Page 48 of Hostile

WYATT: PRESENT

I’d been watching Blair’s numbers for three months.

Not because I’d suspected anything specific at first—more because taking over the company had required me to understand every corner of it, and Blair’s consulting arrangements were the one corner that had never been properly explained to me. My father had waved it off when I’d asked, the year before he handed over the reins. Blair is an asset to this company. The arrangements are appropriate. Said in the tone that meant the conversation was finished, which was a tone I’d spent my entire childhood learning to recognize and my entire adulthood learning to push past.

I’d let it go then. I had enough to manage without pulling on threads that might unravel things I wasn’t ready to deal with.

Then Megan Hale walked into my boardroom, and I’d started looking at everything differently.

Not because of the acquisition, or not only because of it. Because the morning her name appeared in that trading report, I’d sat at my grandfather’s desk and thought about the beach house. About the weekend that had started everything and ended it in the same forty-eight hours. About Blair showing up unannounced Friday night with that look on her face—the one I recognized as calculation, wearing the mask of concern. About the conversation she’d pulled me into while Megan was settling in upstairs, the things she’d said, the logic she’d laid out in that cold, methodical way of hers.

She’s not right for you. You know it. The family won’t accept it. Let me handle it, Wyatt. I’ll make sure she doesn’t get hurt.

I’d said no. I’d said it clearly. I’d gone back to Megan and told her everything was fine because at the time I’d believed it was—believed that Blair’s logic had hit the wall of my refusal and stopped there, as it was supposed to.

I’d been wrong about that. I’d understood how wrong on a Monday morning in a Cambridge hallway, watching Megan’s face go through stages I couldn’t undo, holding four words in my mouth that I’d said because Blair was six feet away and I was nineteen years old and I hadn’t yet understood what my sister was fully capable of.

Three months spent reviewing her financial arrangements had told me more than I’d wanted to know.

“Close the door,” I said when Marcus appeared in my doorway.

He did. Sat down across from my desk with his usual stillness and waited.

I turned my monitor toward him. “Walk me through what you see.”

He leaned forward. He studied the screen for a long moment, with the focused attention of a man who had spent thirty years reading financial documents and knew how to find what wasn’t meant to be found. I watched his expression—steady, then careful, then a stillness that signaled he’d arrived somewhere significant.

“BCA Advisory Group,” he said quietly.

“Three subsidiaries. Fourteen million dollars over four years. Consulting fees with no deliverables I can identify in any of the operational records.” I pulled up the second screen. “And that’s the clean layer. Below it⁠—”

“A transfer.” Marcus leaned closer. “2013.”

“Forty thousand dollars. Routed through a second vehicle to a personal account.” I’d pulled the name for that account two days ago and sat with it for a long time before I was ready to say it out loud. “Billy Brown.”

The office was very quiet.

Marcus sat back slowly. “Wyatt.”

“I know.”

“If Blair paid him⁠—”

“I know what it means.” I turned the monitor back toward me and stared at the numbers as I’d been looking at them for three months—searching for an alternative explanation, a legitimate reason, any version of this that didn’t mean what it meant. I hadn’t found one. “I need to know everything. Every transfer, every entity, every account she’s touched, going back to 2012. I need it documented, sourced, and airtight.”

“That’s going to take time.”

“I know. Start tonight.”

Marcus nodded slowly. “And Blair?”

I looked out the window at the park. The afternoon light was doing its amber thing this time of year, turning the city briefly, improbably soft. My grandfather had loved this view. My father had barely noticed it. I’d been trying to decide which of them I was more like since I was old enough to understand the question.

“Nothing yet,” I said. “Not until I have everything.”

“And Megan Hale?”

I was quiet for a moment.