Chapter 30 Priya Switches Sides

Chapter 30 Priya Switches Sides
POV: Lila Monroe

She did not leave.
I had watched her pick up her bag and stand, and I had fully expected the exit, the conversation felt complete, but she was still standing there three seconds later with the bag strap in her hand and her jaw doing the small tight movement of someone working through a final decision.
"There is one more thing," she said.
I waited.
She set the bag back down. She reached into it and pulled out her phone. She held it toward me, screen facing out, and I took it.
A photo. Clear and well-framed, taken from a moderate distance with a phone camera that had a decent zoom function, the kind of zoom you used when you needed documentation rather than anything like artistry. A restaurant table, not the campus cafe, somewhere private, the kind of room that did not have other tables visible in the background.
Edmund Kane on one side. Two men I did not recognise immediately, though their posture and the cut of their jackets said the same language Edmund's did, money old enough to have rules. And on the table, open between the coffee cups and the folded napkins, a file.
A standard manila folder with a small label tab on the side.
I looked at the tab.
My student ID number was printed on it.
I looked at the photo for a long time. Long enough that Priya, who was watching me, shifted slightly.
"When," I said.
"This afternoon. About forty minutes after I left you."
"You followed him."
"I followed the car," she said. "I had the plate from the board meeting last month. My father's contact mentioned the club name this morning." She was not apologetic about any of this. "I knew where he was going before he got there."
I handed the phone back.
"Why are you showing me this," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. The version of Priya that had come to the library to warn me, the version that had called me last night with something close to real information in it, both of those versions had required effort. This one looked slightly different. Settled.
"Because Ryder would want you to have it," she said. "And he would want me to be the one to give it, because if he did it himself he would have to explain why he has been watching his father's movements, and that conversation would take longer than you have."
I looked at the photo again, which she had not put away.
"You documented this," I said. "Without being asked."
"I was already there," she said. "And I have a phone and a decent education and a father who has sat across from Edmund Kane at enough dinner tables over enough years for me to know exactly what a file with someone's name on it means in that specific kind of context."
"What does it mean," I said.
"It means he is not gathering information anymore," she said. "He has the information. The file is already built. The meeting is about what to do with it."
I took my own phone out. I took a photo of her photo, quickly, before she could put it away.
She let me.
That told me more than anything she had said.
"You do not like me," I said.
"No," she said. "I genuinely do not. I think you are complicated and deliberate and I find that difficult."
"But you are doing this anyway."
She picked up her bag again slowly. "Edmund Kane destroyed someone at this university three years ago. A student who had information he did not want shared. He used the conduct system and the endowment leverage and the contacts he has built over eleven years and he did it cleanly and completely and the person left and simply never came back." She paused. "I was eighteen years old when it happened. I watched it from a distance and I did not understand what I was watching at the time." She looked at me. "I understand it properly now. And I am not going to watch it happen again from a distance."
She left. This time all the way.
I sat with the photo on my phone and the documentation file open on my screen and thought about a file folder with my student ID number carefully labelled on the tab, and what the meeting that contained it was for, and how much time I actually had before whatever had been decided in that room became something I needed to actively respond to.
I texted Ryder: "Priya has a photo. Edmund, two board members, a file with my name. I have a copy. We need to talk today."
He replied in four minutes: "Coming."
Then six minutes of nothing, which was long enough to be unusual.
Then: "Wait."
Then: "Someone has been in my apartment."
I read that message three separate times.
"Are you sure," I sent.
"Nothing appears to be missing. But everything is slightly wrong in a specific way. The books. The position of things on the desk. The board file is still there but the cabinet that holds it was opened."
I did not reply for a moment, just held my phone and thought.
Someone had searched his apartment and had either found nothing useful or had been looking for something specific and chosen not to take it, which was the same information he had given me in a different situation, and it meant the same thing now as it had then.
This was not information gathering anymore.
This was a deliberate message.
He knew. And now we knew he knew. And whoever had searched the apartment, on Edmund's direction or otherwise, had done it in a way that was meant to be found, which meant the purpose was not access.
The purpose was pressure.
"Do not move anything," I sent. "Do not touch the board file. I am coming to you."
His reply came immediately: "No. I will come to you. Give me twenty minutes."
I looked at the photo of the file on my phone. My student ID number, printed cleanly on a tab that someone had prepared before the meeting, which meant it had been labelled in advance, which meant the meeting had a specific agenda and that agenda had my name already on it.
Twenty minutes.
I opened a new page in my notebook and wrote down every question I needed answered before Ryder arrived, listed in order of urgency, and I started working through them.