Chapter 57 A TASTE OF FRESH AIR

Chapter 57 A TASTE OF FRESH AIR
NOVA'S POV

Matthias's text was still sitting on my phone screen when Jasmine walked into my office the next morning.

She came in the way she always did, backwards through the door, kicking it shut behind her with her heel, both hands wrapped around two coffee cups.

She set one on my desk and dropped into the chair across from me and looked at my face and whatever she saw there made her put her own cup down slowly.

"What happened?" She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of my desk.

"A lot." I wrapped both hands around the warm cup. "I don't know where to start."

"Start anywhere." She settled back in the chair and crossed her legs, giving me the same space she always gave me when she could tell I needed to find my own way into something.

I looked at her sitting across from me. Jasmine who had brought me chocolate and croissants on my first day back.

Who had held my hand across this desk when I told her about my wrist.

Who had found Konstantin Voss's name in a business journal and brought it to me without even fully understanding what she had found.

"My mother knew Matthias before any of this," I said, watching her face. "Before Richard, before Blackthorn Estate, before everything. He recruited her into Castellano's organization years ago. He trained her personally."

Jasmine's hands stilled around her coffee cup.

"She left and spent years documenting everything she had seen inside that organization." I turned my own cup slowly on the desk. "She was six weeks away from handing it all over to a federal investigator when she died."

"Nova." Jasmine set her cup down carefully on the edge of my desk, her eyes not moving from my face. "When you say Matthias recruited her."

"Konstantin Voss recruited her." I held her gaze. "Matthias Hale and Konstantin Voss are the same person."

Jasmine sat very still for a moment.

Then she picked her cup back up, took a long slow sip, and put it back down again. The deliberateness of it told me she was doing it to give herself something to do while she processed what I had just said.

"The name I found in that journal article," she said quietly.

"Yes."

"Is connected to Kane Tower."

"Yes."

She pressed her lips together and looked at the desk between us for a moment. Then she looked back up at me. "How long have you known?"

"A few days." I pulled my phone out and turned it face up on the desk between us, Matthias's unanswered text still sitting on the screen. "He wants to meet tonight anyways."

Jasmine looked at the message. Then she looked at me. "Are you going?"

"Yes." I picked the phone back up. "I have to keep things normal until we are ready to move."

"We." She caught the word and held onto it. "You and the brothers."

"Yes."

She nodded slowly, turning her cup in her hands. The office was quiet around us, just the low hum of the building settling into the morning and the distant sound of the floor filling up outside the glass walls.

"Be careful with him." She leaned forward again, dropping her voice even though we were alone. "Not because I think you can't handle it. Because he has been doing this longer than any of us have been paying attention."

"I know." I slid the phone into my bag. "I have my mother's documentation to remind me exactly how long."

She held my gaze for a moment. Then she picked up her cup and sat back and the conversation shifted the way it did between us when the heavy part was done and the practical part needed to start.

"I pulled everything I could find on the Kane Tower corporate structure last night." She reached into the folder she had dropped on my desk when she came in, sliding two printed pages toward me. "Shell companies, subsidiary structures, holding entities. Some of it matches what you described from the ledger."

I picked up the pages and looked at them.

The structure was exactly what my mother had documented. The same company names running down the left column, the same layered subsidiary system designed to make money disappear between one entity and the next.

"She documented all of this." I set the pages flat on the desk. "Every layer of it."

"Then between what she built and what I pulled last night, you have the whole picture." Jasmine tapped the pages once with her finger. "That is not nothing, Nova. That is everything."

The office door opened behind her and we both looked up.

Callum stood in the doorway in a dark suit, one hand on the frame. His eyes moved from me to Jasmine and back to me, taking in the printed pages on the desk and the two coffee cups and whatever was written across both our faces.

"Sorry to interrupt." He kept his voice even, his eyes settling briefly on Jasmine with something in them that wasn't quite the same look he gave everyone else who worked on this floor. "Nova, when you are less busy can you come to my office?"

"I'll come now." I stood up, pushing my chair back.

"Finish your coffee." He dropped his hand from the frame, his gaze moving to Jasmine one more time before he stepped back from the doorway. "I will give you five minutes."

He walked back toward his office without waiting for an answer.

Jasmine watched the empty doorway for a moment after he left.

Then she turned back to me with both eyebrows slightly raised and the particular expression she wore when she was choosing very carefully whether to say something.

"What?" I reached for my cup.

"Nothing." She picked up her own cup and looked into it. "He just looked at me."

"He looks at everyone."

"Not like that." She took a sip, still looking into the cup. "Not the way he just looked at me."

I watched her face for a moment. The small thing she was trying not to make into a big thing sitting right there at the surface of her expression.

"Jasmine." I waited until she looked up. "He is not as cold as he looks."

She held my gaze for a long moment.

Then she stood up and picked up her folder and tucked it under her arm and walked to the door. She stopped with her hand on the handle and looked back at me over her shoulder.

"Keep yourself safe tonight." She pushed the door open. "And Nova? Finish what your mother started."

She walked out and I sat there for a moment with the printed pages and the cold coffee and the text from Matthias sitting in my bag.

Then I picked up the pages, folded them carefully, and went to find Callum.