Hadley’s POV
He had me lock my own door before I came through, and then lock his behind me.
That’s when I understood this wasn’t a meeting.
The five of us took the leather sofas, which are arranged in a loose circle, and which suddenly felt less like a lounge and more like a room where something gets decided.
Nobody reached for coffee.
Nobody made a joke, which for Dorian is close to a medical event.
Rowan sat forward with his forearms on his knees and his jaw locked hard enough to show along the line of it.
“Nothing said in here leaves the five of us.” His voice had dropped into a register I hadn’t heard from him before — no charm anywhere in it.
“You are the only people in this building I trust without qualification.
I want you to understand that’s the reason you’re the ones hearing it.
“Six months ago I started finding gaps in our financials.
Rounding, at first.
The kind of thing you write off as somebody’s data entry.
Then I began running accounting against commercial and the two stopped agreeing with each other in ways that no amount of sloppiness explains.
Dorian and I have been working it privately since.
After last quarter’s report we stopped hedging.” He looked around the circle.
“Somebody is stealing from this company.
Systematically.”
It landed in my chest like a dropped weight.
I looked at Orson.
Every trace of the man who’d been singing across the floor two days ago was gone.
His hands were shut around his kneecaps.
Mine, I noticed, were doing exactly the same thing.
“And it isn’t only money.” Dorian took it up, low and flat.
“They’re bleeding us on other fronts at the same time.
Three major accounts walked this month.
Four more have quietly cut their contracted volume by a third or better.
Individually you could argue each one.
Together, it isn’t an argument.”
Evangeline had gone the color of the paperwork in her lap.
“If they’re coming at us from several directions at once, there won’t be anything left to save.
We’d be talking about insolvency inside a year.” Her voice went thin at the end of it, and she is not a woman whose voice goes thin.
Rowan shoved both hands back through his hair.
“Which is why I had you pull the accounting files yesterday with no notice and no explanation, and I apologize for that.
But this is far too large for the two of us reading ledgers at midnight.
We need a full audit to even find the shape of it.”
And then several things I’d been carrying separately since Tuesday snapped together, and I felt the cold go all the way down my back.
“Rowan.” Everyone turned.
“If it’s running through more than one department at the same time, you’re not looking for a person.
One person can move money.
One person cannot also be walking clients out the door and adjusting commercial records to cover the hole.
That’s coordination.
You’ve got a group.”
Dorian’s head came up sharply.
I kept going, because the rest of it had arrived too, and it was worse.
“And I’ve watched this happen before. New chapters come out on g.com first.
At the construction firm.
One of Aldous Dresden’s friends went through something identical — solid company on the Monday, nothing left of it by the following week.”
“Identical how?” Dorian said.
“Be specific.”
“Ambrose Nash.
He owned Apex Steel.” Saying the name still does something to my throat.
“He spotted irregularities and he did the responsible thing — he brought in an outside audit firm, a reputable one, and paid properly for it.
They gave him a clean opinion.
Nine days later he filed for bankruptcy.
Everything had already been carried out of the building while he sat there holding a report telling him he was fine.” The anger arrived on schedule, the way it always does.
“Aldous loaned me to him for three months afterward to help reconstruct how it had been done.”
Something changed in Rowan’s face — recognition, and underneath it, surprise.
“Wait.” He straightened.
“Ambrose Nash.
He was a friend of my father’s.
I sat with him after the bankruptcy, and he told me a young accountant had been the one to actually break the scheme open.” He stared at me.
“That was you?”
“That was me.”
“Then you know how it was done.”
“I know exactly how it was done, and it’s the reason I’m about to tell you not to hire an audit firm.” I looked between him and Dorian.
“The firm was bought before it started.
Not partway through — from day one.
Nash’s people walked in already owned.
So the moment we engage an external auditor, whoever is doing this to you finds out we’re looking, on the same day, from the inside.
Then you get one of three outcomes: the evidence disappears, the audit gets steered, or the auditors get bought the way Nash’s were.”
Orson looked genuinely frightened, which I hated.
“Then how do we catch anybody?
We can’t audit a company this size ourselves.”
I’d been turning this over since the first time Dorian said the words missing money in front of me.
“We build our own audit team.
Quietly.
Three or four people who come through the door looking like ordinary new hires — assistant here, coordinator there, nothing anyone notices.
They’re actually investigators, and they’re ours.
During business hours they do the job on their badge and they watch.
The real work happens after the building empties.”
Rowan and Dorian traded a look I could read perfectly well from across the circle.
“You’ve already built the whole thing,” Rowan said.
“Haven’t you.”
“I’ve had a while to think about it.” It was easier to say out loud than I’d expected.
“You’ve got an empty floor directly under the executive level.
You announce a renovation — loudly, with a budget and a timeline, so it’s boring — clear it completely, and put the audit headquarters in there.
Access restricted exactly the way you’ve restricted this floor: the five of us and no one else.
Meanwhile your people go through the building with monitoring equipment.
Offices, phone lines, anywhere a conversation gets had.
Our team pulls and copies by day and does the actual analysis at night, with zero overlap with anyone who works here.”
Dorian was nodding, then stopped.
“The nights I follow.
But why only nights?
Some of that work is faster with daylight and a live system.”
“Because isolation does two jobs at once.” I counted them off.
“One, nobody can work out what they’re really doing if nobody ever talks to them.
Two — and this is the part that killed Nash — nobody can buy a person they can’t get near.
Add the fact that four strangers with no visible function, camped on a closed floor during business hours, is the single most conspicuous thing we could possibly do.”
Evangeline’s face cleared for the first time all afternoon.
“But where on earth do we find four people with those skills whom we can also stake the company on?”
“I still have the contacts from Nash’s investigation.
Independents, all of them, properly qualified, and every one has worked this specific kind of fraud before.” I hesitated, then said the rest.
“And I’d want Mr.
Nash himself.
Not as a courtesy.
He’s become one of the better people in the country at this.”
Rowan’s eyebrows went up.
“Ambrose’s still working?
He must be sixty-five.”
“He had to rebuild from nothing, so he did.
Forensic accounting qualifications, fraud detection, the lot of it, in his fifties, after losing a company he’d spent thirty years on.
He’s helped four or five firms in the same position since.” I couldn’t keep it out of my voice.
“He’s a decent man and none of it should have happened to him.”
“I remember the case,” Dorian said grimly.
“The litigation is still grinding.
There were arrests — two convictions, I think.
He never got back more than pennies of what they took.”
“His family had other small businesses, so they weren’t destitute.
He lost his life’s work, not his house.” I found my hands had closed into fists again.
“Rowan, put him in charge of it.
He knows how these people think, he knows what order they do things in, and he has spent nine years wanting one of them in a courtroom.”
Rowan didn’t deliberate.
I’ve noticed that about him — he takes a long time to decide he needs to decide, and then no time at all.
“Then that’s what we do.
Hadley’s plan is the plan.” He went around the circle.
“Dorian.”
“All of it.
It’s the only version that survives contact with these people.”
“Evangeline.”
“Absolutely.
And better than anything we had.”
“Good.
We start Monday.” He held up a finger.
“One addition, and it isn’t negotiable.
From now on this subject gets discussed at my house, on weekends.
Hadley, Orson — you’ll both be compensated for the hours, obviously.” We nodded.
“Evangeline, I know you’re three weeks from walking out of here with a cake and a card.
If I need you back, will you come?”
Evangeline smiled at him the way she smiles at Orson when he’s been an idiot, which is to say with enormous fondness.
“Whatever you need, dear.
I’ll be there.”
“Then here’s the order of business.
I’ll get Nash to the house next Saturday.
Evangeline, your last job on the payroll is emptying the floor below us — start the renovation story circulating this week, make it dull, let people complain about the noise.
I’ll take Grant from security myself; he’s been with my father since before I could drive and he’ll handle the equipment personally.” Rowan stood, and the exhaustion that had been sitting on him all week had visibly gone somewhere else.
“From this minute, nothing about this leaves my house.
Not in a stairwell, not in a car park, not in this office.
Never in this building again.”
One by one they said yes, and one by one they went out.
I was on my feet and two steps from the door when he spoke again, and all the steel had drained back out of his voice.
“Hadley.
Stay a minute.
Please.”