Chapter 61: Blind Drop

"I knew," Lucas said quietly.

Camilla Verman did not move. She stood a few feet away from him, her posture perfectly straight, the gray afternoon light from the window catching the sharp angles of her face. She was not a woman who got caught off guard. Her lips parted anyway.

"How?" Camilla asked. The word was clipped, devoid of any inflection.

"A few weeks ago, in your penthouse," Lucas said. He kept his voice steady. He did not look away, and he did not try to soften the admission. "You were checking your holding balances on your tablet. You didn’t tilt the screen away. I saw the routing number for the dormant account."

Camilla stared at him. "You memorized a dormant routing number from a glance," she said slowly.

"I have a good memory."

"And you used it."

It wasn’t a question. She was already piecing the timeline together.

"When Victoria handed me the zoning contract, I took it to the holding room on the legal floor at Vertex," Lucas said. "I read the liability clause on page forty-seven. I saw the default trap. I saw that the expansion penalty was routed to a Vertex holding account. I knew Cole was positioned to get his hands on that money the minute it moved. If he drained it, Victoria would blame you, and you would lose your company fighting a ghost."

Camilla’s eyes narrowed. "So you decided to rewrite the contract."

"I used a shared courier login on the floor terminal," Lucas continued. "I reprinted page forty-seven. I typed your dormant account number into the routing line, swapped the pages, and put the folder back together before it went upstairs to be signed."

Camilla turned away. She walked slowly back to her marble desk and looked down at the untouched cup of coffee. She put both hands flat on the stone.

"You moved Vertex’s money into my name," Camilla whispered to the desk.

"I parked it where I thought no one else was looking," Lucas said. "I didn’t know Mads monitored that specific hold. I didn’t know he had the authorization codes to wire it out."

Camilla spun around. The personal part hadn’t landed yet. Right now she was looking at the damage to her company.

"Who else knows you did this?" Camilla demanded.

"Morgan Hale."

Camilla let out a sharp, incredulous breath. "The auditor. The forensic auditor knows you forged a municipal document to move stolen funds into my company."

"Mads told the state detectives that someone changed the numbers," Lucas said. "Morgan has the server logs. She knows page forty-seven was reprinted at nine-fourteen. She knows my badge opened the holding room door at eight fifty-one. She has the entire chain of custody."

"When does she file her report?"

"Tomorrow at nine in the morning," Lucas said.

He watched her run the numbers. She was faster at it than anyone he knew.

"You let me walk into a police precinct yesterday," Camilla said, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "I sat in a room with state detectives. I signed a sworn statement that I was the victim of an external embezzlement. I demanded a police report number so my bank would hold the freeze on the wire."

"You told them the truth," Lucas said. "You didn’t know."

"It does not matter what I knew!" Camilla snapped, her composure finally cracking. Her voice echoed sharply off the glass walls. "If the state prosecutor sees Morgan’s timeline tomorrow, they do not see a junior consultant acting alone. They see an accomplice. They see me."

She stepped away from the desk, pacing the length of the room.

"You are my partner," Camilla said. "You’ve been in my home. You’ve stood next to me in my boardroom. If the prosecutor learns that you altered a municipal contract to route penalty funds into an account with my name on it, they will assume I gave you the routing number. They will assume we planned the theft together, and that Mads was just the getaway driver who got greedy."

"I will tell them you had no part in it," Lucas said evenly. "I will corroborate your statement."

"They won’t care what you corroborate," Camilla fired back, stopping to glare at him. "They care whose name is on the ledger. You didn’t just forge a document, Lucas. You used my company as a blind drop. You turned my own infrastructure into a crime scene."

Lucas took the hit. He didn’t argue, because she was right. He had thought about keeping the money from Cole. He hadn’t thought hard enough about what it would mean for her if anyone found out.

"It was the only option I had in the holding room," Lucas said quietly. "If I had alerted you, Victoria would have known the trap was blown. She would have found the leak. If I had done nothing, you would have signed your own ruin."

"Do not pretend you did this to protect me," Camilla said. Her voice dropped. The business questions were done. This was the other part.

She walked slowly toward him, stopping just out of arm’s reach.

"I stood in this office," Camilla said, "and told you never to keep me blind again. I told you that if you saw a knife pointed at me, you tell me. And you promised you would."

"I made the change before we had that conversation," Lucas said.

"And you’ve had every day since to tell me," Camilla said. "You sat next to me and watched me celebrate that contract, knowing what was in it."

Lucas held her gaze. She was hurt. She was keeping it on a short leash, but it was there.

"You let me take you into my bed," Camilla said quietly. Her voice trembled for the first time. "You let me talk about trust. You let me think I was the only one in the room who had finally stopped playing games. And all the while, you knew a state prosecutor was going to come looking for me because of what you did."

[High-Stakes Acquisition Quest Progress Updated.]

[Condition 1 of 2 met: Disclosure to Camilla Verman complete.]

[Relationship Status Updated: Camilla Verman.]

[Devoted Partner → Wary Ally.]

[The target feels utilized. Trust has been severely compromised. The target views the Host as a massive legal liability.]

[Current AP Balance: 800.]

Lucas read the lines as they faded.

He had spent weeks getting her to trust one person in this city. Now he was the reason she shouldn’t.

"I am sorry," Lucas said. It was the only thing he could offer that didn’t sound like a tactical excuse.

Camilla stared at him. She looked at him like she was trying to match his face to the man she thought she knew.

"Apologies do not hold up in court," Camilla said.

She turned her back to him and walked to her desk. She opened the top drawer, pulled out a piece of thick, cream-colored cardstock, and picked up a pen. She wrote a name and a phone number.

She slid the card across the marble surface.

"What are you going to tell the detectives?" Lucas asked, staying where he was.

"I am going to tell them the truth," Camilla said, looking down at the desk. "I am going to tell them that I was completely blind. That my assistant went rogue, and my consultant committed forgery without my consent. I will not perjure myself to cover your tracks, Lucas."

"I would never ask you to."

"Good." She tapped the cardstock with a manicured fingernail. "David Reed. He handles criminal defense for white-collar executives. He is the best in the city. I just paid his retainer."

Lucas looked at the card from across the room. "I can manage my own representation."

"With what money?" Camilla asked, looking up. "On what Vertex pays you? You are going to need a lawyer who understands how state prosecutors dismantle corporate espionage cases."

"I don’t need you to pay for my lawyer, Camilla."

"You do not have a choice," she said. "If you walk into a prosecutor’s office alone tomorrow, you will say something noble and stupid to try and protect me. You will volunteer information you shouldn’t, and you will end up in a cell. Reed will keep you from doing that."

Lucas understood. She wasn’t just protecting him; she was protecting her own exposure. A bad defense attorney would let Lucas accidentally drag Verman Development down with him. A good one would build a firewall between them.

He walked forward and picked up the card. The heavy paper felt rough against his thumb.

"You are meeting him at his office at seven o’clock tomorrow morning," Camilla instructed. "You will tell Reed everything. Every log Morgan has, every conversation you had with Cole. And you will do exactly what he tells you to do."

"I’ll be there," Lucas said.

He slipped the card into his jacket pocket. He looked at her, looking for something to say that wouldn’t make it worse. There wasn’t anything. She picked up a legal brief from the stack on her desk and opened it, signaling that the conversation was over.

"Goodbye, Lucas," Camilla said to the paperwork.

Lucas turned and walked out of the office.

The glass doors clicked shut behind him. Mads’s desk sat empty at the end of the corridor.

He walked to the private elevator and pressed the button.

The ride down to the lobby was silent. The adrenaline wore off and left a dull ache behind his eyes. Camilla no longer looked at him as a partner. She looked at him as a problem to be managed.

He stepped out into the bustling lobby and bypassed the security desk. He pushed through the revolving doors and out onto the sidewalk.

It was late afternoon. The gray sky hung low over the city, threatening rain. The streetlights were already on. People hurried past with their heads down.

Lucas let out a slow, measured breath.

One down. One to go.

He reached into his pocket to check the time. He needed to figure out the fastest route back to Victoria’s apartment. She was expecting him tonight. That conversation was going to be worse.

He pulled his cracked smartphone from his pocket. The screen lit up in his palm.

He had a new text message.

It wasn’t from Morgan, and it wasn’t from the state detective.

It was from Victoria Sterling.

Lucas stared at the screen. The message was short.

My security chief just matched the legal floor badge logs against the print queue. My office. Now.

Lucas froze on the sidewalk.

The timeline had collapsed.

Victoria wasn’t waiting for him to come to her apartment tonight. Her own security team had done the cross-referencing Morgan had warned him about, and they’d done it in an afternoon.

She knew he was in the holding room at nine-fourteen.

Lucas looked up at the towering glass structures of the financial district. The wind picked up, cutting through his thin charcoal shirt. He had less than twenty minutes to get back to Vertex Management and face a woman who had just found out that the man in her bed last night had rerouted her company’s money.