Sienna's POV
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I called Petra from the parking garage before I even reached my car.
She picked up on the first ring. "He's fine, we're doing bath time, he already tried to drink the bubble soap _"
"Is he with you?" I said. "Right now. Is he right there?"
A pause. Petra's voice changed immediately. "He's in the tub. I'm standing in the doorway. Sienna, what happened?"
"Nothing." I pressed my back against the wall and breathed. "Nothing happened. I just needed to hear his voice."
"Leo," Petra called. "Say hi to Mommy."
"HI MOMMY." Loud. Cheerful. Completely unbothered by the world.
Something in my chest loosened by about half an inch.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," I said, and hung up.
-
I sat in the car for four minutes before I started it.
Page four of that folder was photographed on my phone. The payment trail. The shell companies. Enzo Mercer's name at the bottom of it like a signature on something terrible.
Damien's father had paid Gerald Paine to file against me.
Damien had handed me the proof himself.
Which meant one of two things. Either Damien didn't know about his father's involvement until recently and was angry enough to expose it — or he knew exactly what he was doing by showing me, and this was its own kind of trap. A different one. More elegant. Give the opponent information that makes them trust you, then use that trust later.
I had met men who operated that way.
I had almost married one.
I started the car and drove.
-
The hotel room was warm and loud with Petra's terrible singing echoing from the bathroom. I dropped my bag on the bed, took off my coat, and sat down. Spread the merger documents in front of me. Picked up my red pen.
Work. Focus. This I could control.
I started going through the Vale financial records my forensic accountant had sent over that afternoon. Pages of numbers — accounts, transfers, dates. Most of it looked normal on the surface. But I had learned, in three years of studying corporate law, that the worst theft always looked normal on the surface.
I started marking things.
An account that received a transfer in March — routine size, routine label — but the origin code was slightly off. Not wrong enough to flag automatically. Just wrong enough to notice if you were looking.
A subsidiary payment in June that was logged under maintenance costs but the receiving company had been dissolved four months earlier.
A quarterly dividend that went to three board members — standard — and then a fourth transfer to an account I didn't recognize, same amount, same date, no name attached.
I circled it. Wrote a question mark.
Kept going.
By the time Petra emerged from the bathroom I had seventeen red marks on the page and a headache building behind my left eye.
"He is clean, he is moisturized, and he is extremely proud of himself for reasons I can't fully explain," Petra announced.
Leo came running out wrapped in a towel like a tiny cape, arms out, completely joyful about nothing in particular. He crashed into my legs. I caught him automatically, pulled him up, and buried my face in his damp hair for exactly three seconds.
He smelled like the children's shampoo I had packed. Like something safe.
"Mommy, I made a boat," he said seriously.
"Out of what?"
"The soap."
"Petra," I said.
"He's creative," she said, completely unapologetic.
I set Leo down and he immediately went to the window, pressing his small hands against the glass, looking out at the city lights below. Petra came and stood beside me, looking at the mess of documents on the bed.
"That bad?" she said quietly.
"Seventeen irregularities so far and I'm only through the first quarter." I picked up my pen again. "They've been moving money for at least two years. Small enough amounts each time to stay under automatic review thresholds. But it adds up."
"How much?"
"Enough to matter. Enough that if the merger goes through and Vale's assets get absorbed, nobody will ever be able to trace it properly because everything gets restructured." I paused. "It's almost clean. Whoever helped them set this up knew exactly what they were doing."
Petra looked at the documents. "Cole?"
"Cole is good at sales. This is accounting architecture." I shook my head. "Someone else built this."
Petra was quiet for a moment. Then — "What about the folder? The one Mercer's guy gave you?"
I had told her in the car on the way back. She had been silent for an unusually long time afterward, which for Petra meant she was thinking very hard.
"I don't know what to do with it yet," I said.
"He handed you evidence against his own father, Sienna."
"I know."
"That's either the most genuinely decent thing anyone's done for you since you got back —"
"Or it's a move," I said. "I know that too."
Petra opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then said, "So what do you do?"
"I verify it independently before I use it for anything. I don't trust the information just because he gave it to me." I picked up my pen. "I don't trust him."
Petra nodded slowly.
From the window Leo laughed at something outside. A car with bright lights probably. Or a pigeon. Leo laughed at pigeons with genuine enthusiasm.
"He's going to be tall," Petra said, watching him with a soft expression. "Like his phantom father, whoever that man was."
I smiled without meaning to. Looked back at my documents.
And then I looked up.
Because Leo had gone quiet.
He was still at the window. But he had stopped laughing. Something outside had caught his attention fully and he had gone — still. Head tilted to the left. Slow. Precise. Thinking. The way he got when something mattered enough to look at properly.
My red pen stopped moving.
I had seen that tilt today.
Across a boardroom table. On a face carved from something that didn't understand warmth. When Damien Mercer had listened to my third legal challenge and tilted his head exactly that way before responding.
Slow. Precise. Thinking.
Exact same angle.
I told myself I was tired. I had not slept properly in three days. I was running on coffee and controlled panic and my brain was making connections that weren't there because tired brains did that. It was a head tilt. Children tilted their heads. Adults tilted their heads. It meant nothing.
I went back to my documents.
My red pen touched the page.
My hand was shaking.
I pressed the pen down harder so the shake wouldn't show.
Seventeen red marks. Eighteen. Nineteen.
Leo turned from the window and came to climb on the bed beside me. He looked at all my papers seriously. Picked up a blank page. Put it down.
Then he tilted his head at me.
Same angle.
"Mommy," he said. "You look like something's wrong."
I put my arm around him and pulled him close and stared at the documents and said, "Everything's fine, baby."
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Unknown number.
Not the threatening one from this morning. A different unknown. A new one.
One message.
"I know you looked at page four. We need to talk. Not as opponents. Meet me tomorrow. Alone. Tell no one."
No name.
But I already knew.
And the most terrifying part wasn't that Damien Mercer was contacting me privately at 9pm.
The most terrifying part was that somewhere between the boardroom and this hotel room, some quiet, traitorous part of me had already decided I would go.