Dana was already at her desk when Jade arrived at seven forty-five.
The floor was empty. The overhead lights were still on their low morning setting, that particular pre-business hour dimness that made the open plan feel like a different room entirely. Dana had a coffee waiting on Jade's desk, which Jade noticed and appreciated without comment, and when Jade sat down Dana came in and closed the door and placed a single printed sheet face down on the desk between them.
She did not turn it over immediately.
"Before you see this," Dana said, "I want you to know that I verified it three times. I did not want to bring you something I was not completely certain of."
"I understand," Jade said.
"The first name is Ryan Cole. His access logs show six instances of files being opened outside business hours over the past three weeks. Small files. Nothing dramatically sensitive on its own but cumulatively a pattern. Three of those sessions ended with print jobs sent to the floor printer at times when he was the only person logged into the building."
Jade nodded. She had expected Ryan. Ryan was almost a relief.
"And the second name," she said.
Dana turned the sheet over.
Jade read it.
She read it again.
She set the paper down and looked at the surface of her desk for a moment and allowed herself exactly five seconds of stillness before she picked up her professional composure and put it back on with both hands.
The second name was Marcus Webb.
Head of Crest Holdings legal division. Fifteen years with the company. The man who had been at Dominic's right hand through three major acquisitions, two international expansions, and the legal architecture of everything Dominic had built. The man whose name appeared on the founding documents of the company alongside Dominic's own.
Not a junior employee operating naively under the influence of a manipulative woman.
A founding partner.
"Are you certain," Jade said. Her voice was level.
"Completely," Dana said. "His access pattern is different from Ryan's. More careful. He did not open files carelessly or print anything. What he did was access the document management system from an external IP address on four occasions. The system logged the access as authorised because his credentials were used but the IP address does not belong to any device registered to the company or to his personal accounts on record."
"Someone gave him a clean device," Jade said.
"Or he sourced one himself," Dana said. "Either way the access was deliberate and it was concealed."
Jade sat with this. The full shape of it was assembling in her mind and it was considerably larger and more serious than a disgruntled ex-girlfriend running a personal campaign. Celeste Harrow had money and access and social leverage. But she did not have the kind of institutional knowledge required to navigate Crest Holdings' internal legal architecture without guidance.
Marcus Webb had been providing that guidance.
Which meant this had been running for longer than anyone had realised. Possibly much longer.
"Does anyone else know?" Jade asked.
"No one," Dana said. "I ran the analysis from my personal laptop using credentials I have not used in two years. If anyone is watching the system for unusual queries they will not have seen mine."
Jade looked at her. "That was very smart and also quite technically illegal."
Dana held her gaze calmly. "I did not find anything that was not there to be found."
"No," Jade agreed. "You did not." She picked up the sheet and folded it in half. "I need to tell Dominic."
"Before you do," Dana said, and something in her tone made Jade look up, "there is one more thing. I was curious about the external IP address. I traced it as far as I could without going somewhere I could not come back from legally."
"And?"
"It resolves to a registered business address," Dana said. "A small investment holding company registered eighteen months ago." She paused. "The company name is Harrow Capital."
The room was very quiet.
Jade set the folded sheet down on the desk.
Celeste Harrow and Marcus Webb. The ex-girlfriend and the founding partner. Two people with entirely different kinds of access to Dominic's world, working in concert through a vehicle Celeste had registered before Jade had even walked into this building.
This was not reactive. This was not a campaign triggered by Jade's arrival. This had been constructed carefully over an extended period, and Jade's arrival had simply accelerated a timeline that was already running.
"Thank you, Dana," she said. "Genuinely. This is exceptional work."
Dana stood and smoothed her jacket. "What are you going to do?"
"I am going to finish my coffee," Jade said. "And then I am going to go and set something on fire."
Dana's mouth curved. She went back to her desk without another word.
Jade sat alone in her glass office and looked at the sheet of paper and the city beyond the windows and thought with the cold precise focus that was her most useful quality in moments like this.
She could go to Dominic immediately. That was the instinct and it was a sound one. He needed to know about Webb. He needed to know the scale of what was running beneath his company. She would go to him.
But first she needed to understand one more thing.
She picked up her phone and called a number she had in her contacts from her previous life, before Crest Holdings, from the years of running her own firm when she had occasionally required the services of a man who was exceptionally good at finding information that other people believed was hidden.
He answered on the second ring.
"Jade Mercer," he said. "It has been a while."
"I need a history on a man named Marcus Webb," she said. "Everything from the last two years. Specifically his financial position and any connections to an entity called Harrow Capital."
"Timeline?"
"Forty-eight hours."
A brief pause. "It will cost you."
"It always does," she said. "Send me your rate."
She hung up and sat back and looked at Ryan Cole's empty desk through the glass. He would arrive in about an hour, would sit down and open his laptop and perform a normal Tuesday morning, and he had no idea that the floor had already shifted beneath him.
She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
She picked up the folded sheet, put it in her bag, picked up her coffee, and walked to Dominic's office.
He was already behind his desk, jacket on, the controlled morning version of himself that she found both familiar and privately amusing given what he had looked like in the dark of his bedroom six hours ago. He looked up when she came in and she saw the question in his eyes.
She closed the door. She sat. She took the sheet from her bag and placed it in front of him.
She watched him read it.
She watched the colour leave his face.
Not dramatically. Dominic Crest did not do dramatic. But the controlled surface of him went very still in a specific way, the way still water goes still when something has struck it from below, and his jaw set and his eyes moved over the page a second time with the intensity of a man trying to find an alternative interpretation.
There was none.
"Webb," he said. The word came out flat and stripped of everything except the bare fact of it.
"Webb," she confirmed.
He stood and went to his window and stood with his back to her and she gave him the silence because he needed it. She had had forty minutes with this information. He was having it for the first time and Marcus Webb was not Ryan Cole. Marcus Webb was fifteen years. Marcus Webb was the legal foundation of everything Dominic had built. Marcus Webb had sat across from him in rooms that mattered and shaken hands that meant something and carried the architecture of this company in his head.
The betrayal was not corporate. It was personal in the deepest way.
"How long," he said to the window.
"I do not know yet," she said. "I have someone working on Webb's finances and his connection to Harrow Capital. I will know more within two days."
"Harrow Capital." He said it quietly. "Celeste registered that company eighteen months ago."
"Yes."
"Before you were here. Before any of this."
"Yes," she said again.
He turned from the window and looked at her and the controlled surface had cracked sufficiently now that she could see the anger clearly. Clean and cold and very focused.
"She has been running this for over a year," he said.
"At minimum," Jade said. "Dominic. Before you move on either of them I need you to hear me."
He looked at her.
"If you confront Webb today he will lawyer up within the hour and everything Dana found becomes contested and potentially inadmissible. If we move too fast we will expose what we know and give them time to clean the trail." She held his gaze steadily. "We have the advantage right now because they do not know what we have found. We need to keep that advantage."
He was quiet for a long moment. She could see the war in him between the man who wanted to walk into Webb's office right now and the strategist who understood she was right.
The strategist won.
"Four days," he said. "You said four days to find the leak. You found it in two."
"I had excellent help," she said.
"How many more days do you need?"
"Give me until Friday," she said. "By Friday I will have Webb's financial picture and I will know how deep this goes. Then we move. Properly. With everything we need to make it stick."
He nodded once. Then he did something she did not expect. He crossed the room and put his hand against her jaw and pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there for a moment, not a kiss exactly, something more like contact, like someone pressing their hand against a wall to confirm it was solid.
Then he stepped back and straightened his jacket and became the CEO again.
"Friday," he said.
"Friday," she said.
She was almost at his door when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen and something crossed his face that she caught because she was always watching his face.
"Who is it?" she said.
He looked at her. "My father," he said. "He has not called me in four months."
They looked at each other across the width of his office.
Someone had told Gerald Crest to call his son today, of all days, when the ground inside the company was already shaking and the cracks were beginning to show. The timing was not coincidental. Nothing about this was coincidental.
"Answer it," she said quietly. "And say nothing about what we know."
He held her gaze for one more second. Then he picked up the phone.
She walked out and pulled his door closed behind her and stood in the corridor for a moment with her hand flat against the wood and her eyes closed and the full weight of what was moving through this building pressing against her from all sides.
She straightened.
She walked back to her office.
She had a pitch to build and a company to protect and a man inside it who was only beginning to understand that the thing between him and Jade Mercer was the most solid ground he was going to have in the weeks ahead.
She intended to be worth that.
She sat down, opened her laptop, and went to work.