All of it had the sudden hollow feeling of borrowed scenery rather than personal legacy. Caleb told her plainly that the decor was nothing more than furnishings installed by the lei and that the aircraft itself in every legal sense that mattered still belonged to the Ror trust. As the plane taxied toward the runway, Graham quietly sent a message from his seat near the front. And moments later, Lena warned Caleb that several files related to the merger were being deleted from the company's servers in real time. Caleb instructed every device belonging to the leadership team to be switched offline for the remainder of the flight and Sloan objected immediately, insisting he had no authority over company equipment.
He replied that he had no interest in controlling the company, only in preventing his own aircraft from becoming an instrument for destroying evidence mid-flight. Sloan asked him directly why he was truly on this plane, and Caleb answered without hesitation. He told her he had been contacted by an independent member of the board who suspected the aircraft had been falsely declared as fully owned company property in order to inflate the collateral behind the merger. If that suspicion proved true, the entire transaction could amount to fraud on a scale large enough to threaten thousands of jobs. Sloan insisted she had never seen any such filing.
And Graham interjected that this was simply standard financial structuring, nothing more than routine paperwork. Caleb asked why a leased asset would appear in the fixed asset appendix of a merger disclosure at all. And Graham's answer dissolved into vague circling language that satisfied no one. Sloan's father, Prescott Vanderlin, called her phone at that exact moment and instructed her not to answer a single one of Caleb's questions. And the certainty in his voice told Sloan with a sinking clarity that her father already knew exactly who Caleb Ror was.
She asked her father why he had never once mentioned that the aircraft did not fully belong to the company and Prescott answered that image mattered more than legal detail. A response that landed like a small betrayal she had not braced herself for. Caleb did not exploit her moment of doubt. He simply told her she had two paths in front of her. Protect the family's reputation or find out the truth before the board meeting began without her.