“Done.”
“And I want to meet whoever’s been authorizing the cover-up. Face to face.”
A muscle in his jaw moved. “That might be more complicated.”
“Why?”
Sebastian turned toward the window. For a long moment he just stood there, looking out at the city he’d spent decades building, and I waited with the patience I reserved for sources who needed a moment before they could say the thing they’d come to say.
“Because I’m starting to think it might be someone close to me,” he said finally. “Someone who’s been with Laurent Enterprises since the beginning.”
My journalist instincts sharpened. “Who?”
“My CFO. Richard Hartley.” His shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly. “He’s been with me for fifteen years. I trusted him with everything — the financials, the contracts, the internal oversight. And now I’m finding discrepancies that lead directly to his office.”
“Have you confronted him?”
“Not yet. I need proof. Real proof, not suspicion dressed up as circumstantial evidence.” He turned back to face me, and there it was again — that flash of something unguarded that only appeared when he’d stopped performing for the room. “This is why I needed your help. You see patterns I miss. You ask questions I don’t think to ask.”
I moved toward him slowly. “Then let’s find your proof.”
We spent the next three hours buried in documents.
Sebastian had Daniel bring coffee — the expensive kind, dark and strong — and we spread files across the conference table like we were planning a campaign. Which, in every way that mattered, we were.
Richard Hartley’s name appeared in connection with three of the subcontractors who’d supplied substandard materials.His signature was on authorization forms for payments that didn’t match the official invoices. And buried in the email archives, I found a chain of communication with an outside consultant referencing “managing complications” and “ensuring discretion.”
“This is him.” I pointed to a specific email, timestamp and all. “This was sent twelve hours after Marco Benedetti first contacted me about the foundation issues.”
Sebastian leaned over my shoulder, close enough that the warmth of him and the faint cedar scent brushed the edge of my awareness. “He knew you were investigating. He’s been tracking your progress from the inside.”
“Which means he probably knows about us too.”
“Yes.” His voice went grim. “Which means we need to move fast.”
I turned to look at him, and suddenly he was right there, his face inches from mine, his eyes dropping to my mouth for exactly one second before coming back up.
“Emilia.” His voice had gone rough around the edges.
“We should probably stay professional.” My own voice didn’t sound particularly convincing.
“We probably should.”
Neither of us moved.
“Sebastian—”
His phone rang.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second — something between frustration and reluctant relief — and stepped back to answer. “Laurent.”
I used the interruption to straighten papers I didn’t need to straighten and remember how to breathe normally. My body was staging a full-scale rebellion against my brain’s insistence on keeping appropriate boundaries, and my brain was losing badly.
“When?” Sebastian’s voice sharpened. “How did it—” He stopped, listening. His expression went cold in the particular way it did when he’d received information he hadn’t anticipated and was already three steps ahead of dealing with it. “Don’t touch anything. I’m on my way.”
He hung up and turned to me.
“What is it?”
