Fine, you want me to save myself? I'll save myself. I happen to be extraordinarily good at saving things. I do it for a living. I restructure failing divisions in my sleep.
I'll restructure me. She looked at him. But I'm going to hold you to it, Nathan Walker. 6 months. I stand on my own.
I get my feet under me and then I come find you. And you'd better be up that ladder. I'll be up the ladder. Good. She took a breath.
Now, first order of business in the restructuring of Victoria Harrington is that I am not going to let that man take your job while I find my feet. Those two things are separate. Saving myself doesn't mean letting an innocent man get run over. Where's my phone? I need to call Marcus back.
And the strange charged tender thing between them folded itself away again. And Victoria Harrington went to work. Sunday, she went into the office. Quiet building weekend security. The executive floor dark except for one lamp.
Marcus was already there when she arrived and he had files. A lot of files. He'd been at it since before dawn. Before I show you any of this, Marcus said, "I need you in the right frame of mind because you're going to be angry and some of that anger is going to want to point at yourself and I need you to not do that. What Adrienne did, he did.
You didn't do it. Being lied to isn't a character flaw. " Understood. "Show me Marcus," he showed her. The three things he'd flagged 18 months ago had grown into something much larger the way small rot does when you leave it in the dark. Adrien Cole had used his advisory position, the position Victoria had given him over Marcus' objection, because she was in love and wanted to believe to route two of Harrington Global's smaller partnership deals through an intermediary firm, a firm that when Marcus pulled the ownership three layers deep, turned out to be quietly controlled by Adrien himself.
He'd been skimming, not enough to notice in a company that size. That was the genius of it. Small percentages of large numbers invisible in the noise. But over 18 months, it added up to a figure with a lot of zeros. And every dollar of it had a paper trail, and every piece of that paper trail had Adrienne's fingerprints because he'd never imagined anyone would look.
He'd never imagined anyone would look because he'd made sure the one person who might Victoria was too busy being made small to lift her head and check. Victoria sat in the quiet office and read it all page by page, and Marcus watched her face go from disbelief to fury to something cold and final. "He was stealing from me," she said. The whole time he was telling me I was nothing without him. He was stealing from me.