But the recipient of the funds was not Elias Whitmore. It was a name that made Viven's stomach turn cold because she had shaken that man's hand at every board meeting for the last 6 years. The money had gone to Gideon Vale, now chairman of the very board that governed Armadage Holdings. Darius stared at the screen for a long time without speaking. He told Viven quietly that he had always assumed his father's warning had been about Marcus.
There had been a letter written just before Elias disappeared, addressed to no one in particular, but kept by Darius's mother for the rest of her life. It said that if he never returned, his family should never trust the man who wore the mask of a protector. Darius had spent decades reading that sentence as an accusation against Marcus Ashcraftoft, sitting in that quiet conference room, watching Gideon Vale's name attached to a fortune that should never have existed. He began to wonder if he had spent his entire life aiming his anger at the wrong man. That same night, both of their phones lit up within minutes of each other, though neither of them had shared the location of the meeting with anyone else in the building.
The messages were identical in tone, if not in exact wording, both warning them to stop digging into the disappearance of Elias Whitmore, both arriving from numbers that led nowhere when traced. Viven read hers twice before setting the phone face down on the table. Darius did not need to read his twice. He already understood that someone inside the walls of Armmitage Holdings had been watching them long before that night, and that whoever it was had access to information that should have belonged only to the two of them. In the days that followed, an uneasy partnership formed between the executive and the maintenance supervisor, though neither of them called it that out loud.
Vivienne began finding reasons to walk past the lower floors where Darius worked, pausing near the mechanical room doors on pretenses that grew thinner each time, telling herself she needed updates on the investigation when in truth she had simply wanted to see whether he was there. Darius began arriving 15 minutes earlier than his already early schedule. Standing near the loading dock, where she sometimes parked her car before the rest of the staff arrived, offering nothing more than a nod most mornings. Though the nod itself had started to carry more weight than either of them would have admitted aloud. At first the caution between them was thick enough to touch.