The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 112

Chapter 101: The War Room-1

Bella POV

By day three, my dining table had disappeared under a war zone. Transaction records, call logs, SEC filings, and corporate registry documents from four different jurisdictions covered every inch of the surface, organized into stacks that Caleb and I had developed a silent shorthand for over the past seventy-two hours. His pile on the left, mine on the right, and the middle stack that belonged to both of us, worked through together every evening after Tom went to bed.

It had started practically enough. Caleb would arrive at seven, after Tom’s dinner but before his bath, staying long enough to read him a story before we settled at the table with our laptops and got to work. Maya had stopped commenting on it after the first night, and now simply delivered coffee at intervals without being asked.

“Here.” Caleb slid a folder across to me at eleven on the third night, not looking up from his laptop. “Victoria’s calendar access. Everything she could have seen in the months before the Nexus deal.”

I opened it, scanned through to the fourth page, and found it – a meeting notation, a counterparty name, a date that matched the planted transaction record with one digit different.

“She made an error,” I said.

Caleb leaned over my shoulder to look, close enough that I was aware of him.

“She transposed the account number,” he said. “The real Nexus counterparty ends in 7741. The shadow account ends in 7714.”

“She was working from memory, or from notes she took during that meeting.” I pulled up the comparative document on my laptop. “Which means she attended that meeting, or got a very detailed account of it from someone who did.”

Caleb straightened and moved back to his side of the table. “James,” he said quietly. “My former assistant, she was involved with him too,”

I looked up.”She was thorough,”

“She was patient.” He pulled up another document. “I should have seen it.”

“She specifically targeted someone who doesn’t trust easily and performed trustworthiness for months,” I said, keeping my voice even. “That’s not a failure of judgment. That’s a sophisticated operation.” I closed the folder. “Don’t make it personal right now, make it into an evidence.”

He looked at me for a moment across the table. “When did you get good at that?”

“At what?”

“Separating the personal from the problem.”

“From years of building a company alone.” I pulled up the next document.

We worked in silence after that, I had forgotten this somewhere in the years of keeping him at arm’s length – that he was genuinely sharp, not just powerful. He saw patterns in financial data the way I did, from a

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Chapter 101 The War Reem I

+25 Points

different angle but with the same instinct, and watching him work was quietly, inconveniently disarming.

Around midnight he got up and came back with two plates of reheated leftovers from dinner, setting one in front of me without a word.

“I was going to eat,” I said.

“You weren’t.” He sat back down and phoked up his fork. “You do this thing where you tell yourself you’ll eat after the next document, and then there’s always another document.”

I looked at the plate, then at him. “You’ve been paying attention.”

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pay attention to everything that has to do with you.” He said it simply,m. “Eat, Bella. We’ll find the seam faster if you’re running on something other than caffeine.”

I ate.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked, somewhere in the second half of the meal, quietly, like he’d been holding it for days.

I put my fork down. “Because Tom deserves a father who isn’t in prison.”

“That’s the practical answer,” he said.

“It’s the true answer.”

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