Ethan’s pov
Losing Kestrel cost us forty million dollars.
It cost me something worse… I stopped trusting my own boardroom.
“Walk me through the timeline again,” I said, standing at the head of the conference table while our CFO, Priya Malhotra, pulled up the numbers on the screen behind her.
“Every point where their team could have known ours.”
“We opened negotiations in March.” She clicked to the next slide, a wall of dates and figures I’d already memorized from staring at them alone at two in the morning.
“Our final offer went out April twenty-eighth. They countered with terms that matched our internal floor almost exactly. Not close. Exact, down to the decimal on freight allocation.”
“That’s not a coincidence.”
“No,” she agreed.
“It’s not.”
“Who had access to the floor number?”
“Officially? Five people. You, me, Gerald, and the two negotiators on the deal team.” She hesitated.
“Unofficially, anyone who sat in on the strategy meetings could have pieced it together. That’s closer to a dozen.”
“Give me the dozen.”
“Ethan…”
“Give me the names, Priya. I’m not going to storm into anyone’s office and accuse them of treason. I just want to know who was in the room.”
She sighed, but she pulled up a second slide, a list of attendees from every strategy session going back to March.
I read it twice.
Most of the names meant nothing to me beyond a face and a job title.
Three of them meant a great deal more.
“Gerald sat in on four of the six sessions,” she said.
“Victor attended two, as board oversight. And Daniel sat in on three, informally, since you usually pulled him in as a sounding board.”
“I know who sat in the room, Priya. I was there too.”
“Then you already have the list. I’m just the one confirming it.” Her voice softened slightly.
“For what it’s worth, sitting in a room isn’t the same as selling what you heard in it.”
“A dozen people who could hand our competitor a forty-million-dollar advantage and nobody thinks that’s worth losing sleep over.”
“I think everyone in this room is losing sleep over it, Ethan.” She said it evenly.
“The question is what we do next, not how angry we are about it.”
She was right, and I hated that she was right, because anger was easier to sit with than the alternative, which was sitting in a room full of people I’d trusted for years and wondering which one of them had a price.
The meeting broke up an hour later with no answers, only a longer list of names and a promise from Marcus’s team to dig deeper into the deal room’s access logs.
I stayed behind after everyone filed out, staring at the numbers on the screen.
Gerald found me there.
“You should go home,” he said.
“I can’t stop running the list.”
“What list?”
“Everyone who had the floor number. Everyone who had the trust amendment. Everyone who’s had a reason to want me distracted this month.” I rubbed my eyes.
“The lists keep overlapping, Gerald. That’s what’s keeping me up.”
“Overlapping how?”
“Names appearing on both. More than one, actually.”
Something crossed his face, brief, careful.
“Mine included, I assume.”
“Yours included.”
“Good.” He said it without flinching, which somehow made me trust him more than if he’d protested.
“You should be suspicious of me. I’ve had access to nearly everything in this company for two decades. If you weren’t looking at my name, you wouldn’t be doing your job.”
He sat down across from me, “I’ve worked for this family for twenty-two years. I understand why you’re looking at everyone sideways right now. But you can’t run a company suspecting your own shadow.”
“Someone in this building sold us out. Twice, that I know of. Maybe more that I don’t.”
“Probably,” he said, which surprised me, because Gerald rarely conceded a point that easily.
“But paranoia isn’t a strategy. It’s just exhausting, and it makes you sloppy. You start seeing guilt in people who are only guilty of being tired, or distracted, or having a bad week.”
“How do you tell the difference?”
“Evidence,” he said simply.
“Not vibes. Not who looked at you strangely in a meeting. Evidence, and Marcus’s team, and time.”
“Time is the one thing I don’t have a lot of right now.”
“I know.” He stood, resting a hand briefly on my shoulder on his way past.
“Go home, Ethan. Even generals sleep.”
I didn’t go home, not right away.
I sat in my office another hour, pulling up the Kestrel files again, cross-referencing them against the trust amendment access log Marcus had given me the week before, looking for overlap I already half-expected to find and dreading finding it anyway.
Gerald’s name appeared on both lists.
So did Victor’s.
So did Daniel’s.
I told myself that meant nothing.
Gerald had access to everything, by design… that was his job.
Victor sat on committees that touched half the company’s confidential files as a matter of routine.
And Daniel reviewed deal terms with me constantly, had for years, long before either the trust clause or the Kestrel negotiation existed.
My phone buzzed.
Daniel.
Still at the office?
Saw your light on from the garage. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
I typed back before I could think too hard about it.
Yeah.
Reviewing Kestrel.
Want company?
I’ve got nothing better to do tonight than watch you torture yourself over spreadsheets.
I hesitated over the reply longer than the message warranted, my thumb hovering over the screen, some instinct I didn’t fully trust yet telling me to say no, to sit with this alone a little longer before I let anyone else into the room, even him.
I’m fine.
Heading out soon anyway.
Suit yourself.
Don’t let it eat you alive.
It’s just money, Ethan.
You’ll make it back.
It wasn’t just money.
It was the second time in six weeks that someone had known exactly what we were going to do before we did it, and both times, the list of people who could have known ran through the same handful of names.
I pulled up a blank document and started typing without fully deciding to.
I listed everyone with access to the Kestrel floor number.
Then, beside it, everyone with access to the trust amendment eighteen months ago.
Then I highlighted the names that appeared on both.
Gerald Whitfield.
Victor Ashford.
I stared at those two names for a long time, turning the shape of the problem over, testing it from every angle I could think of.
Victor made sense… Victor had motive I could articulate, old grievances, an obvious appetite for control that had never quite been satisfied by a board seat.
Gerald was harder to explain away, but twenty-two years of loyalty had to count for something, didn’t it.
My cursor blinked in the empty space beneath the two names, and I found myself hovering there, my hand not quite committing to the keys, because there was a third name that belonged on that list if I was being honest with myself.
I told myself it was different.
Daniel wasn’t on the board.
Daniel didn’t stand to gain a single dollar from either deal falling apart… if anything, he lost time, lost bandwidth, watched his best friend spiral through the same crisis for weeks running.
There was no motive there, none I could construct even trying, and a suspect list without motive was just a list of people who happened to be in the building.
But Marcus’s voice kept surfacing anyway, unbidden, something he’d said the night he first showed me the log.
People don’t usually hand out their passwords to strangers.
They hand them to people they trust.
What if the leak wasn’t Daniel acting alone at all.
What if it was Daniel, unknowing, careless, mentioning something in the wrong company, trusting the wrong person with a detail that seemed harmless in the moment…