23 — Flagged

ALARIC VOSS POV

"Explain to me," I said, sliding the printed page across my desk, "why a licensing agreement worth several times the Hughes settlement is sitting in the CFO's approval queue with a two-day turnaround request attached to it."

My assistant, a nervous young man named Trent who flinched at approximately everything, including, apparently, the sound of his own name, looked at the page like it might bite him.

"I just flagged it because it came through an unusual routing, sir. I don't actually know anything about the content."

"Nobody ever knows anything about the content, Trent. That's how these things always start." I pulled the page back and read through it a third time, slower, the way I read anything that made the back of my neck itch. "Who submitted this?"

"External counsel. Dean Carlisle."

"Carlisle. The sister's boyfriend." I said it flatly, not quite a question, already turning the information over the way I turned over every piece of information that came within arm's reach of the Montgomery family, out of habit more than malice these days, though I wasn't above admitting the habit had started out of something closer to malice.

"I believe so, sir."

"And it's routed for Japheth Montgomery's signature, fast-tracked, outside the normal review cycle."

"Yes, sir."

"Get me everything on this. Full document history, every version, every timestamp, who touched it and when." I handed the page back to him. "Quietly, Trent. I don't want this getting back to the fourth floor until I actually have something worth bringing them."

"Should I loop in legal?"

"Not yet. I want to understand what I'm looking at before I hand anyone a reason to tell me I'm wrong about it." I waved him off, and he scurried out of my office with the particular haste of a man who'd learned, the hard way, that lingering near my desk rarely ended well for him.

I leaned back in my chair, drumming my fingers against the armrest, running through the last several weeks in my head  Montgomery's son, barely settled into a seat he hadn't earned through anything except genetics, closing out the Hughes matter competently enough that I'd had to quietly revise my own assumptions about him, which I resented more than I was willing to admit to anyone, including myself.

And now this. A document that smelled wrong the moment I laid eyes on it, moving through channels designed specifically to avoid scrutiny, attached to a man who had every reason in the world to want access to that boy's trust.

I didn't like coincidences. I particularly didn't like coincidences that showed up conveniently timed to make the new CFO look either incompetent or compromised, which was, admittedly, closer to the outcome I'd have wanted for him three months ago than I was comfortable with now.

****

**JASMINE POV**

"He's doing the thing again," I told Kate over lunch, stabbing at my salad with more force than it strictly deserved.

"The face thing?"

"The face thing, yes. He's been doing it for two days straight. I asked him what's wrong and he said 'nothing' in the tone men use when they mean 'everything, but I've decided to be mysterious about it instead of just talking like an adult.'"

"Classic Montgomery men. Our dad does the same thing. Once he didn't speak for an entire dinner because he was upset about a golf score, and when Mom finally got it out of him, it turned out he was actually upset about something completely unrelated that happened at work three days earlier, and the golf thing was just the final straw."

"That's deeply unhinged."

"Welcome to the family." Kate stole a cherry tomato off my plate without asking, which I'd stopped bothering to fight her on months ago. "Did you ask him directly? Like, with words, using your mouth?"

"I did. He deflected into a joke about staplers, which apparently is now a whole bit that everyone in the building knows about except me."

"Oh, the stapler thing is legendary. Ranjiv still brings it up at every single company event. There was almost a PowerPoint at the holiday party last year. Japheth had to physically intervene."

"I feel like I'm missing an important piece of company lore."

"You truly are. I'll loop you in properly sometime, it's a whole saga." She waved a hand, dismissing the tangent. "But seriously  do you think something's actually wrong, or is he just being broody because that's apparently a inherited family hobby?"

I hesitated, turning my fork over in my hand. "Dean had me pull something up on Japheth's system a few days ago. Document formatting thing, for a case. It felt fine at the time, but Japheth got weird about it afterward, and now he's been weird about everything since."

Kate's face did something complicated, somewhere between confusion and the specific defensiveness people get when you mention someone they love.

"Dean? My Dean?"

"I mean, unless there's a second Dean I don't know about."

"There's only one Dean, and he would never do anything shady, Jasmine. He's the most by-the-book person I've ever dated. He color-codes his legal briefs. He alphabetizes his spice rack. The man once spent forty-five minutes explaining to me the ethical obligations of attorney-client privilege at a party, unprompted, because someone made a joke about lawyers."

"I'm not saying he did anything. I'm saying Japheth got weird about it, and now I'm a little weird about it too, by proximity."

"Well, now I'm weird about it," Kate said, setting down her fork with more force than the moment required. "Great. Thanks for that. I was having a nice lunch."

"I didn't mean to make you weird about it."

"Too late. It's happened. I'm fully weird now." She sighed, rubbing her temples. "I'll ask him about it tonight. Casually. Like a normal, well-adjusted person, and not like someone building a conspiracy board, which, for the record, is apparently a Montgomery family specialty I should've been warned about before I started dating into this family's orbit."

"You're not dating into their orbit, Kate, you were born into it."

"I meant emotionally. I feel like I joined a cult of suspicious, broody men who communicate exclusively through sighing and staplers."

I laughed despite myself, and some of the tension in my chest actually eased a little, just from the ridiculousness of the conversation, from the fact that whatever was actually going on, at least I wasn't the only one circling it with more questions than answers.

****

**JAPHETH POV

Voss showed up at my office that afternoon without an appointment, which was unusual enough on its own that I actually stood up when he walked in, some old instinct telling me this wasn't going to be a casual conversation.

"Mr. Voss. Didn't expect you."

"I'll keep this brief." He didn't sit, which told me even more than his tone did. "There's a licensing agreement in your queue, fast-tracked, routed through an unusual channel, submitted by outside counsel with a personal connection to your family."

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "Dean Carlisle."

"You already know about it."

"I know he had access he shouldn't have had. I didn't know it was in my queue." I pulled up my system immediately, scanning through the pending items until I found it  the same document, the same title, sitting there innocuously among eleven other things waiting for my signature.

"I'd strongly suggest you don't sign anything in that queue until my team's had a proper look at it," Voss said, and for the first time since I'd met the man, there was no condescension in his voice at all, just something that sounded, improbably, like genuine concern.

"You think it's bad."

"I think it smells wrong, and I've been doing this long enough to trust that instinct more than I trust most people's intentions." He paused at the door, turning back. "For what it's worth, Montgomery I've spent three months looking for a reason to say you don't belong in that chair. I'd rather find one through your own incompetence than watch someone hand you a trap you didn't see coming."

"Is that your version of a compliment?"

"It's my version of doing my job properly, which includes not wanting this company blindsided because nobody thought to ask the right questions at the right time." He left without waiting for a response, and I sat there staring at the document on my screen, feeling the full weight of what Voss had just handed me settle somewhere cold in my chest.

I picked up my phone and called Ranjiv immediately.

"Please tell me you have something," I said, before he could even say hello.

"I have something," he confirmed, voice tight in a way that told me whatever it was, I wasn't going to like it. "You're not gonna want to hear this sitting down, actually, you're gonna want to hear this standing up, pacing, possibly yelling into a pillow afterward."

"Ranjiv."

"The document's clean on the surface. Buried in clause fourteen, though, there's language that transfers exclusive licensing rights on the entire Hughes IP portfolio to a shell company registered three weeks ago. If you sign it, Japheth, you're not settling a lawsuit. You're handing away one of the company's biggest assets to people who don't officially exist yet."

I sat down slowly, the room going quiet around me in a way that had nothing to do with actual sound and everything to do with the sudden, sickening clarity of exactly how close I'd come to signing my own company away without ever knowing it.

"And Dean set this up."

"Looks that way. I'm sorry, man. I know this isn't what either of us wanted to find."

I thought of Jasmine, sitting in my office two days ago, innocently pulling up a file because someone she trusted had asked her to, with absolutely no idea what she'd actually been handed.

"Ranjiv," I said slowly, "I need you to find out if Jasmine's in any danger because of this. Right now. Before anything else."

"On it," he said, and for once, neither of us made a single joke.