Chapter 33: Jasmine Anchor

The executive floor of Vertex Management was operating under a total corporate lockdown.

Lucas stepped out of the private elevator and immediately felt the shift in the atmosphere. The usually pristine corridors were lined with stern security personnel. The heavy glass doors to the legal department were shut and guarded.

He walked past the guards without slowing down.

Through the glass wall of the legal department, he could see a senior partner being escorted away from his desk by two men in dark suits. The lawyer’s face was gray. He kept insisting he had done nothing wrong.

He was telling the truth. Nobody in that department had touched the contract.

Lucas felt a faint twist of guilt and pushed it down. Every lawyer Victoria interrogated was another hour she was not spending on him. He could not afford sympathy right now. The only person in this building who knew where the forgery came from was him, and he intended to keep it that way.

He went directly to the founder’s executive suite.

He pushed the heavy oak doors open and closed them behind him.

Victoria Sterling stood by her mahogany desk. She had discarded her tailored suit jacket and wore a fitted white silk blouse and a dark pencil skirt. A half-empty crystal decanter of scotch sat next to a scattered pile of legal documents.

She did not look like a woman who had just lost eighty-five million dollars. She looked like a predator deciding which bars of the cage to break first.

"Where were you when the market opened this morning?" Victoria asked without looking up.

"In Camilla’s boardroom," Lucas said. "Watching her press release go live."

"And when the penalty cleared?"

"Standing next to her while she kissed me in front of half her company." He kept his voice flat. "You sent me there. That is where I am supposed to be."

Victoria finally looked up. Her dark eyes searched his face for a long moment.

He activated his Micro-Motive Perception. The blue overlay flared across her features. Her jaw was locked tight. Her pulse was fast and hard. She was not accusing him. She was checking whether the one piece she still trusted on the board had moved.

"How did she react when the money landed?" Victoria asked.

"She hasn’t noticed yet," Lucas said. "That trust has been dormant for years. She is too busy giving interviews about the expansion to check her offshore balances."

"She will notice eventually."

"And when she does, she will think she is untouchable," Lucas said. "That is worse for her. People who think they are untouchable stop checking their locks."

Victoria absorbed that in silence. Some of the suspicion in her posture eased, though not all of it. She was too smart to trust anyone completely after a morning like this one, and Lucas respected her for it.

"Camilla is celebrating," Victoria said. "My own lawyers are under guard, and she is opening champagne."

"Then stop handing her reasons to celebrate," Lucas replied.

Victoria’s eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"Look outside your door," Lucas said. He did not soften his tone. "Armed guards on the legal floor. Phones confiscated. By tonight, every analyst on the street will know Vertex is bleeding. Camilla will not even need to attack you. Your own lockdown is doing it for her."

The silence in the suite stretched. Nobody spoke to Victoria Sterling like that. Lucas held her stare and did not look away.

"So what would you do?" she asked at last. It was a challenge, not a concession.

"Let the guards go home. Keep the lawyers working like nothing happened," Lucas said. "Then bring in someone from outside. A forensic auditor with no loyalty to anyone in this building. If your legal team is clean, they prove it. If they are not, they hang themselves while they think you are not watching."

Victoria studied him. Slowly, some of the rigid tension drained from her shoulders.

"You think like a predator," she said.

"I learned from one."

"And if the auditor looks at you?" Victoria asked. "You carried the folder."

"Then let them look," Lucas said without hesitation. "I have nothing to hide from you. If you think I do, give them my name first."

It was a gamble. He kept his face completely still while he said it.

Victoria held his gaze for a long time. Then she shook her head once, slowly.

"No," she said. "If you had betrayed me, you would not be standing in my office telling me how to run my own investigation. You would be on a plane."

The corner of her mouth twitched. She picked up a second crystal glass, poured two fingers of scotch, and held it out to him. It was the same ritual from the night he had first walked back into this suite after leaving Camilla’s office.

Lucas took the glass. Their fingers brushed. Victoria did not pull her hand away immediately.

She stepped around the desk until she stood close enough for him to smell the jasmine on her skin. She reached up and straightened the knot of his tie with slow, precise fingers. It was the kind of adjustment she had made a dozen times before, but this time she let her hand rest against his collar a second too long.

"You walked into the enemy camp and delivered the weapon exactly as I asked," Victoria murmured. "And when it misfired, you did not run."

"I told you I was staying."

The System overlay pulsed softly at the edge of his vision. Her pupils were dilated. Her breathing had slowed and deepened. She was exhausted, furious, and looking for something steady to hold on to. For a moment, Lucas was the only steady thing in the building.

He could have leaned in. Every signal in the room told him she would let him.

He did not.

Instead, he lifted the glass out of her hand and set both drinks down on the desk, untouched.

"Make the call to the auditor," Lucas said quietly. "Then go home and sleep. You are no use to me running on scotch and adrenaline."

Victoria blinked. For a fraction of a second, the CEO of a four-billion-dollar empire looked genuinely thrown.

"No use to you," she repeated.

"You heard me."

He turned and walked toward the oak doors. He did not hurry.

A bright blue notification pulsed in his peripheral vision.

[Strategic Restraint Successful!]

[Target’s volatility has been redirected into trust and unresolved attraction.]

[Victoria Sterling’s reliance on the Host has increased.]

"Lucas," Victoria called out.

He stopped with his hand on the brass handle and looked back.

She was leaning against the edge of her desk with her arms folded. The fury in her eyes had settled into something sharper and more curious.

"Friday night," she said. "Dinner. My table at Halcyon. Just the two of us. I want to hear how a man who used to carry my coffee learned to give me orders."

"I will be there," Lucas said.

He stepped into the corridor and let the doors close behind him. Behind the oak, he heard Victoria pick up her desk phone and ask her assistant for the number of the best forensic auditor in the city.

Lucas walked toward the elevator at an even pace. The guards nodded to him as he passed. Nobody stopped him.

Only when the steel doors closed did he let out the breath he had been holding.

He had just told the most dangerous woman in the financial district to bring in an outside investigator to hunt for a forgery he had committed himself. If the auditor was good, the trail would eventually lead somewhere. He would have to make sure it led anywhere but him.

But he had seen something in Victoria’s face before he left. For the first time since he had walked into Vertex Management as a coffee runner, she had not looked at him like an employee. She had looked at him like a man she could not quite predict.

That made him more valuable to her. It also made him more dangerous.

The elevator descended toward the lobby, and Lucas started planning for Friday night.