The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 144

Chapter 131: Corporate Espionage

Caleb POV

Claim

The name on Lena’s message was Daniel Forde. My corporate CFO, years with Black Enterprises, three of them reporting directly to me. The man who had sat in the war room during the SEC frame job and helped Bella and I build our counter-case.

Who had shaken my hand at the press conference and said, It’s good to see things working out, Caleb.

I read the name and said nothing for a long moment.

“Caleb,” Bella said again, from the window.

I turned the phone so she and Diana could see the screen.

Diana’s expression didn’t change. Bella went very still, then shifted into something controlled. Diana looked at the name and then at me. “How long has he been your CFO?”

“Twelve years.”

“Victor hired him?”

“No,” I said. And then, because she’d asked for a reason: “He was already in the company when I took over, he was father’s hire.”

Diana nodded once. “Then he was never yours.”

We didn’t move immediately. That was Bella’s call, and it was the right one.

“If we pull him now, whoever is running him goes dark, she said, pacing the length of the dining room in the quiet, focused way she moved when she was thinking faster than she was speaking. “We need to know who he’s reporting to before we close the tap. If we know that, we know the full scope. If we don’t”

“We cut one arm and the body walks away,” Diana said.

Bella looked at her. “Yes.”

Something passed between them acknowledgement and then Bella turned to me. “Can you get me access to his financial calendar? Not the official one. The one James manages for his discretionary appointments.”

I was already texting James. The calendar came through in minutes. Diana and Bella went through it together at the table, which was not a thing I’d expected to witness this morning, and I stood at the window and let them work because they were both more efficient at this kind of pattern recognition than I

was.

“Here,” Bella said. “Every six weeks, on a Tuesday. Lunch meeting, no location listed, no attendee name. Eight times in the last year.”

“Whoever he meets doesn’t want a paper trail,” Diana said.

“But he keeps the slot,” I said, coming back to the table. “Because he needs the reminder.”

3

<Chapter 131-Corporate Espionage “Next one is Thursday,” Bella said.

1 looked at it. “Two days.”

“We follow him,” Diana said.

“Lena’s team handles surveillance,” I said. “We’re not”

“Lena’s team is good,” Diana said, without inflection. “I’m better. I’ve been doing this for years without a team.” She looked at me levelly. “And Daniel Forde has worked in your building for twelve years. He’ll notice a familiar face at twenty meters, he won’t notice me.”

I looked at Bella. She looked at me. It’s your call, her expression said, which was, from Bella, a form of trust I didn’t take lightly.

“You go with Lena’s team,” I said to Diana. “Not alone, this is non-negotiable.”

“Fine.”

The next two days were quiet, Tom back from Maya’s, the household running on its normal rhythm, and underneath it this thing we were carrying that couldn’t show on the surface.

Claim

I worked from the study. Bella managed three Hart Worldwide conference calls and reviewed the structural notes Diana had given us, annotating them with her own analysis in the margins in her precise handwriting.

Diana came back to the penthouse both evenings for briefings and left without staying for dinner, which Tom found disappointing.

“She has your eyes,” Tom told me, the second evening, watching Diana’s car leave from the hallway

window.

“She’s my sister.”

“Like Mummy and her sister?”

“Different from that,” I said. “Diana and I are trying to fix things.”

Tom considered this. “Like you and Mummy did?”

“Something like that.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied, and went back to his dinosaurs.

Thursday. Lena’s team picked up Daniel Forde at 12:08, walking two blocks east of the Black Tower toward a restaurant I didn’t know he frequented. Diana was already in position. The feed came through to my laptop-street-level camera angle, Diana’s second phone transmitting from a table inside the restaurant with a sightline to the door.

Forde arrived, he took a table near the back and ordered without looking at the menu.

He was joined eleven minutes later by a man I had never seen in person but whose photograph I had pulled from a twenty-year-old corporate filing that morning, after Diana’s timeline had given me a name I’d been told since childhood was dead.

<Chapter 131-Corporate Espionage

Gole Black.

Claim

My father’s younger brother. Declared missing, then presumed dead, after a falling-out with Victor in the early 2000s that I had been told involved money and a bad business decision and, later, a boat accident off the coast of Portugal with no body recovered.

There was, apparently, no boat accident.

I stared at the live feed -‘Cole Black, fifty-eight now, lean and composed, shaking Daniel Forde’s hand across a restaurant table two blocks from my building – and felt something cold and clear move through me that wasn’t quite shock. More like the particular recognition you’ve been sensing in the dark finally resolving into something you can see.

My father had enemies, my father had also made them. I picked up the phone and called Bella.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify