CHAPTER 13

Gavin found her the next afternoon, not in her office but in the small kitchenette on the fourteenth floor, where Elena had taken to hiding for ten minutes at a time when the walls of her own office felt too much like a fishbowl.

"I have something," he said, sliding into the seat across from her and setting his laptop down with the careful, over-casual air of a man who knew he was being watched by at least two people who shouldn't have been watching. "And I have to be honest with you — I don't love what it looks like."

Elena set down her coffee. "Tell me."

"The signature's real. Serena Croft does have signing authority — but not the kind she's using it for. She's cleared for internal admin changes. Nothing client-facing, nothing contract-related." He turned the screen toward her, a wall of access logs scrolling past. "Someone elevated her permissions eleven days ago. Temporarily. It was supposed to auto-revert after forty-eight hours."

"Supposed to."

"It never reverted." Gavin's jaw tightened. "Which means either it was a mistake nobody caught — which, in a company this size, with this many eyes on compliance, would be a genuine miracle — or somebody wanted her to keep that access and made sure IT didn't notice."

Elena felt something cold settle low in her stomach. "Who elevated it?"

"That's the part I don't love," Gavin said. "The request came through Mark's old admin credentials. Except Mark's credentials were supposed to be deactivated the day he was removed from the Solaris account."

"They weren't."

"They weren't," Gavin confirmed. "Somebody kept a door open for him. Or for whoever's still using his login."

Elena sat with that for a long moment, turning her coffee cup slowly between her palms. "So either Mark still has access to systems he shouldn't, or someone's been impersonating him this whole time to cover their own tracks."

"Right now, I can't tell you which," Gavin admitted. "But I can tell you it's not nothing. And I can tell you that whoever's behind it knew exactly how long the audit trail takes to flag a stale credential — which means they know our systems better than a fired account exec should."

It was the kind of detail that would have meant nothing to her a month ago. Now it sat in her chest like a stone. "How long until you can prove it either way?"

"Proving intent is harder than proving access," Gavin said. "I can show you the door was propped open. I can't yet show you who's been walking through it, or why. That takes time, and time is the one thing I can't fake for you, no matter how good I am." He said it without arrogance, just fact, the way he said most things. "What I can do is set a trap of my own. Quietly re-flag the credential like it's finally about to auto-revert on schedule. If somebody's actively using it, they'll scramble to secure another way in before that happens. People move fast and sloppy when they think a door's closing on them."

"Do it," Elena said. "But nothing that tips them off it's deliberate."

"Obviously." He looked faintly offended she'd felt the need to say it. "I don't do sloppy. Sloppy is how people end up explaining themselves to HR instead of just quietly winning."

"Keep digging. Quietly."

"Always do." Gavin closed the laptop, then hesitated, uncharacteristically serious. "Elena — for what it's worth, whatever this turns into, you're not imagining it. Your instincts have been right about every piece of this so far."

It should have been reassuring. Instead, it made the unease worse.

---

She didn't go to Alexander that night. She told herself it was because there was nothing concrete yet — no name, no proof, nothing but a stale login and a bad feeling — and bringing him half a puzzle felt like handing him a reason to take the rest of it out of her hands.

She told herself that, and she almost believed it.

Instead, she called Leo.

He picked up on the fourth ring, his voice too bright, too fast. "Hey. Everything okay?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing." Elena moved to the window of her apartment, watching the city lights blur into unfocus. "You've been weird since dinner."

"I'm not weird. I'm busy. There's a difference." A pause, too long. "Look, I've got a work thing. Client stuff. It's fine."

"Leo."

"Elena." His voice had an edge now, brittle in a way that didn't suit him. "I'm twenty-six. I don't need you checking in on me like I'm still nineteen and flunking out of a class you paid for."

The old resentment in it landed exactly where he meant it to. She let a beat pass before she answered, refusing to give him the fight he seemed to be fishing for. "I'm not checking up on you because I think you're failing at something. I'm checking on you because you looked scared on that sidewalk, and you've never been able to lie to me about being scared. Not even when you were nineteen."

Silence stretched over the line. When he spoke again, some of the brittleness had gone out of his voice, replaced by something smaller. "It's handled, Lena. I promise. I just — I need you to trust me on this one. Okay?"

It wasn't okay. Nothing about his tone said it was okay. But she recognized, with a sinking feeling, the particular stubbornness they'd both inherited from their father — the refusal to be helped until help was no longer optional.

"Okay," she said anyway, because pushing harder right now would only teach him to hide better. "But if it stops being handled, you call me. Not Dad. Me."

"Yeah. Of course." Another pause. "Thanks, Lena."

He hung up before she could ask him for what.

---

She stood at the window a long while after, phone still warm in her hand, thinking about stale logins and locked doors that were supposed to close and hadn't, about a brother who'd never once in his life been good at hiding fear and was somehow managing it now.

Two separate threads. A company system somebody wanted to keep quietly open. A brother who wouldn't say what he owed or to whom.

She didn't yet have any reason to believe the two were connected. Nothing about a stale office login had anything to do with whatever kept making her brother go quiet mid-sentence, whatever made him check his phone the way people checked for weather they were hoping not to see.

Except that she'd learned, in three short weeks in this building, that nothing at Vance Enterprises was ever as separate as it first appeared. Every thread she pulled seemed to lead back into the same tangled knot — Mark, Serena, a door that wouldn't stay shut, a family with more secrets than seats at its own dinner table.

She thought of Alexander's offer from the night before — *I'd rather you not be doing this by yourself* — and, for one unguarded moment, let herself imagine what it would feel like to say yes to it. To hand over even one thread and let someone else help her hold the weight.

Instead she set her phone face-down on the counter, turned off the kitchen light, and told herself, the way she always did, that she'd know when it was time to ask for help.

She just couldn't shake the feeling that time was coming faster than she wanted it to.