I’m out of my chair and moving before I consciously decide to. When I reach the guest office, Amara is standing at the desk with a stack of yellowed pages spread in front of her. Her eyes are bright and her cheeks are flushed.
“Found something!” she says.
I cross the room in three strides. “What?”
She holds up a document. It’s old and creased. Some kind of financial ledger from the look of it. “This was buried in the paper archives from the foundation’s early years. Before your current accounting system. Someone either forgot it existed or assumed no one would ever check the physical records.”
I take the page and scan it. My stomach drops.
It’s a ledger entry showing fund transfers to a shell company. The company name doesn’t match anything in ourofficial records. But the authorization signature at the bottom is unmistakable.
Xavier Laurent.
“This is from six years ago,” Amara continues. Her words are coming fast now. “Back when Xavier was still on the board. Before the scandal with Diana Castellane. Before any of the current mess. Xavier was moving money through unauthorized channels years before you evenknewthere was a problem. He’s been planning this foryears.”
I set the page down carefully, like it might explode. “He wasn’t just covering up Diana’s fraud. He was running his own grand scheme.”
“He’s been playing the long game.” Amara grabs her legal pad and starts writing. “This shell company probably feeds into the same network he’s using now for the land purchases. If we can trace the ownership structure, prove the continuity between then and now...”
“We’ve got him,” I declare.
She looks up at me with a fierce expression. “We’ve gota start. I need to cross-reference this with the current shell companies, see if I can find the connecting threads. But Corin, this isreal evidence. Not forged documents we have to disprove. It’s anactualpaper trail showing his pattern of fraud going back years.”
“The board will eat him alive if we can find those connections,” I murmur.
I watch her work in awe. Watch her number the pages in her personal shorthand, annotate the margins, build her case with the focused intensity of someone who was born for this.
She’s not just helping me survive.
She’shunting.
And God help me, watching her is the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen.
“We can win this,” she says, looking up. “We can actually win now. Before, I’d have called it a toss-up. But now...”
I want to believe her. Want to let myself hope that maybe this nightmare has an ending where I don’t lose everything.
But I’ve been in this game long enough to know that finding evidence is only half the battle. The other half is surviving long enough to use it.
And Xavier Laurent has never been the type to go down without a fight.
“He’s going to escalate,” I say quietly. “Once he realizes we’re getting close.”
Amara nods. Her expression doesn’t waver. “Then we move faster. Escalate, beforehedoes.”
She returns to her documents, and I stand there watching her work, feeling something dangerous growing inside me.
Something I’m not quite ready to name.
18
Amara
Iwake up at 4:47 a.m. to the sound of absolutely nothing.
Corin’s still asleep beside me, one arm thrown across the pillow where my head was approximately thirty seconds ago.
We’ve been doing this every night now. The sex, I mean. Not the waking-up-at-ungodly-hours part. That’s a special brand of neurosis reserved exclusively for me.
