CHAPTER 156 - THE MOLE

CHAPTER 156 - THE MOLE
Alex's POV

The first thing I noticed was the smell — burnt coffee and the faint metallic tang of panic that always lingered in the security office after a breach. The fluorescent lights hummed above us like a chastened crowd. Marcus from IT pushed a thin printout across my desk and his fingers left a faint smear of ink where he'd gripped it too tight. "You should see this," he said, as if reading it made him complicit.

I read it once and my mouth went dry. Twice and the room tilted. The logs were clean, clinical lines of timestamps and export IDs until they weren't. There, in black and white, were the queries, the file pulls, the times someone had siphoned executive reports and client lists out of our internal vault and into an external account flagged with a routing signature we had traced back through three proxies. The signature resolved — slowly, impossibly — to an internal IP range, and then to a familiar desktop name. EvelynChen-BD.

Evelyn. Board member. Chair of the Finance Committee. Smiled in gala photographs. Toasted me at the last investor dinner and told me I was doing "the right thing" for the company. I could feel my pulse where the watch band dug into the inside of my wrist. Betrayal has the oddest physical symptoms. It was like noticing a loose thread on a suit you've worn for years and then seeing the whole seam unravel in front of you.

"How long?" I asked, though I already knew from the times on the printout that this wasn't a one-off. Marcus said, "Since April. But she accelerated in August. She pulled three major dossiers the week Sterling started whispering to Evelyn on the fourth floor."

My head filled with static. Sterling. Victoria. Boardroom murmurs that had felt like background noise suddenly had teeth. I thought of Bella's face when she'd confronted Victoria at the luncheon — her jaw tight, the way she said nothing and meant everything. I thought of Roberto, trusting me in a way that made my chest ache. Every casual conversation, every chuckle in a corridor now shimmered with danger.

Sandra knocked once and drifted into the doorway with a thermos in hand, the way she always did at night when the office was empty of pretense and full of the things she couldn't fix with a calendar invite. Her loyalty had been a nuisance sometimes, a human firewall of good coffee and better memory. Her eyes slid to the printout and then to me. "Everything okay?" she asked, voice small in that suddenly enormous office.

I said, "No." It felt inadequate and honest at once. "Bring the security footage from last Tuesday. Full timestamps. I want to see who logged into Evelyn's account outside of board meetings."

She was already moving, the thermos forgotten on my credenza. There was a tremor in her hands I hadn't seen before. We were the same — hands that never quite stopped working, even when the world wanted to collapse.

In the data, the pattern wasn't elegant. It was clumsy, almost arrogant. Files zipped out during late nights after everyone went home. The queries came from a desktop logged under Evelyn's credentials, but the weird part, the part that made me feel like I might be paralyzed with rage, was that whoever had set the scheduling had used a machine in Evelyn's inner office cluster. Someone with clearance. Someone who could walk through our halls without triggering alarms.

I pictured her laughing over hors d'oeuvres, the clip of her hair glinting like polished coins. I pictured the way she always had a civil question at meetings, the kind of question that made other people uncomfortable because it suggested she understood more than she should. Had I missed the signals because I wanted to believe in the bone-deep decency of the people around me? Or had she been practiced, deliberate, patient?

"Alex?" Sandra's hand on my shoulder was warm and steady. Her presence snapped my attention back to present tense. "Do you want me to call Marcus? Legal?"

"I want everything," I said. The words were an order and a plea. "Lock the accounts. Freeze transfers. And Sandra — be careful who you tell. If Evelyn is doing this from inside, then telling the wrong person will make it worse."

She nodded like a soldier receiving a map. I watched her go, the office swallowing her silhouette until she was only a shadow disappearing against the glass. My reflection in the window looked like someone I didn't recognize: older, a little wild at the eyes, jaw set like a man willing to fracture rather than bend.

I should have been angry at Evelyn. I should have been furious at the obviousness of it, at the way privilege had shielded a knife for months. But what hurt more — an ache that had nothing to do with corporate espionage — was the knowledge that this leak had given Victoria more than gossip. It had given her leverage, ammunition to pry at the one fragile thing I had mismanaged to protect: the people I loved.

I picked up the phone, fingers hovering over Evelyn's extension because for all the threats and legalities and damage control, there was a smaller, sharper part of me that needed to hear her explain it in her own voice. I pressed call and waited.

The line clicked. Her voice answered, suntanned and even, as if she were reading from a script written the morning after the question was asked. "Alex," she said. "What a surprise. Is everything all right?"