days after I took your father's chair from you? You'd have thought I was manipulating you into trusting me, and honestly, you'd have had every reason to”.

He wasn't wrong, and that was the worst part.

“Is it Lucas?” she asked quietly. “Is that what you think? That he had something to do with my parents' accident?”

Raymond's jaw tightened. “I don't have proof of anything yet. That's exactly why you need to act like nothing happened. If Lucas thinks for one second you saw something worth investigating, he'll bury it so deep neither of us will ever find it again.”

“He already knows I saw the transfer”.

Then he'll be watching you now. Raymond crossed the room, closer than he needed to be, close enough that she had to tilt her head to hold his eyes. Which means you don't dig any further without me. Do you understand? Whatever you find, you bring it to me first. Not the board, not the police, not even Jena. “Me”

“Why should I trust you over him? He's family.”

“Because family didn't put you in a position to find the truth, “Raymond said. “I did”

Neither of them moved. It would have been easy, in that silence, for either of them to close the last of the distance between them, and for one unbearable second, Rena thought he might.

Then his phone buzzed on the desk, and whatever had been building between them broke.

“Go home” Raymond said, stepping back, his voice flat again like a door closing. Say nothing to Lucas. Not one word, not even a hint.

Rena walked out of his office with her heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with the fact that Raymond Levi had just trusted her with something he hadn't handed to anyone else in the company.

She was halfway to the elevator when she saw her.

A woman stood near the reception desk, dressed like she owned the building, watching Rena with an expression that wasn't quite hostile and wasn't quite anything Rena could read either. Beautiful, poised, utterly still, the kind of stillness that felt deliberate, like she'd been standing there long enough to have already decided exactly what she thought of Rena before Rena had even noticed her.

You must be Rena “the woman said before Rena had said a word. “Raymond's little project”

“I'm sorry, who are you?”

The woman smiled, slow and cold. “Kayla. I don't think we've had the pleasure yet”

She looked Rena over once, the way someone appraises a threat they've already decided how to handle, and walked past her toward Raymond's office without another word, her heels clicking against the marble like a countdown.

Rena stood frozen at the elevator, watching her go, and understood with sudden, sinking clarity that the danger she'd walked into wasn't only about her parents. It was about a man she was already halfway in love with, a cousin she couldn't read anymore, and now a woman who had looked at her like she already knew exactly how this would end — and wasn't worried in the slightest.