Chapter Ten

Roman’s Pov

I waited until the office emptied out before I went looking for answers about Cole.

Nobody talked about my brother anymore. It had been three months since he vanished, and the official story was that he’d taken a leave of absence to clear his head. I never believed that, not for one second, because Cole didn’t take breaks. He barely took weekends.

I sat down at the security terminal in the server room and started pulling files from the week he disappeared. Camera footage, badge access logs, anything that could tell me where he went and why.

Most of it was gone.

I checked the dates again, thinking I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t. The footage from three days before Cole vanished had been deleted, along with two days after. Someone had gone in and wiped it clean, then covered the gap so it wouldn’t look obvious unless you were specifically looking for it.

I sat there for a long moment, just staring at the empty folders.

“Who has access to this?” I muttered to myself.

I pulled up the financial records next, because if someone was hiding something about Cole, money was usually involved. The quarterly reports from that period didn’t match what I remembered approving. Numbers had been shifted, small amounts moved between accounts in ways that wouldn’t raise flags unless you cross-referenced everything line by line.

Someone had altered them carefully. Not sloppily. Carefully.

I called Victor into my office the next morning, and I tried to keep my voice light.

“I want to go back through the security archives from the week Cole disappeared,” I said. “Some of it’s missing.”

Victor didn’t even blink. “Missing how?”

“Deleted. Multiple days, right around when he left.”

“Systems glitch, probably. IT’s been having issues with the servers for months.”

“Convenient timing for a glitch.”

“You’d be surprised how often that happens, Roman. Old infrastructure, too much data, things get corrupted.” He said it so smoothly it almost worked.

“And the financial reports? Those corrupted too?”

That’s when I saw it, just for a second, a flicker of something behind his eyes before he smoothed it over. Victor had known me for fifteen years. He didn’t flinch. He hadn’t flinched once in all that time, not during lawsuits, not during hostile takeovers, not during anything.

He flinched now.

“What exactly are you accusing me of?” he asked, and his voice had an edge to it that wasn’t there thirty seconds ago.

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m asking a question.”

“It sounds like an accusation.”

“Victor, my brother disappeared, and now the records from that exact week are gone. I’m allowed to ask questions.”

“You’re allowed to ask questions that don’t waste everyone’s time chasing ghosts,” he snapped. Then he caught himself, took a breath, and softened his tone like he’d remembered who he was talking to. “Look. Cole left. People leave. Digging through old files isn’t going to bring him back, and it’s not going to help the company move forward. Let it go, Roman. For your own sake.”

“For my own sake, or someone else’s?”

He didn’t answer that. He just stood up, straightened his jacket, and said he had a call to get to.

I watched him leave and I didn’t believe a single word he’d said.

I spent the rest of the day distracted, running the conversation over and over in my head, trying to figure out why my most trusted advisor was suddenly so eager for me to stop looking for my own brother.

Later that evening, I stopped by Sienna’s desk to drop off a folder she needed for the morning. She wasn’t there, probably already gone home, and I set the folder down next to her monitor.

That’s when I saw the photo.

It was small, tucked into the corner of her desk in a plain frame, half-covered by a stack of sticky notes. A little girl, maybe four or five years old, sitting on what looked like a daycare playground, laughing at something off camera. Dark curls, bright eyes, a gap-toothed smile.

I don’t know why I picked it up. I don’t know why I couldn’t put it back down.

Something about her face felt familiar in a way I couldn’t place. Not because she looked like Sienna, though there was some resemblance there too. It was something else. Something in the shape of her eyes, or the way her smile tilted slightly to one side.

I turned the photo over, looking for a name, a date, anything. There was nothing written on the back.

I stood there holding it longer than I should have, turning it over and over in my hands like the answer might appear if I looked at it enough times.

“Ava,” I said quietly, remembering the name Sienna had mentioned once in passing, months ago, when someone asked if she had kids. She’d said the name fast, almost like she hadn’t meant to say it at all, and then changed the subject before anyone could ask more.

I didn’t know why a five-year-old’s daycare photo was making my chest feel tight, or why I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at something important, something connected to everything else that had gone wrong in the last few months.

I told myself I was imagining things. Cole disappearing, the files being deleted, Victor’s strange behavior, none of that had anything to do with a photo on Sienna’s desk.

But I couldn’t put it down.

I stood there in the empty office, holding a stranger’s picture, feeling like I was standing at the edge of something much bigger than I understood, and I had no idea why.