Chapter 9 - The CFO’s Password
Marcus denied everything.
“I was asleep.”
Lucas threw the access report onto the desk.
“Your credentials.”
“Then they were compromised.”
“MFA?”
Marcus hesitated.
The login required a physical authentication token.
Lucas stared.
“Where’s your token?”
Marcus checked his bag.
Not there.
His face changed.
“I keep it in my desk.”
Security searched.
Gone.
Camera logs showed Bianca entering Marcus’s office at 11:48 p.m. the previous evening.
She remained twelve minutes.
Bianca did not deny entering.
“I needed the Bellweather file.”
“Why?”
“My attorney requested it.”
“Why didn’t you ask Marcus?”
“He wasn’t there.”
Lucas leaned forward.
“Did you take his token?”
“No.”
“Did you access Isabella’s server?”
“No.”
“Did you attempt to delete files?”
“No.”
Security searched Bianca’s office.
No token.
Then they searched a backstage production room she used privately during shows.
Marcus’s token sat inside a cosmetics case.
Bianca stared at it.
“I didn’t put that there.”
Lucas almost laughed.
“Now you sound like Elena.”
Bianca’s eyes hardened.
“I am being framed.”
“By whom?”
“Elena.”
“She doesn’t have building access after midnight.”
“Sophie.”
“She was at a campaign shoot in Brooklyn.”
“Marcus.”
Marcus stared.
“You’re accusing me?”
“I’m saying somebody wants us to blame each other.”
Lucas looked between them.
That possibility felt increasingly plausible.
Who benefited if Bianca looked guilty of everything?
Kessler.
The lawyer had entered the storage unit.
He had warned Bianca that destroying one copy was not enough.
And he had disappeared from meetings afterward.
Company counsel subpoenaed his billing records through pending litigation and demanded preservation.
Kessler responded aggressively.
Then he resigned as Bianca’s personal attorney.
That frightened her.
She called him.
He did not answer.
Elena and Priya focused on the old ownership trail.
The handwritten notebook referenced a bank account at Hudson Mercantile.
The bank no longer existed.
Its successor did.
Old microfilm records showed founder distributions made to both Isabella and Elena during the first three years.
Not salary.
Distributions.
That mattered.
Priya smiled for the first time in days.
“This is independent evidence you were treated as an owner.”
Elena stared at the old bank images.
Checks.
Her name.
Founder distribution.
Thirty-five years of being told she remembered incorrectly.
There it was.
Printed by a bank.
Priya continued.
“We still have limitations issues. We still have the later release. But fraud and concealment change the analysis.”
Elena nodded.
“Can we win?”
Priya looked at her.
“I don’t know.”
Elena appreciated the answer.
“What do you want?”
“Truth.”
“That is not a remedy.”
Elena thought.
“Credit.”
“Public?”
“Yes.”
“Money?”
Elena hesitated.
“I am not going to pretend money doesn’t matter.”
“Good.”
“My husband died with hospital debt. I still work because I need to.”
Priya nodded.
“Ownership?”
Elena looked toward the window.
“I don’t know whether I want to own a company that spent thirty years pretending I wasn’t there.”
That answer would change later.
At Moretti headquarters, Lucas found one deleted server file recovered from backup.
A draft email Isabella had written to him the night she died.
It had never been sent.
Lucas, I made a mistake by letting your grandfather convince me silence was the price of survival. If I do not correct this tomorrow, ask Elena about the black notebook and ask Bianca why she took the blue file.
Lucas read it twice.
The timestamp was 11:31 p.m.
Nine minutes before Elena said she left Isabella.
Bianca could no longer claim Isabella had imagined the issue after Elena’s departure.
She had written it contemporaneously.
Lucas called Bianca.
She came to his office.
He turned the screen.
She read.
Her face collapsed.
“She knew.”
“Yes.”
“I thought she didn’t see me.”
Lucas frowned.
“What?”
Bianca sat.
The story changed again.
Earlier that evening Bianca had entered the Mercer Street atelier using a side door.
She overheard Isabella and Elena arguing about the ownership restoration.
“Arguing?” Lucas asked.
“Elena didn’t want twenty-five percent.”
Elena had said it was too late.
She wanted public correction, not control.
Isabella insisted.
Bianca listened from the hallway.
When Elena left, Bianca confronted their mother.
“What happened?”
“We screamed.”
“About the company?”
“About everything.”
Isabella accused Bianca of becoming Carlo.
Bianca accused Isabella of sacrificing Lucas’s deal to ease her conscience.
Then Bianca saw the blue folder.
“What did you do?”
“I took it.”
Lucas closed his eyes.
“At last.”
“But I didn’t destroy it.”
He looked up.
“What?”
“I hid it.”
“Where?”
“In the archive storage.”
“Which Kessler accessed.”
“Yes.”
“Why send him?”
“I didn’t.”
Lucas stared.
Bianca whispered:
“I think he found it on his own.”
“Why?”
“Because David knew Grandpa’s old lawyer.”
Lucas went still.
“What?”
Bianca looked sick.
“Kessler worked at Carlo’s law firm before he represented us.”
May you like
The secret was no longer only Bianca’s.
David Kessler had been connected to the original forged redemption.
