The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 111

Chapter 100: The Frame Job

Bella POV

+25 Points

The notification came at 6 am. – Priya’s name on my screen, three words before I’d even sat up properly. Turn on the news.

I was reaching for the remote before I’d finished reading it.

The anchor’s voice filled my bedroom: “- allegations against Black Enterprises CEO Caleb Black, with the SEC confirming this morning that a formal investigation has been opened into suspected insider trading in connection with last quarter’s Nexus Pharmaceuticals acquisition. Sources close to the investigation indicate that transactions made in the three days prior to the public announcement suggest prior knowledge of”

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the screen. His face was everywhere. That controlled, unreadable press photo expression, his name scrolling in a red ticker at the bottom like a verdict already delivered. The anchor used words like alleged and sources indicating with the practiced confidence of someone who had already decided.

My phone buzzed three times in quick succession.

I silenced it, pulled up the trading records Priya had linked, and read through them slowly. Twice. The pattern was almost too precise – a series of transactions anchored to an offshore account, timestamps that lined up with damning neatness against the Nexus announcement window. Clean, deliberate, and constructed to look devastating on a surface read, then fall apart the moment you knew what you were actually looking at.

Real insider trading was messy. Greedy people left fingerprints everywhere, because greed made people stupid and impatient. This was neither of those things. This was architectural.

My phone rang, Caleb’s name on the screen as I picked up.

“Tell me you’re watching,” he said, without preamble.

“I’m watching.” I kept my voice level, the way I always did when my mind was already moving faster than the conversation. “The transaction pattern is fabricated.”

A beat of silence. “You’re sure.”

“It’s too neat.” I pulled up a second screen, cross-referencing the timestamps. “Whoever built this understood what investigators look for, which means they also left the right amount of trail in the right places. This took planning, Caleb. This took access – not just to your deal timeline, but to your banking architecture, your counterparty patterns.” I paused. “Who had that kind of access?”

He was quiet for a moment. “My inner circle. Legal. Finance.”

“And anyone they talked to,” I said. “Think further back.”

Another pause, longer this time. “Victoria,” he said.

My heart skipped a beat.”The woman from the networking event,” I said, keeping my tone completely neutral. “The one who made a point of telling me how well she knew you.”

13

< Chapter 100-the Frame Job

“Bella”

“How long did she have access to your calendar?”

“Several months. His voice was careful, in the way it got when he knew he was walking toward something. “It ended before you came back. Long before.”

+25 Points

“Right.” I set my phone on the nightstand put it on speaker, and stood up to find something to wear. “So while I was raising your son alone, you were Jetting women with revenge potential memorize your entire business infrastructure. Noted.”

“That’s not” He stopped. “You’re right. I’m not going to argue that.”

The fact that he didn’t argue it was somehow more irritating than if he had. I pulled a shirt from the wardrobe with slightly more force than necessary, breathed once, and redirected.

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“She has access,” I said, back to the problem. “Jade on her own has a motive. I won’t be surprised if they were working together, they have everything they’d need to construct something exactly like this.” I buttoned my shirt, thinking. “The anchor point is the Nexus side. If someone built a shadow trail, they had to root it somewhere real, and that seam is going to exist. It always does.”

“My legal team is already pulling records.”

“Tell them to look at the offshore account structure first, not the timestamps. The timestamps are the distraction.” I grabbed my jacket. “I’m calling Priya.”

“Bella.” His voice stopped me at the door. “You don’t have to do this.”

I stood there for a moment, jacket in hand, the television still running his name on a loop behind me.

“I know I don’t,” I said. “That’s not why I’m doing it.”

A silence, then, quiet and careful. “Why are you?”

I thought about last night. About breakfast at his kitchen island, shoes off, coffee going cold, talking about lavender and cartoon dinosaurs like it was the most natural thing in the world. About how new and fragile and terrifying that felt, and how much I did not want to watch Victoria burn it down before it had even properly started.

“Because Tom deserves a father who isn’t being dismantled by the same people who tried to dismantle me,” I said. “And because I know fabricated evidence when I see it. I’ve had it used against the people I love before.”

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