Chapter 180: The Audit

A jarring, teeth-grinding crash of clashing steel filled the hall.

Eight fully armored, elite fencers groaned in pain, every one of them struck at a vital point. They collapsed in a scattered heap across the floor.

Noel stood at the edge of the hall, half-kneeling on the ground, and clapped softly.

"Your footwork's getting faster."

The man in the center heard the voice and slowly turned.

He pulled off his black fencing mask, revealing a face identical to Noel's. The same blond hair, the same bone structure—only those eyes ran deeper, colder, carrying the bloody edge of a man forged through countless battles.

"How'd it go?" He tossed his épée to a subordinate beside him and took a towel to wipe the sweat from his brow.

Noel brought his legs together, hands resting on his knees, like a child who'd done something wrong.

"He's strong." Noel gritted his teeth. "A lot stronger than I imagined. I wasn't even in his league. I couldn't so much as touch the hem of his clothes."

The man looked down at his half-kneeling brother, his gaze like a bottomless pool of dead water.

"So. You're just going to accept defeat like this?"

Noel's head snapped up, his fists clenched so tight the knuckles went white.

"No. The men of our bloodline don't know the meaning of surrender."

"Good. That's my little brother." He reached out and clapped a hand on Noel's shoulder, hard. "Remember—as long as there's still breath in your lungs, every defeat is only temporary."

"Our top priority right now is finding that 'thing' the Russian girl has hidden away. Once I have it, every ounce of humiliation you swallowed today, I'll make him pay back a thousand times over."

Noel rose to his feet and moved to stand at his side.

The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, two nearly identical faces looking eerie under the dim lights. Noel touched the front of his fencing jacket where Caesar had sliced it open, his eyes turning venomous.

"Next time, there's no way I'll lose again."

…

Meanwhile, at the Williams Group's Nevada plant.

The plant manager's office was thick with smoke, the rich aroma of a Cuban cigar mingling with the scent of expensive leather.

Thompson lounged back in that oversized leather executive chair, legs crossed and propped arrogantly atop the mahogany desk.

The office door swung open.

His smoking-hot secretary slipped inside. She wore a tight black pencil skirt, the buttons of her silk blouse deliberately undone to the third, the strip of pale, dazzling skin below her collarbone gleaming under the office lights.

"Boss." The secretary swayed her hips as she crossed the room, her voice all sugar. "That bodyguard, Caesar—he's back. He just went up to the president's office."

Thompson took a slow drag off the cigar. The thick smoke drifted lazily out of his nostrils.

"So he's back. What's there to make a fuss about?"

The secretary frowned, leaning in with a trace of worry. "But everything we've been running out of the warehouse—won't that new lady president find out? She brought a whole audit team with her."

Thompson clamped the cigar in the corner of his mouth, then suddenly shot out a thick arm, grabbed the secretary's wrist, and yanked her toward him.

"Ah!"

She yelped, lost her footing, and tumbled straight down onto Thompson's lap. Her pencil skirt rode up a good few inches in the process, exposing full thighs sheathed in black Balenciaga stockings.

Thompson's coarse palm slid up without the slightest hesitation, kneading and stroking freely.

The secretary's eyes went soft and heavy-lidded. She gave a token push against his chest. "You're awful. The door's not even locked."

Thompson burst out laughing, his laughter brimming with untouchable arrogance.

"Every supervisor top to bottom is ours. The books are cleaner than the Bible, and that batch of dirty goods is almost done clearing through the offshore shell company."

"What are you afraid of?" Thompson blew a smoke ring at the ceiling, his eyes contemptuous. "Just relax. Even if the sky comes crashing down, I'll be the one holding it up. That bitch doesn't know the first goddamn thing about an industrial audit!"

The secretary's voice went soft as melting butter, laced with a teasing, coy resistance.

"Then I'm counting on you, Boss."

Thompson licked his slightly dry lips, his hand sliding higher along the inside of her thigh.

"That all depends on how well you perform, baby."

The secretary turned her head aside, dodging the smoke-stinking mouth Thompson leaned in with, murmuring low. "Not here, I don't think… I just got married last month. My husband'll find out."

Instead of stopping at that, Thompson's eyes lit up, blazing with excitement.

"Just got married? Even better. That makes it more fun."

Thompson pressed his palm against the back of her head and shoved it down, roughly.

"Come on, baby. Show me how sincere you are."

…

In the same office building, top floor, the president's office.

Caesar pushed the door open carrying two white takeout boxes stamped with a red pagoda logo.

Elizabeth's massive desk was buried under mountains of financial statements, invoices, and offshore account slips. She was practically drowning in paperwork.

When Caesar came through the door, she didn't even lift her head.

Caesar nudged the door shut with his heel and set the takeout boxes down on the glass coffee table in the sitting area.

At the sound of the boxes touching down, Elizabeth finally looked up.

"You're back?" She reached up to rub her aching neck and roll her stiff shoulders. "I figured you'd want to hang around campus and play with those little college girls a while longer."

Caesar ignored the jab. He opened the boxes, laid out the plastic cutlery, then filled two cups of lukewarm water at the cooler and set them beside the food.

"The school stuff's handled. Come eat first."

Elizabeth's eyes stayed glued to the numbers on her screen. "Five minutes. Let me finish this quarter's balance sheet."

She didn't get another word out.

Caesar had already circled around the desk to stand behind her. He gripped the back of the leather swivel chair with both hands and, without a word, dragged her—chair and all—out from behind the desk.

"The work never ends. But your stomach's going to file a complaint."

Caesar forced a plastic fork into Elizabeth's hand and pointed at the sofa.

"Eat first. That's an order, boss."

Elizabeth knew Caesar's temperament far too well. She knew that if she didn't eat on time, this man would flat-out yank the power cable out of her computer.

She let out a sigh, walked over to the sofa, and sat down, spearing a piece of chicken glazed in thick sauce and putting it in her mouth.

Caesar had brought back American-Chinese takeout this time. The food was still steaming, and the sweet-sour, faintly spicy tang of General Tso's chicken—crispy outside, tender within—burst across her tongue.

Elizabeth really was starving. All she'd had at lunch was a single cup of black coffee, and now the aroma of the food dragged the hunger clawing out of her stomach.

She dropped the ice-queen act and ate bite after bite.

Caesar settled into the single armchair across the coffee table, hands folded over his knees, quietly watching her eat.

Outside the window lay the desolate Nevada night, but inside, there was a rare stillness—a small, quiet peace.

Ten minutes later, Elizabeth set down her fork and elegantly dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

"All right, I'm done. I'm going back to keep working—"

Before she could stand, Caesar's hand was already on her shoulder, pressing her back down onto the sofa.

"You did me a big favor this morning. Pulled all those haute couture gowns for me."

Caesar leaned back leisurely against the sofa, a confident curve tugging at the corner of his mouth. "So as a thank-you, let me handle the next round of work for you."

Elizabeth eyed him skeptically, her gaze openly doubtful and appraising. "You? Help me with the audit?"

Caesar sat up straight, arching a brow in mock indignation.

"What's with that look? You underestimating my intelligence?"

"For a top-tier tactical operative, a solid grasp of advanced mathematics and physics is just the basics, all right?"

Caesar lifted his right hand and made the gesture of a sniper taking aim.

"Otherwise, how do you think I'd calculate wind shear, the Coriolis effect, and bullet drop in my head, in a split second, then put a round through a terrorist's skull from two thousand yards away?"

Caesar rubbed his nose, his eyes turning sharp.

"Now let me show you what a tactical-grade financial audit looks like."

Caesar didn't rush to dig through the stacks of reports. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Elizabeth and asked, "In a heavy-industry plant like this one—handling raw material processing—what's the biggest, most common way the insiders skim money?"

Elizabeth answered without hesitation. "Substituting inferior materials, then buying and reselling the quality raw stock on the side."

Caesar snapped his fingers with a crisp click. "Correct."

"Passing off inferior goods is how they smuggle the good stuff out to sell. But if they're going to buy and resell it, the first thing they have to do is balance the books in the financial system."

Elizabeth nodded, a little irritated.

"I know all of this. I've already cross-checked their invoices and tax records for the last six months. The numbers are flawless—not a single crack. If it were easy to spot the fraud on paper, then that old fox Thompson would be a moron."

Elizabeth's brow furrowed tight. Nobody understood the inefficiency of this traditional reconciliation method better than she did. Faced with a mountain of meticulously forged paperwork, verifying it entry by entry was like searching for a needle in the ocean—and time was the one thing they were most short on.

Caesar watched her frustrated expression and suddenly smiled.

"Elizabeth."

Caesar picked up a pen from the table and spun it nimbly across his fingers.

"You're a Wall Street elite, but you lean too hard on paper data. You can step outside the fixed financial mindset and think about this through the lens of criminal psychology."

Elizabeth lifted her head. "What do you mean?"

Caesar raised one finger, his voice low and certain.

"Whether it's swapping in inferior materials or buying and reselling on the side—at the end of the day, they're all doing it to turn physical goods into cash."

"And when you're talking about hundreds of tons of metal raw material, there's no way they're carrying that out in a briefcase. They have to use heavy trucks to haul it off the plant grounds."

A hunter's gleam flickered in Caesar's eyes.

"The financial ledgers might be doctored to perfection. But the freight logs and shipping manifests? Those never lie."

Understanding flooded through Elizabeth in an instant, and her eyes lit up.