Ethan’s pov
I’d been hunting a stranger.
The paper trail kept leading back to people I loved.
Marcus called an emergency meeting at nine that night, which told me before he said a single word that whatever he’d found wasn’t going to be the kind of thing that could wait until morning.
I met him in the small conference room off my office, the one with no windows and no assistant stationed outside, the room we’d started using specifically because nobody could see in.
“Tell me,” I said, not bothering to sit.
“We found a second leak.” He turned his laptop toward me, a spreadsheet filling the screen, rows of timestamps and document names that meant nothing to me at first glance.
“Not Kestrel. Different deal, different timeframe, but the same pattern, internal numbers showing up in a competitor’s counteroffer within days of being finalized.”
“Which deal?”
“The Meridian port contract. Six months ago. You probably don’t remember it clearly, it was smaller, got absorbed into the noise of everything else that quarter.”
I did remember it, actually, though barely a modest infrastructure deal, nothing like the scale of Kestrel, easy to lose in a year that had been full of bigger fires.
“We lost that one too?”
“You didn’t lose it. You won it, actually, but only because you underbid what you should have, going in low enough to beat whatever the competitor already knew about your ceiling.” Marcus scrolled through the sheet.
“At the time, everyone assumed it was just smart negotiating. Looking at it now, against the pattern we’re seeing with Kestrel, it looks like the same leak, earlier, smaller stakes, easier to miss.”
“How did you even catch this one? If it looked like a win at the time.”
“I went back through every deal from the last two years where our final numbers matched a competitor’s opening position a little too closely. Meridian wasn’t the only false positive I found, either I flagged nine at first. Three washed out under scrutiny, coincidence or public information doing the explaining. Six didn’t wash out.”
“Walk me through how you ruled the three out.”
“Public filings, mostly. Two of them involved competitors who had access to numbers through completely legitimate channels, industry reports, that kind of thing. The third was pure coincidence, as far as I can tell, a competitor guessing right by chance. It happens more than people think.”
“But not with the six.”
“Not with the six. Those six all show internal access within a tight window before the leak, every time, no exceptions.”
“So this has been happening longer than we thought.”
“Six months, at minimum. Possibly longer. I’m still working backward through the archives.” He pulled up another screen, a timeline this time, dates marching left to right with small red flags at intervals I didn’t like the spacing of.
“Every flag is a deal where our numbers showed up somewhere they shouldn’t have. Six in the last eight months.”
“Six.” I sat down finally, the number settling into my chest with a weight I hadn’t braced for.
“Six deals compromised and nobody noticed until Kestrel blew up in our faces.”
“The earlier ones were subtle. Small enough margins that they read as normal market pressure, not sabotage. Whoever’s doing this got better at it over time, or bolder, or both.”
Marcus hesitated, which was unlike him, a man who usually delivered bad news with the same flat efficiency regardless of how bad it actually was.
“Ethan, before I show you this, I want to say something.”
“Say it.”
“The overlap is narrower than the Kestrel list alone. Six deals, cross-referenced against access, it cuts the suspect pool down considerably. That’s good news, in a sense. It means we’re closer to an answer.”
“But.”
“But the names left standing after the cross-reference aren’t going to be comfortable ones. I wanted you prepared for that before I show you the screen.”
Something cold settled in my stomach, the particular dread of a man who already half-knows what’s coming and has spent weeks trying not to look directly at it.
“Show me.”
He turned the laptop fully toward me and pulled up the consolidated log, six columns collapsing down into a single overlapping set of names, the pool I’d been running through my head for weeks finally narrowed by hard data instead of gut feeling and sleepless paranoia.
Victor Ashford.
Present in the access trail for five of the six flagged deals.
Gerald Whitfield.
Present for four.
“Victor,” I said slowly.
“That tracks. He’s had motive for years, and board access explains most of it.”
“It does. Though five out of six is a lot of coincidental proximity for a man who claims he’s only ever looked at these documents in passing.”
“Has he ever claimed that? Directly, to you?”
“Once. In passing, when I mentioned the audit was underway. He said something about how he barely touches operational files anymore, leaves that to younger hands.” Marcus’s mouth tightened slightly.
“His own access history says otherwise.”
“And Gerald.” I said the name like it might taste different out loud than it did in my head, like saying it would somehow make the possibility more or less real.
“Four out of six.”
“Gerald’s access is largely explainable by his role. He touches nearly every legal document that crosses this building. It would be more suspicious if his name weren’t on these lists, frankly.”
“You’re defending him.”
“I’m contextualizing him. There’s a difference.” Marcus met my eyes steadily.
“I’m not going to tell you who’s guilty, Ethan. I’m going to give you the data and let you draw conclusions, because that’s my job, and because I’ve been wrong about people before, and I’d rather be careful than fast.”
“You’ve been wrong before? About what?”
“Different life. Different company.” He said it flatly, closing off the topic before it opened further, though something in his tone told me it wasn’t a casual deflection.
“Let’s just say I once accused the wrong person of something serious, and it cost that person their career even after the truth came out. I don’t intend to make that mistake twice.” You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
“Fair enough.”
“So I’ll keep saying this until you’re tired of hearing it: overlap isn’t proof. It’s a place to look harder, not a verdict.”
“I appreciate that. I do.” I rubbed my eyes, the exhaustion of the last six weeks pressing down harder than it had in days.
“Keep going. Who else.”
He scrolled to the final tab, and something in his posture changed, a stillness that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“There’s a third name that appears more than once,” he said carefully.
“Not as frequently as Victor or Gerald. But present.”
“How many times?”
“Two of the six.”
“That’s not nothing, but it’s not damning either. Half the executive floor probably touched two of these deals in passing.”
“Normally I’d agree with you.” He hesitated again, that same rare uncertainty crossing his face.
“But this particular name doesn’t have an obvious professional reason to be in either file. Not the way Gerald has a reason, or Victor has board oversight. This access doesn’t map to any role this person actually holds.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning someone either shared credentials with this person, or this person went looking for information they had no business reading, and did it well enough that it almost didn’t register as unusual.” Marcus’s voice had gone careful in a way I recognized from the night he first showed me the trust amendment log.
“I ran it twice, thinking I’d made an error. I hadn’t.”
My pulse had started climbing without my full permission, some part of me already guessing where this was headed and dreading the confirmation more than I dreaded almost anything else in my life right now.
“Show me.”
“Ethan…”
“Show me the name, Marcus.”
“Before I do, I want you to remember what I said. Two out of six. Unusual access, not a signed confession. There could be an explanation we haven’t thought of yet.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I know you heard me. I’m not sure you’re listening to me right now.” He said it gently, which somehow made it land harder than if he’d been sharp about it.
“You’ve had a hard six weeks. I don’t want you doing something you can’t undo because you’re exhausted and scared and finally have a name to point at.”
“I’m not going to do anything tonight except look at a screen, Marcus. Show me.”
He turned the screen the rest of the way toward me, scrolling to the highlighted row, and I understood, watching his face rather than the screen for one extra second, that he already knew what I was about to see and had been trying, in his own careful way, to soften the landing before I hit it.
I looked down at the log.
The access log had a name on it I recognized instantly, and my hand went still on the mouse because I didn’t want to click and confirm it.