The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 143

Chapter 130: Unlikely Alliance

Bella POV

Diana arrived at the penthouse at nine in the morning with a laptop bag, a second phone, and the particular expression of someone who has decided to do a thing they find personally distasteful but strategically necessary.

Claim

I let her in because Caleb asked me to. I stood in the kitchen doorway with my coffee and watched her set up at the dining table and reminded myself that her file on Caleb’s phone had been thorough, accurate, and had given us three names we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

That was the only reason she was here.

“Tom’s at Maya’s,” Caleb said, coming in from the hallway. “We have the morning.”

Diana looked up. “I’m aware you both have questions about my methods,” she said.

“Questions are generous,” I said.

She looked at me steadily. “I’ve been investigating my brother’s life for years using means that were not always strictly legal. You can be angry about that or you can use what I found. I’d recommend the second option.”

I sat down across from her. “Walk us through it.”

She was good, I gave her that without pleasure.

The file she laid out was meticulous -years of documented movements, financial trails, a network map of people connected to Victor Black’s personal accounts who were still active and still receiving irregular payments from a shell structure she’d traced through four different jurisdictions. Paul Reeves was one node in a larger web.

The school surveillance had been the first overt action, which meant whoever was running the operation had decided that passive observation was no longer sufficient.

“They escalated when you went public,” Diana said, pulling up a timeline on her laptop. “The press conference was the trigger. Before that, they were watching – building a picture, confirming Tom’s existence, confirming his relationship to Caleb. When you announced it officially, they shifted to active phase.”

“What’s the active phase objective?” Caleb asked.

“Leverage or removal.” She said it flatly. “Whoever is running this isn’t trying to kill anyone. They’re trying to acquire something. Tom, or Caleb’s cooperation, or both.”

I looked at the network map on her screen – nodes and lines, names I didn’t recognize, account numbers in small text – and felt the particular cold focus that came over me when a problem was large enough to require all of my attention. Fear was there underneath it. It was always there when Tom was involved.

“How did you build this?” I asked.

Diana glanced at me. “Methods you’d rather not know about.”

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Chapter 130 Unlikely Alliance

Claim

run an international acquisitions,” I said. “I’ve sat across from people who smiled and offered tea while Their lawyers filed injunctions designed to bankrupt me, you can tell me how you built the file.”

Something shifted in her expression. She held my gaze for a moment and then said, “Bribed a financial forensics consultant who owed me a favor. Planted a passive monitoring tool on three sss accounts connected to Reeves. Physically followed two of the other names across two cities.” A pause. “And I called in a favor from someone who used to work for Interpol.”

“See,” I said. “That wasn’t so hard.”

Caleb made a sound beside me. Diana looked between us, and for just a moment – the first time since I’d sat across from her at that dinner she smiled.

“I want to be clear,” she said, “that I’m not doing this for you.”

“I know,” I said. “You’re doing it because if something happens to Caleb, you lose the only person who remembers your childhood, and you’ve apparently decided that matters more than being right about him.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Diana looked at her laptop screen then Caleb looked at me as I drank my coffee.

“The financial trail,” Diana said, after a moment, “leads to a holding structure connected to Black Enterprises. Someone inside the company has been facilitating the payments.”

I set my mug down. “Inside the company.”

“The access level required to route through that structure without triggering internal audit is senior.” She pulled up the account architecture. “C-suite. Or someone with C-suite access.”

I looked at Caleb. His face had gone very still.

“There’s a mole in Black Enterprises,” I said.

Diana nodded once. “And whoever it is, they’ve been active for at least eighteen months.”

We worked through the morning, the three of us at the table with our respective laptops and the particular focused quiet of people who have set aside every other variable in order to solve the problem in front of them. Diana didn’t make small talk. Neither did I. Caleb moved between us, pulling documents, making calls to James in a low voice from the hallway, and by noon we had narrowed the internal access scope from fourteen possible individuals to four.

At some point Diana asked me about the Singapore expansion model Hart Worldwide had used in the Nexus-adjacent market. I answered – briefly, and she asked a follow-up that was genuinely sharp, and I answered that too, and we didn’t comment on the fact that we were having a competent professional

conversation.

When Caleb came back in with sandwiches and set one in front of each of us without asking, Diana looked at it for a second like she wasn’t sure what to do with the gesture.

Then she picked it up and ate, still reading her screen.

I was standing at the window with my third coffee, looking out at the city while Caleb and Diana argued quietly over the account architecture, when my phone buzzed with a message from Lena.

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Chapter 130-hikely Alliance

Claim

Reeves made contact with a Black Enterprises internal address this morning. Timestamp 07:42. We have the TP. Cross-referencing now.

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