Chapter 37 Evidence Tampered
Eli’s POV
By the time I saw the email from compliance, my stomach was already in a knot from a night of replaying that rooftop kiss and the tiny blink of red light in the sky I had been too slow to notice.
Subject line: Anonymous tip, urgent review.
The Ward conference room felt colder than usual. Daniels sat at the end of the table with his thin folders and thinner patience. The external advisor, the former Bureau guy, was there again. Lucas stood by the screen, arms folded, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else.
Daniels did not bother with small talk. He tapped his tablet and a shaky video filled the display.
“This was submitted from an encrypted account about an hour ago,” he said. “We need your comment.”
Grainy hallway footage. Mercer’s sixth floor. A few weeks back. I knew it in a glance, because that had been the day an alarm had screamed and the elevator had tried to shut on Sloane.
There she was on screen, walking toward the glass doors, phone in hand. Off camera the alarm must have gone off, because I saw her jolt, head turning. Then the clip jumped, the focus tightening, as if whoever had shot this was zooming in with shaking hands.
In that close frame, it looked like I grabbed her arm out of nowhere.
The audio was garbage. Tinny, warped, like it had been dragged through three dirty filters. Her startled gasp from that day had been spliced so it came half a second later, louder, sharp in a way that made it sound like protest.
To anyone who had not been there, it would look like I had pulled my client against a wall for no good reason and she had said no.
My pulse slammed. “You know exactly what that is,” I said, hearing the edge in my own voice. “Fire doors were sealing. I pulled her out of the line so the mechanism did not take her shoulder off. She did not say stop. She said, What now.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. “This is obvious manipulation.”
Daniels did not blink. “The public will not have context if this leaks, Mr Ward. They will see a man with authority putting hands on his boss when she is startled.”
He clicked to the next clip before I could answer.
This time it was the all hands incident. Smoke in the corridor, that canister on the floor, masked men. Only in this edit, the attacker was blurred to anonymity. The angle had been tightened, cropped until all you could really see was my body pinning a smaller body to the ground near the stage steps. No stage, no screaming staff, just weight and restraint.
The audio had been cut so only my grunt and her sharp intake of breath made it through. No alarm in the background. No Mila shouting in her ear. It looked like a man pinning a woman. That was it.
Rage crawled up my spine, hot and choking. “She was under attack,” I said. “I was pulling her away from a hand holding a knife at her ribs. This is a splice job. You can hear it in the audio.”
Lucas finally spoke, voice low. “I believe you,” he said. “We all know what actually happened that day. But Daniels is right about one thing. If this hits public feeds first, people will not slow down for nuance.”
Daniels tapped his pen. “Could Ms Mercer feel pressured to defend you,” he asked. “If this becomes public and the relationship between you is exposed fully, do you think she will feel truly free to say what she experienced?”
It hit like a punch I had not braced for. Not the question about optics. The suggestion that she might one day stand in front of a camera and say she did not know if she had consented. That my hands in any context might be turned into a weapon in a story she did not write.
“Do you hear yourself,” I asked, voice rough. “You are asking me if the woman whose entire personality is built on telling powerful men where to shove it will suddenly become too scared to speak because of me.”
The former Bureau guy shifted. “We are asking,” he said carefully, “whether a woman under that level of pressure can separate her feelings for you from what is best for her company and herself. You know as well as I do that in court, these questions will be asked.”
I wanted to flip the table. Instead I let the rage sit heaving in my chest and swallowed it down.
“They are trying to recast my devotion as predation,” I said. “And use your fear to help them.”
Afterward, when I stepped out into the hall, the building felt foreign. My own house looking at me like I was a stranger.
I did not think. I just drove.
Security barely had time to blink before I swiped into Mercer and took the elevator straight to her floor. Jace rose from the chair outside her office when he saw me, mouth flattening.
“She is in a call,” he started.
“It will wait,” I said, opening the door.
Sloane sat at her desk, video muted on her laptop, expression tight. She went pale the second she saw my face.
“What happened,” she asked.
I did not answer. I set my own laptop on her desk and hit play.
She watched in eerie silence. The hallway scene. The warped gasp. The cropped tackle. Her own body turned into a prop.
Her fingers curled slowly on the desk. I watched color drain from her cheeks, then flood back hot.
“They are trying to turn you into a weapon against me,” she said, voice shaking with fury. “If they can paint you as some kind of predator, then anything I say in your defense becomes suspect.”
I exhaled, shoulders dropping. “If I go dark,” I said quietly, “if I step back even more, they lose their favorite toy. No more clips. No more chances to twist anything I do near you.”
Her head snapped up. “You are not a toy,” she said. Every word came out like glass. “And I am not letting them decide who I trust because they are good at editing video.”
“Sloane …”
She pushed back from the desk, came around to me so quickly I barely had time to stand. Her hand came up, thumb brushing along my jaw where tension had locked it.
“If they want to accuse me of loving the wrong person,” she said, eyes blazing into mine, “they can do it to my face. Not through anonymous edits and poison tips.”
The word loving hit something deep. I froze.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Mila.
Source of these files is a Mercer internal, her text read. Privileged security footage account. Under Oversight scope.
Under Mariah’s scope.
I turned the screen so Sloane could see. Her pupils blew wide, then narrowed.
Of course it was not enough that Mariah had invited Noah’s people into our systems. Now the pool she managed was being used to poison the evidence itself.
“If we do not get ahead of this,” I said, throat tight, “they can paint me as an abuser and you as either the victim who will not admit it or the accomplice covering it up.”
She looked at the clips again, then at the message, and I saw something very cold settle behind her eyes.
“Then we go after the person holding the scissors,” she said. “Before she gets to finish cutting our story.”