A Name on the Inside

Chapter Eight

Wren stared at the message until the words blurred, then typed back with unsteady hands.

Who is this?

The reply came fast, like whoever was on the other end had been waiting with a thumb hovering.

Someone who's watched Camille Renard operate for longer than you'd believe. Meet me. Alone. Not at Voss Holdings, and not anywhere either of you would think to look for me.

An address followed. A coffee shop in a part of the financial district Wren rarely visited, unglamorous enough that nobody from either of their worlds would look twice at a stranger alone at a corner table.

She looked up at Alaric, reading the exchange over her shoulder, his face gone carefully blank in the way she was starting to recognize as barely restrained alarm.

"You're not going alone," he said.

"The message specifically says alone."

"I don't care what the message says." His hand landed on her shoulder, firm, not demanding. The first genuinely protective gesture she'd seen from him since this mess detonated in his office fifteen minutes ago. "Someone anonymous with detailed knowledge of Camille's history contacts you within an hour of a photo of you leaking. That's not a coincidence I'm comfortable sending you into alone."

"If I show up with you, whoever this is walks before we're within a hundred feet of the door. You're the one person in this mess they specifically didn't ask to see." She softened, seeing the tension still coiled in his shoulders. "I'll take Priya. She waits outside. If I'm not out in thirty minutes, she calls everyone we both know."

It took him a long moment to agree, and when he finally did it was with the reluctance of a man who'd spent a decade controlling every variable in his life and hated, viscerally, being asked to trust one he couldn't manage himself.

The man waiting when Wren arrived an hour later was younger than she'd expected, in an understated suit that read expensive without trying to announce itself, dark eyes tracking her the second she walked in with a wariness that said he was just as nervous about this as she was.

"Theo Renard," he said, standing briefly as she sat across from him. "Camille's brother. I imagine that raises more questions than it answers."

"A few," Wren admitted, sliding into the booth, cataloguing his posture, his tone, the way he kept glancing at the door. "Why would Camille's own brother anonymously text a journalist his sister clearly doesn't want digging into her history?"

Theo exhaled slowly, both hands around a coffee he clearly hadn't touched. "Because I've spent ten years watching my sister build a career on a foundation I've never been fully comfortable with, and I've reached the point where I'd rather live with the fallout of the truth than keep living with what silence has already cost other people." His eyes flicked up, steady despite the visible tremor in his hands. "Including your father."

Wren's pulse spiked. "You know something about the merger collapse. About the leak."

"I know Camille worked briefly for a firm connected to both the Voss family's shipping company and your father's PR firm, fifteen years ago, before either company was big enough to matter to anyone outside their own industries," Theo said. "I know she left that job abruptly, under circumstances the family never discussed. And I know that within six months of her leaving, the merger that would have secured the Voss family's company for another generation collapsed after confidential details were leaked to a rival bidder." He paused, jaw tight. "I was twenty-two. I didn't understand what I was looking at back then. It took years to connect what I'd overheard as a kid to what I've watched her build since."

"Do you have proof?" Wren asked, voice low, careful. "Anything beyond suspicion and timing?"

Theo slid a slim folder across the table. Old, slightly yellowed, the kind of document kept somewhere private for a long time. "Correspondence," he said. "Between Camille and someone at the rival bidding firm, dated two weeks before the merger collapsed. I found it going through our mother's things last year. I don't know if it proves intent. But it proves she had access, and contact, at exactly the wrong moment."

Wren opened the folder with hands that had gone entirely steady, the reporter in her taking over completely now there was something concrete in front of her. Formal, businesslike letters, but unmistakable in what they implied. References to "the Vale-Ashby arrangement," timing, information Camille shouldn't have had access to, let alone discussed with a competitor.

"This could clear my father's name," Wren said quietly. "If it's real. If it holds up."

"It's real," Theo said. "Whether it holds up publicly is a different question, and I need you to understand the risk. If I hand this over and it goes public, my sister loses everything. Her career, her reputation, possibly her freedom depending what else surfaces once people start looking closely. I'm not naive about what I'm doing here." His eyes met hers, steady despite everything. "I'm doing it anyway, because I don't think either of our families deserves to keep paying for something that was, in the end, entirely her decision."

Wren closed the folder carefully, holding it like something fragile. "Why now? Why not years ago, if you've suspected this that long?"

Theo was quiet a moment. "Because two nights ago Camille told me she was preparing something," he said finally. "A story she intends to release herself, before anyone else can. One that frames Alaric Voss as the architect of your father's downfall, distances herself from any involvement entirely, and positions her as a sympathetic insider willing to go on record against her own employer." His expression darkened. "She's not protecting the truth, Ms. Ashby. She's protecting herself, and she's willing to let Alaric take the full weight of a decision that was never entirely his."

Wren's stomach dropped. "When?"

Theo's phone buzzed on the table, and whatever color remained in his face drained out of it.

"That," he said quietly, turning the phone toward her, "might already be answering your question."

The notification was from a major financial news outlet, published four minutes ago, the headline glowing between them.

EXCLUSIVE: Voss Holdings Insider Alleges CEO Orchestrated Decade-Long Vendetta Against Ashby Family — "He Wanted Her Broken, Not Just Bought Out.