Chapter 7

TERMS OF COOPERATION

Kieran’s POV

The detail Riona pointed out changed the shape of the problem.

I took the photograph carefully, keeping my fingers away from the printed line she had indicated. I studied the surrounding details. The date. The subsidiary reference. The transaction code.

I had seen that arrangement before.

Not this exact document, but the same deliberate neatness: a company used as a passageway, a transaction given an ordinary label, a subsidiary positioned between the money and the people who benefited from it. Years ago, those patterns had surfaced in the records surrounding my mother’s downfall. 

The resemblance was unsettling. It was not proof.

My mother’s file had taught me to distrust coincidences, especially the convenient kind. A clean record could be manufactured; a missing record could be made to look like an administrative mistake. The people responsible had known precisely which signatures to collect and which questions to bury. By the time the scandal reached the newspapers, the public had been handed a simple story with a villain already chosen. My mother had spent the rest of her life trying to prove that the story was false.

I studied the photograph again, searching for anything beyond the company name. The paper’s edge was cropped, and the reference number was partially obscured by a shadow. Whoever had assembled the evidence file might have included the page carelessly. Or someone had wanted it noticed by the right person.

Riona followed my gaze. She wasn’t asking me to rescue her. She wanted to understand what had happened and why. Riona was frightened, exhausted, and grieving, but she was still guarding the little control she had left.

I could work with that. I could not yet trust her account without verification, and I would not confuse her pain with proof. But I also knew the danger of dismissing a person because the evidence had been arranged to make them look guilty. My mother had been dismissed that way, without question. I had no intention of repeating the mistake without examining the facts first.

“Can you tell what it means?” Riona asked.

“Not yet.”

“You looked as though you recognized it.”

“I recognize the pattern. I don’t know if it’s the same operation.”

I returned the photograph to her. “Keep it somewhere safe. Don’t send it to anyone or upload it.”

“Is that advice or an order?”

“Advice.”

“Good. I’m not taking orders from you.”

I took out my phone and called my security chief.

“Darius, I need preliminary inquiries on a company I’m sending you. Check its current registration, former subsidiaries, and any financial records you can access without alerting the subjects. I also want the circumstances surrounding Riona Vesper’s arrest reviewed. Start with the evidence inventory and the chain of custody.”

I glanced at Riona. She was listening, her face giving away nothing.

“And one more thing,” I continued. “Do not contact Wrenhold. No calls to their legal department, no inquiries through their usual channels, and no one is to mention my name. I want facts before anyone knows we’re looking.”

I ended the call.

Riona’s expression had cooled. “You already started investigating me.”

“I asked for a review of the circumstances surrounding your arrest.”

“You also asked about my professional history, didn’t you?”

I hadn’t told her I had. I’d recognized her name, checked the basic public details available to me, and confirmed that her work at Wrenhold involved property acquisitions and development. “Yes,” I said. “I checked your professional background.”

Her fingers closed around the folder. “Without asking me.”

“I needed to know whether your account matched what could be independently verified.”

“So you’re treating me like another suspect.”

“I’m treating every claim as something that should be checked. Including yours. Including mine.”

“That must make life very comfortable. Nobody gets to be a person until you’ve examined their records.”

“Of course not.” She gave a small, bitter laugh. “You’re not offering comfort, are you? You’re offering an investigation.”

“I’m offering a chance to find out why a company connected to my work appeared in evidence against you.”

“Your work,” she repeated. “Not me. Not what happened to me. Your work.”

“I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” I leaned forward, keeping my voice level. “I don’t know you well enough to trust you, and you don’t know me well enough to trust me. I won’t promise you a result I can’t guarantee. I won’t tell you that everything will be fine. And I’m not giving you money because I feel sorry for you.”

Her eyes flashed at the last sentence, but she didn’t look away.

“If you want my help,” I continued, “you’ll need to answer reasonable questions about what you saw at Wrenhold, what you reviewed, and how that photograph came into your possession. If my people need clarification, you’ll cooperate. In return, I’ll have them investigate the company and the evidence used against you. I’ll share what we establish, provided it doesn’t compromise the investigation.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you leave with the information you already have.”

“I won’t become your employee,” she said. “I won’t let you use my situation to make decisions for me, and I won’t give you private information that has nothing to do with this case. You ask about the documents, the transactions, or the people involved, I’ll answer what I know. But you don’t get access to every part of my life just because you can afford a team of investigators.”

“Reasonable.”

“And you don’t get to decide where I go.”

“If your safety becomes an immediate concern, I’ll tell you what I think you should do. The decision remains yours unless you ask me to arrange protection.”

She studied me. “You make cooperation sound like a business contract.”

“It is.”

“I’m not a company you’re acquiring, Mr. Mercer.”

“No,” I said. “Companies are usually easier to negotiate with.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll answer questions related to the case. You’ll investigate the photograph. We share relevant findings. Nothing beyond that without another conversation.”

I extended my hand. “Agreed.”

She looked at it for a moment before taking it. Her grip was cool and surprisingly steady. I released her hand first.

My phone vibrated against the table.

Darius.

I opened the message. It contained only a brief preliminary note, with a scanned reference attached. The company in Riona’s photograph appeared in an old financial file tied to the investigation into my mother’s downfall. The record was incomplete, and it did not establish who had moved the money or why. But the name was there, in a file I had spent years trying to find.

I had expected a possible connection. I had not expected the first thread to lead straight back to the case that had ruined my mother’s name.

Riona noticed my expression. “What is it?”

I looked from the message to the photograph in her hands.

“We have a connection,” I said. “And it goes back further than your arrest.”

Her face tightened. “How far?”

I turned the phone toward myself again, reading the reference one more time before answering.

“Far enough that I need to know who put this document in your evidence file.”