Chapter 5: The Leak

Jade found out on a Wednesday.

It was Dana who brought it to her, which told Jade everything she needed to know about Dana's instincts and why she had survived four directors on this floor when people with shinier resumes had not. She came into Jade's office at eight fifteen in the morning before the rest of the team had filtered in, closed the door quietly behind her, and sat down with the particular stillness of someone carrying information they have already turned over several times before deciding to speak.

"I need to show you something," Dana said.

She placed a printed email chain on Jade's desk. Jade read it once quickly and then again slowly, the way she read anything that mattered. It was an internal thread from three weeks ago, before Jade had joined the company, discussing the preliminary Valen strategy. Preliminary, internal, and stamped at the bottom of the thread with a distribution list that contained exactly four names.

None of those names were external.

And yet the thread had clearly been forwarded. The metadata at the top of the page showed an outbound send to an address that was not a Crest Holdings domain.

Jade set the paper down. "Where did you get this?"

"I did not go looking for it," Dana said. "It came to me by accident. Someone on the floor printed it and left it in the tray. I do not think they realised I was still at my desk." She paused. "I have been watching since then. There have been two other instances I can identify. Small things. A budget figure that appeared somewhere it should not have. A timeline that was referenced in an external meeting before it had been shared outside the building."

Jade looked at her. "You have been sitting on this."

"I wanted to be certain before I brought it to you," Dana said. "And I wanted to bring it to you rather than anyone else because I do not yet know how far it goes."

That final sentence landed with precision. Dana was telling her she did not know who to trust above Jade's level. She was also, by coming here first, indicating that she had decided to trust Jade herself. Given that Jade had been in the building for less than a week, that was not a small thing.

"How many people had access to this thread?" Jade asked.

"Originally four. Since then, with the project expansion, twelve."

"I need the names of all twelve," Jade said. "Quietly. No flags on the system, nothing that looks like an audit. Can you do that?"

"Already done," Dana said, and placed a second sheet on the desk.

Jade looked at her with something close to genuine appreciation. "You are very good at your job, Dana."

"I know," Dana said, without any performance of modesty. "That is why I am still here."

After Dana left, Jade sat with the two sheets of paper and her coffee and the particular cold focus that came over her when a situation required precision rather than reaction. She did not feel panicked. She felt the problem take shape in her mind with the clarity of something she could work with.

Twelve names. One of them was feeding information outside the building. The question was not only who but to whom, and the second question was more urgent than the first because the who would follow naturally once she understood the why.

She thought about Celeste Harrow in her cream dress.

She thought about the way Celeste's eyes had sharpened when she saw Jade.

She did not yet have evidence. But she had a shape.

She folded both sheets into her bag, opened her laptop, and began working on the Valen pitch as if nothing had shifted. Because the pitch still needed to be built and she was not going to let whoever was watching see her change her behaviour. The best thing she could do right now was appear completely undisturbed.

She was deep in the work when her phone buzzed.

Dominic: My office. Ten minutes.

She went.

He was standing at his window when she walked in, which she had come to recognise as his thinking position. He turned when he heard her and looked at her face with the particular attention he gave her in professional settings, reading her the way she read other people, and she knew he clocked something immediately because his eyes sharpened.

"Close the door," he said.

She did.

"Harmon called me this morning," he said. "He referenced a budget figure from the Valen preliminary brief. A figure that was revised internally two weeks ago and never shared outside this building."

The cold focus in her chest tightened. "He referenced it how?"

"As a concern. He said he had heard the initial budget allocation was lower than presented and he wanted assurance that the revised figure was the genuine commitment." Dominic's voice was controlled but only just. "The only way Harmon heard that figure is if someone told him. And the only people who knew that figure work on this floor."

"I know," she said.

He looked at her. "You already know."

"Dana brought something to me this morning." She told him what she had. The email chain, the metadata, the two other instances Dana had identified. She did not soften any of it. She watched his face as she spoke and saw the controlled anger moving beneath the surface of it, contained but present.

When she finished he was quiet for a moment.

"Twelve names," he said.

"I am already working through them," she said. "I need a few days. If I move too quickly I will spook whoever it is and they will cover their tracks."

"I want to bring in security."

"Not yet," she said. "If we bring in security the whole floor knows within an hour. Whoever this is will go quiet and we will lose the thread." She held his gaze. "Give me until the end of the week. I will find them."

He looked at her for a long moment. The tension in him was palpable and she understood it. This was his company. Someone inside it was working against it and he had the instinct of a man who dealt with threats by moving on them immediately and completely.

"Four days," he said.

"Four days," she agreed.

He moved toward her and she thought for a moment he was going to touch her, which in his office in the middle of the morning would have been a departure from the careful line they had both been maintaining professionally. But he stopped two feet away and looked at her with an expression that was partly the CEO she worked for and partly the man who had held her in his dark apartment two nights ago.

"Be careful," he said. It came out lower than his professional register.

"I am always careful," she said.

His mouth curved slightly. "No you are not. You are precise. There is a difference."

She felt the warmth of that move through her and kept it off her face. She nodded once and went back to her office and sat down and pulled out the list of twelve names and began the work of elimination.

She crossed off four immediately based on access timing. The leaked thread had been sent on a date when two of the twelve had been out of office and a third had not yet been granted system access. The fourth she eliminated based on position, too senior to risk it for anything short of a catastrophic personal motive and she had nothing to indicate that.

Eight names.

She spent the rest of the morning in apparently normal work mode, moving around the floor, dropping into conversations, asking the kinds of questions that were plausibly about the pitch and incidentally revealed who knew what and when. She was good at this. She had always been good at this.

By lunchtime she had it down to three.

By three in the afternoon, watching the floor with the peripheral attention she had been trained by years of reading rooms, she noticed something. One of the three remaining names, Ryan Cole, the youngest member of the team at twenty-three, had been on his personal phone twice in the last hour. Which was not unusual. Except both times he had angled his body away from the floor in a specific way, shoulders curved inward, screen tilted, the body language of someone who did not want to be read.

She had done enough.

She did not confront him. Not yet. She needed one more thing.

She asked Dana, quietly, to check whether Ryan's system access logs showed any unusual activity outside of business hours in the past three weeks. She framed it as a general audit question and Dana, who was sharp enough to understand exactly what was being asked without being told, said she would have something by morning.

At six o'clock, when most of the floor had emptied, Jade's phone buzzed.

Not Dominic this time.

An unknown number. A single message.

You are looking in the right direction. Be careful about what you find.

She stared at the screen for a long time.

She typed back: Who is this?

No reply came.

She sat in the emptying office and felt the situation expand around her, taking on dimensions she had not anticipated when she walked into this building in her navy dress a week ago with seventeen slides and a presentation she had rehearsed until the words stopped meaning anything.

She thought about Celeste. About the board. About a leak that went somewhere specific and deliberate. About an unknown number that knew she was already close.

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was Dominic.

Come over. I will cook.

She almost smiled. She typed back: You cook?

Badly. Come anyway.

She picked up her bag, folded the list of names into her inside pocket, and walked to the elevator. She was going to his apartment and she was going to eat whatever he cooked badly and she was going to tell him about the unknown number and then later, much later, she was going to stop thinking about all of it for a few hours in the way that only he had so far managed to make possible.

But first she stood in the elevator and looked at the unknown message one more time.

Be careful about what you find.

The doors opened. She walked out into the evening and the city swallowed her and somewhere above her in the lit towers of the skyline, something that had been set in motion long before she arrived was continuing to move.

She could feel it.

She walked faster.