All Chapters of UNDISCLOSED : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"You're doing the thing," Imara said, dropping into the chair across from Nia's desk and setting down a coffee that was not from the office kitchen.Nia looked up from her screen. "What thing?""The thing where you arrange objects." Imara pointed. "You've moved your stapler three times since I sat down."Nia looked at the stapler. Then she put it back where it started. "I'm not doing anything.""You absolutely are." Imara settled into the chair with the authority of someone who had been in this office often enough to know where everything belonged. She was wearing a dark green coat over a charcoal suit, and she looked exactly like what she was a woman who had walked into seven boardrooms this week and won in six of them. The seventh was still pending. "Talk to me.""I have nothing to say that I haven't already said.""You haven't said anything, Nia. That's the problem. I've been sitting here for four minutes and you've told me about the all-hands agenda and moved a stapler and that's

"The Meridian account flagged an anomaly in the Q3 allocation," Cressida said, setting a tablet on the desk in front of him without preamble. "Nothing critical. A rounding discrepancy in the rebalancing formula that their previous management team had been carrying forward for approximately eighteen months without correction."Darian looked at the figure. "Who caught it?""Calloway. She flagged it in the integration notes she submitted this morning." A pause that was precisely the length Cressida used when she was giving him space to respond to something she considered significant without appearing to prompt him. "She submitted them at six-forty-three a.m."He looked at the tablet for another moment. Six-forty-three. He had been awake at six-forty-three, in the hotel gym, running at a pace that was less about fitness and more about the specific utility of physical effort as a substitute for thinking about things he had decided not to think about."Flag it for Pearce," he said. "Have him

"Ms. Calloway." The voice was male, smooth, and completely unfamiliar. "My name is Conrad Hale. I'm an attorney representing the Ashford family."Nia stood completely still on that corner for exactly two seconds two seconds in which the October wind kept moving, the city kept breathing, and everything she had spent four years carefully constructing tilted approximately three degrees off its foundation.Then she started walking.Not fast. Not slow. The deliberate unhurried pace of someone who had learned, through necessity rather than nature, that stillness in a crisis was more useful than movement."Mr. Hale," she said. "It's past eight o'clock.""I'm aware of the hour. I apologize""What do you want?"A brief pause on his end, the specific pause of someone recalibrating after realizing the person they called was not going to perform the expected script. "Mr. Stellan Ashford has asked me to reach out regarding some matters that have come to his attention. Matters he believes would ben

"You're early," Nia said from the doorway of her office.Darian was standing at the window with his back to the room, hands in his pockets, looking at the West Loop the way people looked at things when they weren't actually seeing them. He turned when she spoke."You said eight," he said."It's seven fifty-two.""I know."She walked in and put her bag down and sat behind her desk with the deliberate purposefulness of someone establishing the terms of a space before a conversation began. He watched her do it without comment and then sat in the chair across from her not the one closest to the door, she noticed, but the one directly opposite. He wasn't leaving himself an easy exit either.For a moment neither of them said anything."I'll start," he said."Please."He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and looked at her with the directness that she had noticed in the elevator and the conference room and every professional interaction since Monday the quality of a man who had de

"Ms. Calloway." The woman in the doorway was exactly what her reputation suggested, precise, unhurried, wearing grey in the specific way that some people wore authority. "Do you have five minutes?"Nia looked up from the Henriksen revision. "You must be Cressida Vane.""I must be." She came in without waiting for an invitation, which was not rudeness it was the movement of someone who had learned long ago that waiting for permission was a different thing entirely from earning the right to enter. She sat in the chair across from Nia's desk and placed a single folder on her knee and did not open it. "I wanted to introduce myself properly. The integration schedule hasn't left much room for that.""It hasn't," Nia agreed. "How are you finding Chicago?""Cold." A brief pause. "Efficient. The team here is stronger than the acquisition documentation suggested.""We generally are."Something moved at the corner of Cressida's mouth that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. "I noticed