Chapter 61 JASMINE KNEW

Chapter 61 JASMINE KNEW
NOVA'S POV

We drove back to Blackthorn Industries without talking.

Callum had both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and the particular stillness about him meant he was working through something he hadn't finished working through yet. Elias sat beside me in the back, his knee pressed against mine, looking out the window at the city moving past.

I had the communication pattern summary in my bag and the name nobody had said out loud sitting behind my teeth the whole ride.

We split up in the parking garage without discussion. Callum went straight to his office. Elias went to make calls from the conference room. I went to mine and sat down and opened my laptop and stared at the screen.

Department head level or above. Or someone with a direct line to that level.

I pulled up the internal directory and looked at it for a long moment.

Then I closed it and picked up my phone and called Jasmine.

She answered on the second ring. "Hey, I was just about to come find you. The Harrington deal research is pulling some interesting threads and I think Callum needs to see the—"

"Can you come to my office?" I kept my voice normal and easy. "Bring whatever you have on Harrington. We can go through it together."

"Give me five minutes." She hung up.

I put my phone down and sat with my hands flat on the desk.

Jasmine had been on this floor since before I arrived. She had access to acquisition files, financial projections, and internal communications. She had been the one who pulled Kane Tower's corporate structure independently, which meant she knew how to find things that weren't easy to find.

Which could mean she was exactly the loyal, brilliant person I believed her to be.

Or it could mean something else entirely.

I hated that the thought existed in my head at all.

She came through my office door four minutes later, a folder under one arm, her coffee in her free hand, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail that bounced slightly when she walked. She dropped the folder on my desk and sat down and pushed it toward me.

"Page three is the one that matters." She leaned forward, tapping the folder. "The Harrington financial disclosure shows a clean balance sheet but their subsidiary structure has three entities that don't appear in any public filing. Which means either their lawyers are sloppy or they are hiding something underneath the surface."

I opened the folder to page three and looked at it.

She was right. Three subsidiary names with no corresponding registration numbers, no filing dates, nothing that connected them to any public record.

"How did you find these?" I kept my voice casual.

"Cross referenced their disclosed entities against the federal business registry." She sat back and wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. "It took about two hours. It is the same method I used for the Kane Tower structure." She paused. "Actually it is the same method your mother used in her ledger. I noticed that when I was going through the pages you showed me."

I looked up from the folder.

Jasmine was looking back at me with an open expression, her coffee cup at her lips, completely at ease.

"You studied her method," I said carefully.

"It is a good method." She took a sip. "Clean and replicable. She knew what she was doing."

I looked at her face for a long moment.

The thing about Jasmine was that she had never once been anything other than exactly what she appeared to be. From the first morning she had shown up backwards through my door with two coffees and genuine warmth. She had not asked for anything in return, had not pushed me toward anything, had simply been present every time something hard happened.

The name behind my teeth felt wrong in a way I needed to trust.

"Jasmine." I closed the folder and looked at her directly. "How long have you known about the irregularities in the Kane Tower structure? Before I mentioned it to you."

She set her coffee cup down on the edge of my desk slowly.

"About four months." She held my gaze without flinching. "I noticed it while I was working on a separate competitive analysis. The shell company patterns looked familiar from a financial crime case study I did in my postgraduate year." She paused. "I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know who to tell or whether I was reading it correctly." She looked at me steadily. "And then you arrived and started asking questions and I realized I wasn't reading it wrong at all."

The office was quiet around us.

"Why didn't you go to Callum?" I asked.

Something moved across her face briefly. "Because I didn't know if I could trust the information staying inside this building." She picked her coffee back up. "I still don't know who inside this company has been passing things to Castellano's people."

I looked at her.

She looked back at me.

"Neither do I," I said quietly. "Not yet."

She nodded once and stood up and picked up her folder from my desk. She was at the door when she stopped and looked back at me over her shoulder.

"Nova." She kept her voice low. "Whatever you find, whatever name comes up when you look at that pattern properly." She held my gaze. "Be careful how you move with it. Some people have more to lose than you realize."

She walked out before I could ask her what she meant.

I sat at my desk for a long moment.

Then I picked up my phone and typed a message to both brothers. We need to talk tonight. All three of us. Not at the office.

Callum responded in under a minute. Estate. Nine o'clock.

Elias's response came right after. I'll be there.

I put the phone down and looked at the empty doorway Jasmine had just walked through.

She knew something she hadn't told me yet.

And whatever it was, it was sitting behind her eyes the same way the name was still sitting behind mine.