The second attempt was smarter than the first, which was exactly what worried Vivienne most about it.
It surfaced on a Tuesday, buried inside a routine document review — a shared case file for a contract dispute, nothing as high-profile as Whitmore, the kind of matter three different paralegals touched over the course of a week without anyone tracking exactly who did what, when.
She noticed it because she’d started noticing everything now.
A single figure in a damages calculation, altered by one decimal point — small enough to slide past a rushed glance, large enough to change the entire recommended settlement range if it reached opposing counsel unchecked.
She sat with the discrepancy for a long moment, heart beating a little faster than the situation strictly warranted.
*A theory backed by a timestamp.
Not proof.
Not yet.*
She thought about walking straight to Zachary’s office.
She thought better of it.
If she was wrong — if this really was just an honest clerical slip, one careless keystroke in a file three people had touched — she’d hand Victoria exactly the narrative she needed: an unstable new hire, seeing conspiracies in ordinary mistakes.
She needed to be certain first.
She pulled the file’s revision history — every document at the firm tracked changes automatically, a detail she suspected Victoria, for all her care with physical files, hadn’t fully accounted for in a purely digital record.
The edit had been made at 6:52 p.m.
the previous evening, under a login that wasn’t Victoria’s.
Vivienne frowned at the screen, recalculating, certain she’d misread it.
She hadn’t.
It was Marcus’s credentials — a junior associate two desks down, currently on vacation in a country with a nine-hour time difference and, according to his out-of-office reply, no laptop within reach.
Someone had used his login.
Someone with access to shared credentials, or the ability to guess a password nobody had bothered to make complicated.
She thought about Victoria’s careful, patient face.
She thought about the file room, the missing exhibit, the four minutes nobody had noticed.
This wasn’t carelessness.
This was someone learning from the last attempt — someone smart enough to route the next one through a name that wasn’t her own.
She brought it to Zachary that evening, exactly as promised, laying out the revision history and the timestamp discrepancy across his desk without embellishment.
“Marcus’s login,” he said, reading it over twice.
“He’s in Portugal.”
“I checked his out-of-office reply myself.
He left three days ago.”
“So either he accessed a firm system from an airport lounge in the middle of the night his time—”
“Or someone used his credentials,” Vivienne finished.
“Which raises the question of how many people around here know each other’s passwords well enough to borrow them.”
Zachary’s jaw tightened, the particular stillness he wore when he was furious and controlling it with visible effort.
“IT keeps activity logs beyond just the document history,” he said.
“Building access, VPN connections, the works.
If someone logged in as Marcus from inside this office, there’ll be a record of exactly which desk it came from.”
“Can you pull it without raising flags?”
“I’m a partner at this firm, Ms.
Grant.
I can pull anything I want without raising flags.” A faint, humorless edge to his voice.
“The question is whether I want to move that fast, or whether I want to let her think she’s still getting away with it a little longer.”
“You want to catch her doing something bigger.”
“I want proof solid enough that when I end her career here, there’s no version of events where she gets to call it personal, or unfair, or anything other than exactly what it is.”
“That could take weeks.”
“It could.”
“And in the meantime, she keeps trying.”
“In the meantime,” Zachary said, “you keep catching her.
Which, so far, you’ve done twice without a single mistake of your own.
I’d call that an acceptable trade.”
“Easy for you to say.
You’re not the one whose name gets floated every time something goes wrong on a case.”
Something in his expression shifted, closer to genuine concern than she’d seen from him yet.
“Has that happened?
Someone questioning your work directly?”
“Not yet.
But it will, eventually, if this keeps going unresolved.
People start to wonder why the new hire is at the center of so many ‘coincidences.'”
“Then we won’t let it go on that long,” he said, quieter now.
“I give her enough rope to hang herself properly, or I cut it short myself.
Either way, you’re not carrying this alone.”
Vivienne studied him for a moment.
“You’ve done this before.
Handled someone this carefully.”
“I’ve handled worse people than Victoria,” he said.
“Carefully is the only way it holds up.”
She left his office an hour later with a plan in place — a quiet, careful trap of their own, one more piece of bait left visible enough to tempt, secure enough that its tampering would be undeniable when it came.
They’d worked out the details together, heads bent over his desk: a deliberately vulnerable document, placed where Victoria would find it easily, wired with a tracking marker Zachary’s IT contact could trace back to any device that touched it.
A small, elegant piece of engineering, the kind of thing Vivienne suspected he’d used before, on someone else, in some other version of his career she knew nothing about.
“If she takes the bait,” Vivienne said, “how long before you move?”
“However long it takes to build something airtight.
I won’t rush this.”
“Even though you clearly want to.”
“Wanting something and doing it recklessly aren’t the same instinct,” he said.
“I learned that lesson expensively, once.
I don’t intend to relearn it.”
She wondered, walking out, exactly what he meant by that — whether it was a general philosophy or something more specific, some old wound she wasn’t yet allowed to see the shape of.
Walking to the elevator, she found herself replaying the conversation, turning over the particular way he’d said *carefully is the only way it holds up*, and wondering, not for the first time, exactly how many other careful, unfinished things Zachary Knight was quietly still holding together behind that composed, unreadable face.
She had no idea, yet, how close to the truth that thought actually was.
The elevator doors opened onto the lobby, and for a moment, in the reflection of the darkened glass, she caught her own expression — thoughtful, unguarded, nothing at all like the careful mask she’d trained herself to wear for the last five years.
She smoothed it back into place before she stepped outside.
Two floors above, alone in her own office long after the building had emptied, Victoria sat with her laptop open, staring at a case file she had no real reason to be reviewing this late.
She hadn’t expected the decimal error to be caught so quickly.
She’d expected, at most, a confused associate flagging a discrepancy days later, easily dismissed as an honest mistake, easily buried under the ordinary churn of a busy firm.
Instead, the file had been quietly corrected within twenty-four hours, no fanfare, no confrontation — which worried her far more than an accusation would have.
Quiet corrections meant someone was watching.
Someone careful enough not to show their hand until they were ready.
She closed the laptop, unsettled in a way she didn’t like admitting even to herself, and told herself, for the second time that month, that she needed to be more careful.
She didn’t tell herself to stop.
That option, somewhere in the last few weeks, had quietly stopped being one she was willing to consider.