That's the last favor you'll get without earning it. Ryan read it twice, then a third time, and something happened in his chest that hadn't happened in a long, long time. A loosening, a small, hot flood of something he'd almost forgotten the shape of. Not relief.
It was bigger than relief. It was the feeling of being seen. Carter. Dev was still standing there.
Buddy, your hands are shaking. Yeah, Ryan said. He folded the note back up carefully along its one crease and put it in his shirt pocket over his heart without deciding to. Yeah, I know. across the building up on the 14th floor behind a door that said Victoria Sterling Chief Executive Officer.
A woman who had not let another human being matter to her in 7 years sat behind her desk with the blinds for the first time anyone could remember pulled all the way open, letting the morning in watching the city she owned wake up. And she was thinking about a man who had asked for nothing and a little girl named Emma with asthma and the way it had felt for 20 terrible minutes in an ugly break room to say a dead man's name out loud to someone who understood exactly what it cost. She didn't know yet where it was going. Neither of them did.
But something had opened. A door that had been locked for a very long time. And doors once opened are very hard to close again. as Victoria Sterling was about to learn in a way she never could have imagined. When the second time she took Ryan Carter's hand, she would not say a word at all.
By Thursday night, Ryan Carter had gone through every project budget in the division three times, and he had found the answer. It hadn't been easy. He'd stayed at the office until 11 the first night until Emma's babysitter texted him twice until the cleaners were vacuuming around his ankles and giving him looks. He'd taken the files home and spread them across the kitchen table after Emma went to bed.
And he'd worked by the little light over the stove because it didn't hurt his eyes the same light he made her breakfast under. He'd filled a legal pad with numbers. He'd crossed most of them out. And somewhere around 2:00 in the morning on Thursday, sitting there in his undershirt with a cold cup of coffee, he'd found it the thing finance had missed or hadn't wanted to see.
The waste wasn't in the people, it was in the vendors. Sterling Holdings was paying three different outside contractors for work that over overlapped by almost 40%. Two of the contracts had autorenewed for 6 years running without anyone rebidding them. And one of them Ryan had circled this three times and then just stared at it.
One of them traced back through two shell companies to a name he recognized. Marcus Webb, the finance director, the man with the golf tan and the wet towel handshake who told Ryan to go kiss some ring. He was quietly billing the company he was supposed to be protecting through a vendor nobody had looked at in six years for a number that came out when Ryan added it all up and checked it and checked it again to almost four times the entire salary cost of the four people on the restructuring list. Ryan had sat at his kitchen table at 2:00 in the morning and understood that he was holding something dangerous.
Now it was Friday, 8:40 in the morning, and he was standing outside Victoria Sterling's office with a folder under his arm and his heart going like a hammer. And her assistant, a severe woman named Diane, who had worked for Victoria for 11 years and guarded her door like a Rottweiler, was looking at him over her glasses. She's expecting you, Diane said in a tone that made it clear she found this personally baffling. Go in.
Don't waste her time. Ryan went in. Victoria was standing at the window with her back to the door and the blinds were open again and the morning light came in around her so that for a second she was just a silhouette. She didn't turn around.
You found something, she said. I can hear it in how you're breathing. I found something. sit. He sat.
He put the folder on the desk. And then because there was no soft way to do it, he said, "Before you open that, I need you to understand that I didn't go looking for this. I went looking for a budget number. This is what was underneath the budget number.
And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And neither can I. And neither can whoever else you have to tell." He slid it an inch toward her. I want to keep my job, Victoria, but not this way.
Not by handing you a grenade and running. So before you look, you should know it's a grenade. Now she turned. She looked at him for a long moment and then she came to the desk and she sat down and she opened the folder and Ryan watched Victoria Sterling read.
He watched her face because her face was the only thing in the room worth watching. She read the first page and her expression didn't change. She read the second page and something tightened at the corner of her mouth. She got to the third page, the page with the shell companies, the page with the name and she went absolutely completely still.
The way a person goes still when the floor they've been standing on turns out to be ice. Marcus, she said flat. No inflection at all. Marcus, Ryan confirmed.
She kept reading. She read all of it, every page, and she didn't rush, and she didn't skip. When she was done, she closed the folder and set her hand flat on top of it, and she looked at the wall for a moment, and then she started to laugh. It wasn't a happy laugh.