CHAPTER 14: THE NEXT MOVE

The next move came at six in the morning, before any of them had managed even an hour of real sleep.

Temi's phone buzzed against the coffee table, the sound sharp enough to jolt her upright from where she'd finally drifted off sitting up, still in her wedding dress, Adrian dozing uneasily in the chair across from her, Naomi and Vivian long gone home for a few hours' rest before regrouping. Outside the windows, the first gray light of dawn was just beginning to touch the tops of the city's buildings, the kind of hour that usually belonged to joggers and delivery trucks, not crisis meetings about blackmail and stolen financial records. Temi grabbed the phone before the second buzz finished, expecting another cryptic threat.

It wasn't a text this time.

It was a news alert.

Adrian's eyes snapped open the second she made a small, strangled sound in her throat, and within seconds he was beside her, reading over her shoulder, both of them staring at the same headline in silence.

Exclusive: New Bride's Financial Troubles Revealed. Inside Temi Callahan's Struggling Studio and the Desperate Deal That Saved It.

"They didn't wait for the fifty thousand," Temi said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The article, already live on three different outlets by the time Adrian finished scrolling through it, laid out details Temi hadn't told anyone outside her closest circle. Her studio's overdue lease notice. The two junior architects she'd nearly had to lay off. Specific numbers from her financial records that no outsider should have had access to at all. Someone had clearly gone through months of her bank statements and invoices, cherry picking the most damaging figures to paint the picture of a desperate woman who'd married a billionaire out of financial necessity rather than any real connection.

"This is worse than the photo," Adrian said grimly. "Whoever this is doesn't just have surveillance access. They have financial records. Yours specifically. Which means either someone hacked your accounts directly, or someone with access to them sold the information." He was already on his feet, pacing again, the exhaustion of the night apparently burned clean away by fresh anger.

Temi's stomach turned over. "Pri has access to some of the studio's books. So does our accountant. So does the bank, technically, through the loan paperwork."

"Do you trust them?" Adrian's question was quiet but pointed, the kind of question a man asked when he'd learned the hard way not to assume loyalty extended as far as people liked to claim it did.

"Completely." The answer came out immediate, unshakable, before she'd even fully processed the question. "Pri would never. And our accountant's been with us since we opened. It doesn't make sense."

"Then someone got in another way." Adrian was already pulling up his own phone, dialing before he'd finished the sentence. "Naomi. It's happened again. Bigger this time. I need you back here, and I need you to bring someone from cybersecurity."

Within the hour, the penthouse had transformed from a quiet, exhausted crisis room into something closer to a small operations center. Naomi arrived first, followed shortly by a lean, quiet woman named Farrah who Adrian introduced simply as the best digital forensics specialist Voss Industries employed, someone who normally spent her days protecting the company's own systems from exactly this kind of breach. Laptops appeared on every available surface, cables snaking across the coffee table, the elegant, sparse living room transformed almost unrecognizably in the span of a single hour.

Farrah set up at the dining table without much preamble, plugging into Temi's laptop and running through lines of code Temi barely understood, occasionally muttering something to herself that sounded equal parts frustrated and impressed.

"Your studio's financial software has a vulnerability," Farrah said eventually, not looking up from the screen. "An old one. Something that should have been patched months ago but wasn't. Someone exploited it roughly three weeks ago, before any of this started. They've had access to your books for weeks, not days."

Temi felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her. "Three weeks ago. Before Camille even ran."

"Before the wedding was ever announced publicly," Adrian said slowly, something in his expression shifting from anger into a colder, more focused calculation. "Which means whoever did this wasn't reacting to any of what's happened since. They were already watching you, specifically, before you were ever part of my life at all."

The room went quiet, the implication settling heavily over all of them.

"That changes everything," Naomi said. "If this started before the engagement, before Camille ran, then this was never actually about the marriage, or the will, or even Marcus's campaign against the company. Someone had eyes on Temi's finances independently, weeks before any of that connected to Adrian at all."

"Which means the target might not be either of us specifically," Vivian said through the speakerphone, having joined the call the moment Adrian summoned her. "Which raises an uncomfortable question. What was so interesting about Temi Callahan three weeks ago that someone decided her financial records were worth hacking?"

Temi's mind raced backward, trying to place what might have happened three weeks ago, before any of this began, before Camille's rehearsal, before Adrian, before any of it. Nothing came to mind that felt significant enough to explain this kind of targeted attention.

"I don't know," she admitted. "Nothing changed for me three weeks ago. Same clients. Same studio problems. Nothing unusual." Temi pressed her palms against her eyes, exhaustion and fear tangling together into something close to panic, the last twenty four hours finally catching up with her all at once.

"Except," Pri's voice cut in suddenly from the doorway, having let herself in with the spare key Temi had given her years ago, phone in hand, face pale. "Except the Whitmore contract. Remember? Three weeks ago is when we submitted the final bid for the Whitmore renovation. The one that would have put us on the map if we won it." She crossed the room quickly, dropping onto the arm of the sofa beside Temi, still catching her breath from what must have been a frantic drive over.

Temi turned to stare at her. "You think this is about a client contract?"

"I think it's worth asking who else was bidding on that same project," Pri said. "Because if someone wanted us out of the running badly enough, digging up financial dirt to discredit us, or worse, to pressure us into withdrawing, wouldn't be the strangest thing a desperate competitor's ever done."

Farrah looked up from her laptop for the first time. "Send me the name of the other firms that bid on that contract. If there's a connection, I can find it faster with a starting point than digging blind."

Pri pulled up the bid records on her phone, scrolling through the list of competing firms, most of them familiar names in the city's architecture circles, nothing that jumped out as obviously threatening. Until she reached the third name on the list and went very still.

"What is it," Temi asked.

Pri turned the phone around slowly, and Temi felt every ounce of relief from the morning's chaos drain out of her at once.

Whitfield Design Group. Camille's family firm.

"That can't be a coincidence," Adrian said quietly, his voice carrying none of its usual measured control now, something rawer bleeding through instead.

"Camille wouldn't do this," Temi said immediately, though even as she said it, doubt crept in at the edges, unwelcome and impossible to fully silence. "She just stood outside that chapel and warned me about your father. Why would she help sabotage me and then turn around and warn me about someone else?" The question came out sharper than she intended, part defense of her friend, part desperate attempt to talk herself out of a growing unease she couldn't fully name.

"Maybe she wouldn't," Naomi said carefully. "But her family's firm bid against yours for a major contract, and someone connected to that bid has been sitting on hacked financial records for three weeks. That's not nothing, even if Camille herself had nothing to do with it directly." She glanced toward Adrian, some silent calculation passing between them, the kind of look two people share when they're both thinking the same uncomfortable thought and neither wants to say it first.

Farrah's fingers moved faster across the keyboard, cross referencing something Temi couldn't follow, lines of data scrolling past too quickly to read. The room held its breath around her, waiting, no one daring to fill the silence while she worked.

"I've got something," Farrah said finally, turning her laptop so everyone could see the screen. "An IP address tied to the breach. It traces back to a residential address in Connecticut." She said it plainly, without any sense of the weight it was about to carry, the way someone announces a fact before realizing exactly what that fact is going to do to the room around them.

Temi's blood ran cold before Farrah even finished speaking, some part of her already anticipating the address before it appeared fully on the screen. She thought of Camille standing at the edge of that gravel path in her plain gray coat, telling Temi she'd been staying somewhere no one thought to look, and felt the pieces of the last week rearrange themselves into a shape she desperately didn't want to see. Every warm, honest word Camille had said to her outside that chapel now sat differently in her memory, tinted with a suspicion Temi hated herself for even allowing room to breathe.

The same town where Camille had told her she'd been hiding this entire past week, at her aunt's place, exactly where no one thought to look.