Chapter 65 THE CALL

Chapter 65 THE CALL
ELIAS POV

Reeves picked up on the first ring.

Callum had his phone on speaker in the middle of his desk and the three of us were spread around the office in that unplanned way that happened when nobody had quite settled into the reality of what they were doing yet.

Nova was in the chair across from Callum with her bag still on her shoulder.

Callum was standing behind his desk rather than sitting in it, his arms crossed, his eyes moving between the phone and Nova's face. I was near the window watching both of them.

"Read it to me exactly as it came in," Reeves said.

Nova read the message out word for word, her voice steady all the way through it.

The silence that followed on Reeves's end was long enough that Callum uncrossed his arms and leaned forward slightly toward the phone.

"He signed it with his own name," Reeves said finally, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone processing something carefully before they responded to it. "Which tells me Hale has run out of road with him and Castellano has decided to step in front of it himself."

"That was my reading as well," Callum said.

"Miss Sinclair." Reeves shifted on his end, the background sound changing slightly. "Before you thought about what it meant, before any of that, what was your first reaction when you read it?"

Nova looked at the phone sitting on the desk between us. "That he has been wanting to do this for a long time. That it felt less like a threat and more like someone who has been waiting to introduce himself."

"Which is exactly what it is." Reeves's chair creaked on his end. "He is making himself real to you. Stepping out from behind Hale and the lawyers and the shell companies and standing in front of you as a person." A brief pause where we could hear him thinking. "Do not respond to that message tonight. Let it sit until morning and then send him something short that tells him you received it and you are considering what he said without giving him anything more than that."

"How short?" Nova asked.

"Three sentences at most. Enough that he knows you are not running scared but not so much that he thinks he has you." Reeves's voice was measured. "Can you do that without feeling forced when you write it?"

Nova looked at Callum across the desk. Something passed between them that didn't need words.

"She can do it," Callum said.

"Good." More movement on Reeves's end, papers or files shifting around.

"Now. The prosecution timeline is sitting at two weeks minimum before we can bring what we have to the federal prosecutor. That means two weeks of everything looking exactly as it does right now from Castellano's side. No sudden changes. No disappearing acts. No moves that tell him something has shifted." He stopped. "Is that manageable from where you are standing?"

"We started controlling what reaches Park's access level today," Callum said. "He is still passing information but nothing that damages us."

"Keep a small amount of real information moving through him," Reeves said immediately.

His voice dropped slightly on that last part, more serious than it had been. "The moment Park panics we lose our cleanest thread into Castellano's current operation."

"Understood," Callum said.
“Goodnight to all three of you." He faded goodbye and the call ended.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

The office sat around us in that particular evening quiet that came when a floor emptied out and left only the hum of the building and the orange city light coming up through the windows behind Callum.

Nova was looking at her phone in her lap, her thumb pressed flat against the dark screen.

Callum moved around the front of his desk and leaned against it with his arms crossed, closer to her than he usually stood, and looked at the side of her face without saying anything immediately.

"Two weeks is not that long," he said finally, his voice coming out slightly rougher than his usual register, like the control had worn thin somewhere in the last hour without him noticing.

"Two weeks is fourteen days of sitting across tables from him and smiling." Nova looked up at Callum, her eyes direct. "I can do it. I just needed to say out loud what it actually is."

Callum looked at her for a long moment. "Then say it whenever you need to."

She held his gaze and something moved across her face briefly before she stood up and swung her bag properly onto her shoulder and looked at both of us.

"Go home at a reasonable hour, both of you." She picked up her phone from the chair. "Especially you." She looked at Callum. "You have been here since seven this morning and you look like it."

Callum opened his mouth.

"The documents will still need you tomorrow," she said, cutting him off before he could use them as a reason. "Go home."

She walked out and the door swung closed behind her and the office felt immediately different with her gone, quieter in a way that had nothing to do with sound.

Callum looked at the closed door for a moment.

Then he walked back around his desk and sat down and pulled the Harrington file toward him.

I looked at the back of his head bent over the desk. "She just told you to go home."

"Jasmine found three unregistered subsidiaries in the Harrington disclosure that need a formal response before nine o'clock tomorrow." He turned a page without looking up.

I grabbed my jacket from the chair back and headed for the door.

"Then at least eat something," I said. "There is nothing in that file that gets clearer on an empty stomach."

He didn't answer which meant he had already forgotten I was in the room.

I walked out and down the corridor to the elevator and pressed the button and stood waiting with my jacket over my arm.

The doors opened and Jasmine was inside, her laptop bag on one shoulder and the Harrington files stacked under her other arm, a highlighter tucked behind her ear that she clearly hadn't noticed was still there.

She looked up when the doors opened and stepped back to make room. "Mr Blackthorn."

I got in and the doors closed. "Elias is fine."

She shifted the files under her arm and kept her eyes on the floor numbers above the doors.

"He is still up there," I said, meaning Callum.

"I know." She repositioned the files. "I offered to take the subsidiary response home and have a draft on his desk before eight tomorrow but he said he would handle it himself."

She glanced sideways at me briefly. "He says that and then he is still here at midnight and the draft is on my desk instead."

"That sounds exactly right," I said.

"Goodnight Mr Blackthorn," she said, warm and genuine.

She turned back around and walked toward the car park and I watched her go for just a moment before I turned and went to find my car.