Chapter 64 WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE MESSAGE?

Chapter 64 WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE MESSAGE?
NOVA'S POV

Callum was at his desk when I walked into his office.

He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and three different documents spread across the surface in front of him, the kind of spread that meant he had been switching between all of them without finishing any of them.

He looked up when I came in and something in his face settled slightly, the way it did when he had been waiting without wanting to show it.

Jasmine was at the small table along the wall of his office with her laptop open and the Harrington acquisition files stacked beside her, a pen tucked behind her ear and her shoes off under the chair. She glanced up when I entered and gave me a small nod before going back to whatever she was cross referencing on her screen.

"Close the door," Callum said, looking back at his documents.

I closed it and walked to his desk and put my phone face up on top of the papers in front of him without saying anything.

Castellano's message was open on the screen.

He looked down at it.

I watched his face while he read it. The way his eyes moved across the words twice, slowly the second time. The way his hand that had been reaching for his pen stopped moving halfway there and stayed suspended for a moment before he set it down flat on the desk instead.

He read it a third time.

Then he sat back in his chair and looked up at me and his expression was doing several things at once that he was working very hard to keep separate from each other.

Behind me I heard Jasmine's typing stop.

"When did this come in?" Callum kept his voice completely level.

"While I was standing outside the coffee place after I left Matthias." I pulled the chair across from his desk and sat down. "No warning. Just his name and that message."

Callum looked at the phone for another moment. Then he picked it up and stood and walked around his desk to where Jasmine was sitting and held the screen toward her without explaining what it was.

She read it.

Her pen came out from behind her ear and she turned it over in her fingers slowly, her eyes still on the screen. "He signed it himself."

"Yes." Callum put the phone down on the table beside her laptop.

"Which means he wants her to know he is real." She looked up at Callum, her eyes sharp and clear. "Not a threat passed through someone else. Him directly. He is making himself a person to her instead of just a name."

Callum looked at her for a moment with something moving in his expression that he didn't examine out loud.

"That is exactly what he is doing," he said.

Jasmine held his gaze for just a beat longer than necessary before she looked back at her screen and picked up her pen again. "The Harrington subsidiary pattern I found this afternoon connects to two of the same shell entities in the Kane Tower structure." She tapped her pen against the page beside her laptop. "Which means Harrington is not just a deal. Castellano has money sitting inside it."

Callum turned to look at me.

I had already worked it out. "He is using the acquisition to get someone inside the building legitimately."

"If the deal closes, Harrington's finance team gets access to our systems for integration purposes." Callum walked back around his desk and stood behind it with both hands flat on the surface. "Standard procedure. Nobody questions it."

"So we don't close the deal." I looked at him.

"We haven't closed it yet." He picked up the top document from his spread and looked at it. "We let it run long enough that pulling back feels like a business decision rather than something we know." He set the document down. "Jasmine, how long can you stretch the due diligence process before it looks unusual?"

Jasmine pulled a file toward her without looking up. "Three weeks if I find enough to query. Four if the queries generate counter documentation that needs reviewing." She glanced up briefly. "I can find enough to query."

The corner of Callum's mouth moved slightly. Not quite a smile. Something smaller and more genuine than a smile.

"Find enough to query," he said.

She was already typing.

I sat across from Callum's desk and watched him look at Jasmine for just a moment longer than the instruction required, his expression doing that thing it did when he was noticing something he hadn't made room for yet.

Then he looked back at me.

"Reeves needs to know about Castellano's message today," he said. "And Elias needs to be here for that call."

"Elias is downstairs." I picked my phone up from the table beside Jasmine. "I'll get him."

I stood and walked to the door and had my hand on the handle when Jasmine's voice came from behind me, directed at her screen, quiet enough that it could have been to herself.

"Your mother made contact with the investigator six weeks before she died." She kept typing without looking up. "She didn't run. She moved toward it."

I stood at the door with my hand on the handle.

"I know," I said.

"Just making sure you remembered that part." She turned a page beside her laptop and kept working.

I looked at the back of her head for a moment. Then I looked at Callum standing behind his desk watching me with that open expression he rarely let anyone see.

I opened the door and went to find Elias.