Chapter 8

Alexander Pov

The photograph remained on the table between us like a piece of unfinished business.

Adrian Cole stood on the opposite side of the glass surface and did not look away from it for a long moment. When he finally lifted his eyes, the earlier anger had settled into something tighter and more useful. He understood the shape of the problem now. Understanding did not make him cooperative. It only made him harder to read.

I preferred hard to read over broken. Broken people made mistakes. Hard people could still be leveraged.

“Sit down,” I said.

He did not move immediately. The refusal was small and deliberate, a reminder that he still possessed the ability to choose. Then he pulled out the chair opposite mine and sat. The movement was controlled. No wasted energy. No performance of distress. Whatever emotional damage Nathan Reed had left in him, Adrian was not offering it for display.

I opened the folder to a fresh page and kept my pen ready. “I want the complete timeline of your access. Every device Nathan used. Every instance you can remember of him near your work materials. Dates if you have them. Approximate windows if you do not.”

“I already told you the shape of it.”

“You told me the summary. I need the operational detail.”

He leaned back in the chair. The afternoon light from the windows cut across one side of his face and left the other in soft shadow. Up close the signs of the last twenty-four hours were visible—fatigue around the eyes, the residual tension in the way he held his shoulders—but the core of him remained intact. That integrity was either genuine or the best defense he had left.

“He used my laptop at home,” Adrian said. “Usually in the evenings. Sometimes when I was cooking or in the shower. I did not stand over him. I had no reason to. He borrowed my phone on short trips around the apartment when his was charging. He never asked for my work password. I never offered it. The company laptop stayed in my bag unless I was actively using it. I did not leave it open and unattended at home as a habit.”

“As a habit,” I repeated. “Meaning there were exceptions.”

“There were nights I came home late and left it on the desk while I showered or ate. He was in the apartment. I did not treat him like a security risk. That was the mistake.”

I made a note. The admission cost him something. Good. Cost created pressure, and pressure produced clearer information.

“Did he ever ask questions about your approval process? About how the subsidiary’s final sign-offs worked?”

“He asked general questions about my day. The same way I asked about his. Procurement problems. Vendor delays. Nothing that stood out as intelligence gathering at the time.”

“Hindsight is clearer.”

“Hindsight is all I have left.”

The edge in his voice was controlled but present. I let it stand. Pushing too hard on the emotional wound would make him close ranks. I needed him open enough to keep talking.

I turned to the next page in the folder—a printout of Adrian’s building access logs for the previous six months. Victoria had pulled them quietly before the board meeting. “Several of the largest transfers were approved during windows when your badge shows you in meetings on the nineteenth floor. Conference rooms with no terminal access. Explain how your credentials were used while you were physically elsewhere.”

“I can’t. That is the point. I was not at a computer. Someone else was.”

“Someone who had already captured your login and was operating remotely.”

“Yes.”

“Or someone who had physical access to a terminal that still carried an active session you failed to close.”

His jaw tightened. “I do not leave active sessions open. That is basic procedure. I was trained on it. I followed it.”

I watched him for a reaction beyond the words. There was frustration, yes. Defensiveness. But no flicker of the kind of panic that usually accompanied a lie under direct pressure. Either he was telling the truth or he had prepared for this exact line of questioning long before today. The second option required a level of foresight that did not match the man who had only discovered the affair and the missing money the previous evening.

“Nathan’s procurement access,” I said. “How much did you know about the scope of it?”

“I knew he approved vendors and managed purchase orders for the subsidiary. I did not know the ceiling of his override authority. We did not discuss clearance levels. It was not the kind of conversation we had.”

“What kind of conversations did you have?”

The question was deliberate. I wanted the personal texture, not because I cared about the relationship, but because the texture would reveal how much operational information could have passed between them without Adrian noticing.

He was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again the words came slower.

“Ordinary ones. Work. Rent. Whether we were saving enough. Plans that never went further than the next quarter. He was good at being present without being known. I see that now. At the time it felt like compatibility.”

I wrote nothing. The observation was useful without needing a note.

“Did he ever mention my brother?”

“No.”

“Sebastian Blackwood. Never came up in conversation. Never appeared in a message you saw. Never referenced as a contact inside the company.”

“No.” Adrian’s gaze flicked back to the photograph still lying face up on the table. “If he had, I would have remembered. Your family name is not easy to ignore when you work under it.”

The answer aligned with the image. Three weeks ago Nathan and Sebastian had stood together outside a private club with the easy proximity of people who did not need introductions. That relationship had existed without Adrian’s knowledge. The secrecy itself was information.

My secondary phone vibrated against the table. Victoria’s name on the screen. I answered and kept my eyes on Adrian.

“Talk,” I said.

“The formal assertion is filed,” Victoria replied. Her voice was clipped, professional, already moving to the next problem. “It will hold for now. The officers have been instructed to stand down pending further coordination. That is the good news.”

“And the rest?”

“We found something in the deeper procurement logs. The transfers did not originate with Adrian Cole’s login. His credentials appear only at the final approval layer. The initiation and the routing overrides sit higher. They require a procurement override code that is restricted to Sebastian’s direct team. The code was used repeatedly in the same windows as the fraudulent approvals.”

I kept my expression unchanged. Adrian was watching me too closely for any visible reaction.

“How restricted?” I asked.

“Narrow. Four people on the active list. Sebastian is one of them. The other three report directly to him. We are pulling their individual activity now, but the override usage clusters around hours when Sebastian’s own badge shows him in the building.”

“Send the package to this address. Encrypted. I want the full chain.”

“Already in transit. Alexander—” She paused. The hesitation was rare for her. “This moves the center of the problem inside the family. Once the interim committee sees the override data, the narrative that placed you on leave becomes harder to maintain. Evelyn will not take that quietly.”

“I am counting on it.”

I ended the call.

Adrian had not moved. The tension in his shoulders had shifted, however. He had heard enough of Victoria’s side to understand that the ground under his feet had changed.

I set the phone down and met his eyes.

“The transfers did not start with your login,” I said. “They started with a procurement override code that only my brother’s team can issue. Your credentials were used to complete the chain. That makes you a necessary piece. It no longer makes you the architect.”

For the first time since he entered the apartment, something like relief threatened the edge of his control. He shut it down quickly. Relief was a luxury. He seemed to know it.

“So you believe me now.”

“I believe the logs. Belief in you is still conditional.”

He accepted the distinction without argument. That, too, was useful.

I closed the folder. The photograph of Nathan and Sebastian remained visible on the table. The new data from Victoria did not clear Adrian completely. It did, however, place the origin of the fraud inside the same family that had removed me from the chair only hours earlier.

Sebastian had the override authority.

Nathan had the relationship with Adrian that supplied the final credentials.

Evelyn had the board votes that turned the resulting mess into my removal.

The architecture was no longer abstract.

I looked at the man sitting across from me. He was still a risk. He was also the only person in the city who had lived with Nathan Reed for four years and might still recognize patterns the rest of us could not see.

“You are going to help me map every connection Nathan had inside that subsidiary,” I said. “Every name he mentioned. Every late night. Every time his mood or his schedule changed in the last year. We are going to reconstruct the relationship from the operational side until the missing pieces surface.”

Adrian held my gaze. The distrust had not vanished. It had only been forced to share space with a new and sharper necessity.

“And if the map leads where you do not want it to lead?” he asked.

“Then we follow it anyway.”

Outside the glass the light had begun to shift toward late afternoon. Somewhere in the same city my brother still believed the override codes were buried deep enough to remain invisible. Somewhere else Nathan Reed was moving through whatever exit he had arranged.

The temporary protection Victoria had bought would not last forever.

I intended to use every hour of it.