Joey snorted. “Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning if she won’t back off,” he said, “we move the whole board until she’s not on the square. Hide her digital footsteps before anyone at Summit asks who talked to the SEC.”
Silence. Then Joey hummed softly. “So itwasNorah.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” Joey’s voice sobered. “I’ll handle it. You okay?”
He looked back up at the glass tower and the floor where a woman he used to know was about to do something foolish because it was the only way she knew how to be honest. The answer was obvious and unhelpful.
“Yeah,” he lied. “Keep me posted.”
He ended the call and headed for the car, jaw tight, mind already pulling threads and tying knots. He had to control the variables.
And if control failed, there were other ways to win.
CHAPTER 5
NORAH
The morningafter Marshall’s visit felt ordinary on the surface, but Norah couldn’t shake the tightness in her chest.
Summit Capital operated on the twenty-fourth through twenty-seventh floors of the Pinnacle building. The twenty-sixth was already buzzing when she slipped into her glass-walled office. Phones were ringing, analysts were hunched over terminals, and the printer across the bullpen was spitting out sheets with mechanical indifference. All the noise should have steadied her. Instead, Marshall’s voice slid into her mind like an unwelcome echo.This is not an inconsistency. It’s a fuse.
She shoved the memory away.
Walk away, Norah.She clenched her jaw. Irritatingly, it wasn’t the words that stuck with her. It was the way he’d said her name. Like he still had any right to care.
Shaking it off, she pulled her chair in and woke up her computer. Numbers would clear her head. They always did.
She opened the NorthBridge Energy file again, her pulse ticking a little faster than she wanted to admit. Columns filled the screen in neat order. Everything looked normal, the same as it had yesterday and the day before. And every day she had pulled the file out to dig again.
She ran the macro anyway.Winslow_QC_v7.xlsmchurned through the data with the efficiency she’d coded into it years ago. Bars appeared, the histogram climbing.
Her pen hovered.
The slope was wrong. Again.
Relief and dread tangled in her gut. Relief because she hadn’t imagined it the other night, or the other six times she’d run it since. Dread because that meant she still wasn’t chasing shadows. She was staring at something real.
She hitCtrl+Sand directed it to her secure drive.
Error: Operation not permitted.
Her brows knit. That had never happened before. She tried again, saving to a thumb drive she kept for backups.
Access denied.
Her stomach dropped. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. If permissions were changed, that meant someone else had been in the files. Maybe it was an IT sweep. Maybe it was...
She clicked “Print.” The dialogue box hung longer than it should have, then blinked out. No hum of the machine. Nothing.
“What—” She muttered under her breath.
Norah highlighted the output and tried copying it into a new workbook. Nothing.
Fine. If they blocked downloads, she’d go old-school. She opened the tab she still had cached, scrolled slowly, and began taking screenshots. She moved methodically, her breath shallow. She dragged them into a folder labeled innocuously — “Q2 Slides” — then opened her cloud sync.
