Chapter 58 A NEW DEAL

Chapter 58 A NEW DEAL
NOVA'S POV

Callum was on the phone when I walked into his office.

He held up one finger without looking away from the window, his free hand flat against the glass, his voice low and clipped in the way it got when he was dealing with something that required patience he didn't naturally have.

I sat down across from his desk and put Jasmine's printed pages on the surface between us and waited.

He wrapped up the call in under two minutes, dropped the phone on his desk and turned around. His eyes went to the pages before they went to my face.

"Jasmine pulled those." I pushed them slightly toward him. "Kane Tower's full corporate structure. Every subsidiary, every holding entity, every shell company sitting underneath the main business." I watched him pick the pages up. "It matches Isabella's ledger exactly. Every layer."

He read through the first page slowly, then the second, his jaw tightening once somewhere in the middle of it.

"She found all of this on her own?" He set the pages flat on the desk without looking up from them.

"She started pulling it the night I told her about the ledger." I crossed my arms. "She worked through it at home. None of it came through company systems."

He looked up at that.

"She was being careful," I said. "She understood what it meant without me having to explain it."

He looked back at the pages for a moment. Then he stacked them neatly and set them to one side and leaned back in his chair, his eyes settling on mine.

"There is a new acquisition deal coming in." He picked up a pen and turned it over with his fingers. "Major one. The other party has a complicated financial structure that needs someone who can read between the lines of what they are presenting." He paused. "I need my best analyst on it from today."

I held his gaze. "Jasmine is the best person on that floor."

He nodded once, already reaching for his phone. "I know."

He dialed someone from the internal directory and told them briefly to reassign Jasmine Wells to the Harrington acquisition effective immediately, full access, reporting directly to him. He hung up before the person on the other end finished saying yes.

I watched him put the phone down.

"She is going to be good at it," I said.

"I know that too." He picked up the printed pages again and looked at the top one. "The ledger cross reference, did you document which entries match which shell company on these pages?"

"Jasmine did. There is a key on the second page, bottom right corner."

He flipped to it without being asked and studied it in silence for a moment.

The office was quiet around us, just the low hum of the building and the afternoon light pressing flat against the glass behind him.

I thought about my mother sitting in that dim room three weeks before she died, looking straight into a camera and talking to a daughter she knew might not hear it for years.

Go finish what I started.

"Callum." I waited until he looked up. "The federal investigator contacted me in the ledger. Elias said the case was transferred but still open."

"I know." He put the pages down. "Elias told me last night. We have a meeting in three days."

"Three days." I pressed my fingers against my bag strap. "And Matthias is pushing harder every time I see him. The questions are getting more specific."

"Which means he is getting nervous." Callum held my gaze steadily. "Nervous people make mistakes."

"Or they stop being careful," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Keep the dinner tomorrow night." He kept his voice even. "Give him nothing specific. Let him think he is still three steps ahead."

"I know how to handle him." I stood up and picked up my bag.

"I know you do." He said it simply, without any of the careful management he sometimes wrapped around things that might land wrong. Just the plain fact of it.

I was at the door when my phone buzzed in my bag.

I pulled it out.

Matthias: Thinking about you. Tomorrow night still works for me if it works for you. I have something I want to talk to you about.

I stood in the doorway and read the message twice.

Something he wanted to talk about.

I looked up and found Callum already watching me from across the desk, his eyes on my face reading whatever was written there.

I turned the phone screen toward him so he could see the message without me having to say it out loud.

He read it. His expression didn't change but his pen stopped moving against the desk surface.

I put the phone back in my bag without responding and looked at him across the office.

"Something he wants to talk about," I said quietly.

Callum set the pen down parallel to the edge of the desk. "Then we make sure we are ready before tomorrow night."

I nodded and walked out.

I got back to my office and sat at my desk and stared at my screen without opening anything on it.

My phone buzzed again in my bag.

I did not reach for it immediately.

I sat there for a moment with my hands flat on the desk and my mother's voice somewhere in the back of my chest and the particular kind of calm that came not from feeling safe but from having already decided you were going to see something through no matter what it cost.

Then I reached into my bag and picked up the phone and typed back to Matthias with completely steady hands.

"Tomorrow night works perfectly. I have been looking forward to it." I hit send and put the phone face down.

Outside my glass office walls the floor hummed with the ordinary noise of a Tuesday afternoon.

Nobody looking in would have seen anything unusual.

That was exactly the point.