Chapter 4

But things didn't go that smoothly.

When we got to the security monitoring room, the guard on duty looked uncomfortable.

"The temporary camera in the twenty-first-floor office area broke today. We only reported it for repair this afternoon."

My heart sank all the way down.

That was way too convenient.

Sloane's face darkened. "What about the one by the elevators?"

"That one works, but it can't see the desks."

She had the guard pull up the elevator footage for that time window first.

On screen, at 5:37 p.m. yesterday, I left my desk and headed for the print room.

At 5:39, Derek appeared in the hallway, just as we'd suspected.

He glanced left and right, walked over to my desk, and stood there for a dozen seconds or so.

Because of the angle, the camera only caught half his back. We couldn't see what his hands were doing.

At 5:40, he turned and left.

It wasn't enough evidence.

But it was already enough to raise suspicion.

I stared at the screen, my jaw clenched tight. "It was him."

Sloane didn't respond.

She was watching more closely than I was.

Once she'd finished with the footage, she took me straight to IT.

It was past eleven at night, and she hauled the on-call engineer up out of his chair.

"Pull the remote logins and local activity logs on Ethan's email."

The engineer didn't dare drag his feet and quickly booted up.

For the ten-plus minutes we waited for the data to come through, I sat off to the side, my heart pounding so hard it hurt.

Sloane stood by the window taking a call.

I heard her talking to my mom.

"Ms. Langley, please don't report the results up the chain tonight."

"Give me twelve hours."

"If we can't figure this out, we'll withdraw from the project ourselves."

I froze.

To protect the project, she was even prepared to pull out of the deal.

And yet she was still investigating.

She hadn't just thrown me under the bus.

When she hung up, she turned to look at me.

"Scared?"

I gave a bitter smile. "Yeah."

"Scared of losing your job, or scared I'll misjudge you?"

I hesitated for two seconds, and the truth slipped out. "The second one."

She looked at me and said nothing.

The night outside the window was reflected in her eyes, as if something were being held down there.

After a long moment, she finally looked away. "Let's deal with what's in front of us first."

Just then, the engineer looked up.

"Ms. Mercer, I found it."

I shot to my feet.

The engineer pointed at the screen. "The email sent from Ethan's account at 6:14 yesterday really did go out over the company intranet. It wasn't sent from a phone. It came from a computer."

"But right before it was sent, there was a password reset."

My scalp prickled. "A password reset?"

"Right. Someone used the company's internal admin system to request a temporary login code for him. The approver was..."

The engineer trailed off.

"You'd better see for yourselves."

Sloane and I looked over at the same time.

The name on the screen was clear as day.

Derek.

But before I could breathe easy, the engineer frowned again. "Wait, there's something else here."

"Derek submitted the reset request, but the final approval didn't come from the system automatically. Mr. Hale's assistant approved it on his behalf."

"And before the attachment was uploaded, someone pulled an old template version from the shared drive."

My stomach dropped.

This was bigger than I'd thought.

This wasn't just Derek framing me on a whim, all by himself.

Someone else was behind it.

Sloane stared at the screen, her expression growing colder by the second.

She picked up her phone and placed a call.

The moment it connected, she said just one thing.

"Ms. Langley, could you please come to our office tomorrow at ten a.m. and bring your legal team?"

"This may be about more than a pricing error."

She hung up and turned to me.

"Ethan."

"From now on, you stay with me. Don't go off on your own."

Before I could ask why, my phone buzzed.

It was a message from Tessa.

"Ethan, check the company Slack channel, now."

I opened it.

Someone had anonymously posted a photo in the channel.

It was from the private room tonight: my mom piling food onto my plate.

The caption was a single line.

"No wonder he got to lead the team on a major deal. Turns out his family's money bought him the seat."

The replies had already exploded.

Some were snide, some feigned surprise, and some came right out and said no wonder Ms. Mercer had only brought Ethan this time.

The color drained from my face.

They weren't just out to destroy me.

They were after Sloane, too.