31 — Loose Ends

**VICTOR KADE POV**

The call came in at six in the morning, which should have told me immediately that whatever it carried wasn't going to improve my mood.

"Mr. Kade, we need to talk about the timeline," said a voice I recognized but had never bothered to learn the actual name of, one of three men I'd engaged through an intermediary eight months ago to apply the kind of pressure polite conversation never quite manages on its own.

"There is no timeline anymore," I said, already irritated at having to explain this before my coffee had finished brewing. "The matter's been resolved. I've reached an agreement with Montgomery directly."

"That's not really how this works, Mr. Kade." Something in his tone had shifted since our last conversation, a casualness that hadn't been there before, the particular confidence of a man who no longer considered himself an employee taking instruction. "We've got our own arrangement with the people financing this operation. Your grudge was useful to get things moving. It's not actually what's driving the rest of it."

I set down my cup slowly, feeling something cold settle into my stomach that had nothing to do with the early hour. "What people financing this operation?"

"Didn't think you needed to know that part. You wanted Montgomery rattled, embarrassed, maybe pushed into a settlement that favored you. We were happy to help with that, since it aligned with what our actual clients wanted anyway access. Specifically to the R&D data Montgomery's been sitting on for their next product cycle. Your old grudge was a convenient cover story. Made the whole operation look personal instead of what it actually is."

"Which is?"

"Corporate espionage, Mr. Kade. Properly funded. You were never actually the client. You were the cover."

I stood, moving to the window, my mind racing through eight months of interactions I'd thought I fully understood, recalculating every piece of information I'd believed myself to be controlling.

"Who's actually behind this?" I asked, careful to keep my voice level even as something genuinely resembling fear began working its way up my spine.

"That's need-to-know, and you don't need to know. What you do need to know is that the operation's still active, your settlement with Montgomery doesn't change our instructions, and if you try to interfere further, you'll find yourself facing considerably more trouble than an eleven-year-old grudge ever caused you." A pause. "We'll be in touch, Mr. Kade. Enjoy your settlement. I hear it's quite generous."

The line went dead.

I stood at the window for a long time, looking down at a city I'd spent over a decade believing I understood, feeling, for the first time since I'd begun this entire campaign, genuinely, thoroughly out of my depth.

I'd wanted an apology. A reckoning, eleven years overdue. I had never wanted to become the unwitting cover story for something considerably larger and considerably more dangerous than my own wounded pride.

I picked up my phone and, for the first time in eleven years, dialed a number I'd deleted and re-memorized more times than I cared to admit.

******

**JAPHETH POV**

"It's Victor Kade," Dad said, staring at his phone with an expression of genuine bewilderment. "He's asking to speak with both of us. Says it's urgent. Says the deal we made yesterday doesn't cover what's actually happening."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know. He sounds" Dad paused, searching for the word. "Rattled. Victor doesn't get rattled. In eleven years of knowing that man, I've never once heard him sound like this."

We took the call on speaker, Jasmine and Voss crowding into Dad's office to listen, everyone exchanging the particular wary glance of people who'd thought a crisis was finally resolving and were now bracing for the possibility that it wasn't.

"Sebastian. Thank you for taking my call." Victor's voice did sound different, I noticed immediately the careful, practiced confidence from yesterday's meeting replaced with something closer to genuine unease. "I need to tell you something, and I need you to understand I only learned it myself an hour ago."

"I'm listening."

"The men I hired to apply pressure on my behalf I believed I was their only client. I was wrong. They're being funded by someone else entirely, someone interested in Montgomery's R&D data, not my old grievance. My grudge was simply convenient cover for an operation that was never actually about me at all."

The room went very still.

"Say that again," Voss said sharply, leaning toward the phone. "Someone's using industrial espionage against Montgomery, and you're saying you only just found out you weren't actually running the operation?"

"I understand how that sounds. I assure you I'm as unsettled by it as you are, possibly more, given that I've apparently spent eight months believing myself the architect of something I was merely a convenient face for." Victor's voice carried genuine strain now, the first truly human note I'd heard from him since the gala. "I called because, despite everything between us, I don't believe either of us benefits from pretending this threat ended with yesterday's settlement. It didn't. If anything, it's larger and more dangerous than either of us understood."

"Why should we trust a single word you're telling us?" I asked, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

"You shouldn't, not entirely, not yet. Trust is earned, and I've given your family very little reason to extend it to me so far." A pause. "But I am telling you the truth, because whoever's actually behind this doesn't care about my settlement with your father. They care about your company's research data, and they're going to keep pursuing it with or without my involvement. I'd rather be useful to you now than find myself genuinely complicit in something considerably worse than a petty, overdue grievance."

Jasmine stepped closer to the phone. "Do you have any information at all about who's actually funding this? A name, a company, anything?"

"Not yet. The man I spoke with this morning was careful not to say. But I have resources, relationships, people who owe me favors from decades in this business. I can start looking, properly, if your family's willing to work with me rather than simply treating me as an enemy you've temporarily tolerated."

Dad looked around the room slowly at Voss, already pulling up something on his own phone with the particular urgency of a man recalculating an entire strategy in real time, at Jasmine, steady and thoughtful despite the fresh wave of danger this call represented, at me, watching him with the unspoken question of what came next.

"Alright, Victor," Dad said finally. "We'll work with you. Cautiously. But if I find out you've misled us about any part of this"

"You won't," Victor said, and something in his voice, for the first time since this whole nightmare had begun, sounded entirely, uncomplicatedly sincere. "I've spent eleven years nursing a grudge I believed was simple. I have no interest in discovering, this late in my life, that I've also been an unwitting pawn in something I don't even fully understand yet. Help me find out who's actually behind this, and I promise you, we'll be considerably more formidable working together than either of us has been working apart."

The call ended a few minutes later, and the room sat in heavy silence, the brief relief of yesterday's settlement replaced entirely by the unsettling knowledge that whatever danger we'd thought we'd navigated had, in fact, only just begun to show its real shape.

"Well," Voss said finally, breaking the silence with his usual dry precision, "I suppose we should find out exactly who wants our R&D data badly enough to fund a small army of intermediaries and recruit an eleven-year grudge as cover."

"Any theories?" I asked.

"Several, none of them comforting." He was already typing something, mind clearly racing through possibilities. "I'll pull together a list of competitors with both the resources and the motive. It's not a short list, unfortunately. Companies our size make enemies simply by existing successfully."

Jasmine slipped her hand into mine, and I felt the particular steadiness of her presence even as the ground beneath all of us seemed to shift yet again.

"Together," she said quietly, echoing the word from weeks ago, back when I'd first promised her we'd handle whatever came at us as a team.

"Together," I agreed, and braced myself for whatever was still waiting, somewhere out there, patient and considerably more dangerous than anything we'd faced so far.

"I feel like we should establish some kind of code name for this new threat," Kate said, appearing in the doorway with Dean a step behind her, both of them clearly having caught the tail end of the conversation from the hallway. "Victor Kade was at least a name we could say out loud at parties. 'Mysterious unknown corporate spies' doesn't have the same ring to it."

"This isn't the time for code names, Kate," Dad said, though without much real force behind it, exhaustion audible underneath the words.

"There's always time for code names, Dad. It's a documented stress management technique."

"Is it, though?" Voss asked, not looking up from his phone.

"It is if I say it is. I'm workshopping. Give me a minute." Kate tapped her chin theatrically. "The Fox. No, wait, that's taken by approximately every thriller novel ever written. The Ghost Client. Ooh, I like that one."

"We are not calling international corporate espionage 'the Ghost Client,'" I said.

"You're just upset you didn't think of it first."

"That is accurate," Dean admitted, earning himself an elbow from Kate that he took with the particular good humor of a man still grateful, every single day, that she'd chosen to stay.

Despite everything Victor's call, the unsettling new shape of the danger we were facing, the sheer exhausting weight of having thought we'd solved something only to discover it was merely the surface of something larger I found myself grateful for my sister's ability to find levity in literally any circumstance, a skill that had gotten the whole family through more crises than I probably gave her credit for.

"Fine," I said. "The Ghost Client. For now. Until we actually know who we're dealing with."

"I'm framing that concession for posterity," Kate said, delighted, already pulling out her phone to presumably text Saph the victory.

Jasmine squeezed my hand once more, grounding, steady, and I let myself hold onto that small, strange moment of lightness even as the real work of finding out exactly who was coming for us began, somewhere beyond the walls of my father's office, patient and unseen and already, somehow, several steps ahead.