Page 3 of You, Only You

I turned. He hadn't moved from behind his desk, but his eyes stared with that same unsettling intensity.

"Your father's case. The forensic accountant who found the discrepancies in his books, Marcus Webb." A pause. "He missed the secondary shell company for three years. The one that would have exposed the fraud eighteen months earlier, before half the damage was done."

My stomach dropped. How did he know that? The Webb detail wasn't public knowledge. I'd found it buried in case files during my own obsessive review of my father's prosecution, years after the fact. Cross-referencing filings at three in the morning because that was what I did when I couldn't sleep, which was most of the time.

"Interesting," Will continued, his tone almost casual, "that you ended up in the same field. Following the same money. I wonder if you're trying to be better than the man who caught your father or the man who was your father."

I couldn't breathe. Not because the question was cruel, though it was. Because it was precise. Surgically precise, like he'd opened a locked drawer in my head and read what was inside.

"Maybe both," I heard myself say. My voice came from somewhere far away. "I guess we'll find out."

Something flickered in those ice-blue eyes, that spark of interest again, brighter now. Almost warm.

"I suppose we will."

I left before he could see how badly my hands were shaking.

Diane materialized in the hallway, her smile professionally pleasant, and led me to Conference Room B. It was all glass walls and a stunning view I couldn't appreciate. The moment thedoor clicked shut behind her, I sank into the nearest chair and pressed my palms flat against the cool table surface.

Breathe. Just breathe.

I told myself the tremor in my fingers was adrenaline. Professional tension. The natural aftermath of a hostile confrontation. My mind kept circling back, not to his words about my father, though that wound throbbed, but to the way he'd looked at me when I'd pushed back about the Henderson file. Like I'd done something unexpected. Like I'd become a different kind of problem than the one he'd prepared for.

Ten years I'd spent being invisible on purpose. The neutral vessel for facts. I moved through investigations noticed only for my findings, never for myself. That was the design. Ghosts were safe.

But Will Steele had looked at me like I was the opposite of invisible. And some small, reckless part of me, a part I planned to have a stern conversation with later, had responded to that.

I shook my head sharply and pulled my tablet from my bag. I had a job to do. Evidence to examine. A firm to audit.

As I opened the first file, I found myself staring at the glass wall, at my own reflection ghosted against the city skyline. I stared at it without seeing a single number.

He knew things about my father's case that he shouldn't know. He'd knocked me sideways in minutes. And when I'd pushed back, he hadn't been angry.

He'd been intrigued.

The question that kept me up that night wasn't whether Will Steele was the monster everyone believed him to be.

It was why he'd let me see, even for a moment, that he might be something far more complicated. And what he expected me to do about it.

2.Will

Itold myself I watched her because she was a threat. The door clicked shut behind her, and I caught myself still staring at it. Pathetic. I turned back to my desk, to the city sprawled beyond my window, and forced my hands to unclench.

Most auditors came armed with checklists and nervousness. They wanted to find enough to justify their billable hours, but not enough to create actual problems. They were bureaucrats conducting an investigation. Lindsey Ashford had walked into my office with the precision of a surgeon approaching an operating table.

I pulled up her file again, scrolling past the professional credentials to the personal history. Thomas Ashford. Twelve million dollars. Forty-three families. I expected that would shatter her confidence.

"Miscalculation," I muttered to the empty room.

She hadn't broken apart. She'd absorbed the blow and redirected it back at me with a precision that left marks.I became this to expose people like him. And people like you, if necessary.Not defensive. Not apologetic. A promise.

I spent the next two hours building contingencies. Every case file she might request, every internal memo that could raisequestions, every client interaction that existed in the moral gray zones where I operated. My system was meticulous, I'd designed it to withstand scrutiny, but no system was perfect. Especially not when the person examining it had grown up watching her father's empire of lies collapse around her.

She would know what to look for. The subtle irregularities. The patterns that didn't quite add up. The ghost in the machine.

"Diane," I said into the intercom, "pull the Henderson files. And the Whitfield settlement documentation."

"The auditor already requested those, Mr. Steele." A pause. "She's very thorough."