Chapter 5: First Crack

I heard the sound of footsteps approaching quietly in the west wing, a door opened, and the steps headed toward the stairs.

I finally made my choice and deleted the message, cleared it completely, set my phone face down, and I sat at my desk with my laptop open by the time Adrian reached the bottom of the stairs. My laptop screen was blank.

Someone in this building knew exactly who I was. And they had chosen to warn me privately instead of exposing me. That meant they wanted something.

“We have an invitation from Dominic at ten.” Adrian passed the message to me briefly, without an explanation. His father wanted to see us on the 40th floor right away.

I had never been above the 38th floor in three years. The executive level felt different.

Some minutes later, I was done and ready.

Dominic stood up when we walked in, smiling as if we had done him a great favor. The photo from last night had exploded online, and the press was running the exact story he wanted: The Tao heir was finally settling down. He looked pleased.

He put a hand on Adrian’s shoulder and talked about the coverage. Adrian smiled slightly.

I sat across the desk, laid my hands gently in my lap, and observed.

Then Adrian’s phone rang. “Legal team. He said and went into the next room, closing the door most of the way. I heard his low voice through the gap.

I looked back, and Dominic was already staring at me, his smile stayed, but the air in the room had shifted.

“You’ve made quite an impression,” he said. “The public likes you more than I expected.”

“I’m glad it’s useful.”

He leaned back. “I want us to understand each other, Harper. May I call you Harper?”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

For the next four minutes, he spoke warmly, pleasantly, like we were having a friendly chat. “I appreciate your cooperation.” He said. “And I understood this was a big change for someone in your position, I hoped you had been handling it well.”

Underneath every polite word he said, there was a clear warning: You are a mere secretary, you are useful for now, don’t start thinking you matter.

He didn’t say it outright. He smiled the whole time and mentioned how important discretion was, how past women in Adrian’s life had made things easier by knowing their place. He reminded me how connected the Tao family was across the city.

I smiled back, but I didn’t react or even flinch.

The door opened again.

Adrian stepped back in and stopped. He looked at his father.

“That’s enough, Dad.” He said quietly.

Dominic studied him for a moment. The silence between them carried old feelings, as if they had had this moment several times before.

Finally, Dominic picked up his pen. “I have calls to make,” he said pleasantly.

We left.

Neither of us spoke on our way back home. We weren’t just ready to talk about what transpired back there.

I didn’t say a word of appreciation to him, he didn’t mention it either. We left it there.

That evening, I went over everything again, everything I knew about Adrian’s place in the company. He had been Chief Operating Officer for three years. Before that, he spent four years in the subsidiary oversight division, a department that no longer existed on the current org chart. It had been quietly shut down eighteen months ago.

I had noticed it once and let it pass. Now, sitting there, I kept wondering who had dissolved it, and why it happened. Was Adrian asking questions that made them necessarily scrap it?

I also went deeper into the Vela Holdings document. I kept reading the same paragraph over and over without paying full attention to it.

My mind kept drifting back to that room on the 40th floor. To Adrian speaking up for me when no one was watching. He had no reason to do it except that he chose to.

I forced myself to focus and pulled up another file. Before I opened it I ran a search I had been putting off for two weeks.

Adrian Tao. Subsidiary oversight division. Employment history.

The results loaded slowly.

He had spent four years in that division before becoming Chief Operating Officer. Then, he had direct access to the internal financial structures that connected Tao Industries to its subsidiary network. The kind of access that would have put him inside the exact records I had been trying to reach from the outside for three years.

The division had been dissolved eighteen months ago. The dissolution was authorized at the executive level. Dominic signed the order.

I sat back and thought over it. A man in subsidiary oversight for four years, with direct access to records that could expose a fifteen-year fraud, was suddenly elevated to Chief Operating Officer and simultaneously stripped of the position that gave him that access. Two thoughts came to my mind: it’s either Dominic was protecting his son by moving him up and out of reach of the evidence.

Or he was protecting the evidence from his son who had been getting too close to it.

I stared at the screen for a long time, and then pulled up the old internal record from eleven years ago and found the two signatures at the bottom. Neither was Dominic, neither matched the first name I found.

I checked the dates and froze at what I saw.

Those transactions happened in the exact three-month period when my father’s company collapsed. I had spent years trying to understand that exact period.

Everything I built for three years suddenly looked bigger and deeper than I had thought. And far more personal than I had ever realized.

My phone buzzed.

I picked it up without a second thought. A new message with a different number.

The two signatures on the Vela document. You found them tonight. One of them knows you are in this house. The other one does not know yet. When they find out, you will have less time than you think. You need to decide who to trust before someone decides for you.

I read it twice and looked up at my closed bedroom door, then toward the west wing, where Adrian was some meters away. I thought about how he stepped in for me earlier today. The same man whose name appeared nowhere in my files. I came here to investigate, and used him as an access to gain full entry into this family that ruined my father’s life.

And then, an unidentified person was feeding me with information, guiding what I found and when.

I still didn’t know if they were helping me or setting me up.

The document stayed open on my screen until four in the morning.

I never left the chair.