Olivia's POV
She found it on the third day and it made her stomach drop.
Not because it was hidden. Because it wasn't. Whoever had orchestrated Cross Tech's collapse hadn't buried the evidence deep in complicated financial structures hoping nobody would look. They had left it sitting in plain sight inside the company's own reporting system, confident that Sebastian's internal team would look in the wrong direction long enough for the damage to become irreversible.
That kind of confidence meant they knew his team well.
Olivia sat alone in the small office Sebastian had given her off the main floor and looked at the pattern she had spent seventy hours building across three whiteboards and two laptops and more printed spreadsheets than she had used in the last year combined.
The client who pulled their contract, a major logistics company called Meridian, had received specific information about Cross Tech's hidden debt exposure. Not general information. Specific. Account numbers. Dates. Names of the original lenders connected to Sebastian's father's operations. The kind of detail that lived in maybe four places inside the entire company.
She had traced which four.
Then she had traced who had access to all four simultaneously.
The list came down to eleven people. She eliminated seven based on communication patterns, access logs, and the kind of behavioral inconsistencies that most people didn't know how to look for but that became obvious when you laid three months of internal emails side by side.
Four people remained.
She was looking at their files when Sebastian knocked and came in without waiting, which she had stopped being annoyed by somewhere around day two because it turned out Sebastian always knocked, he just didn't wait, and there was something about the knock that made it feel less like an intrusion.
"You've been in here since six AM," he said.
"I found something."
He closed the door and came to stand beside her at the whiteboard. She could feel the warmth of him next to her, closer than strictly necessary, and she kept her eyes on the board.
"The leak didn't come from a system breach," she said. "Someone walked the information out. Not digitally. Physically printed and handed over." She pointed to a column of dates. "Every time sensitive information reached the wrong person, there was a scheduled building maintenance window the night before. Same maintenance company. Same access window. Someone used those windows to pull physical documents from the records room on level twelve."
Sebastian looked at the dates. "Those maintenance windows are scheduled six weeks in advance."
"Which means whoever did this had a six week planning horizon minimum." She turned to face him. "This wasn't opportunistic, Sebastian. Nobody decided three months ago to destroy your company in a moment of frustration. This has been running for at least eight months. Possibly longer."
She watched his face process that. Eight months was before their divorce. Before he came to her office. Before any of the recent events that had seemed like the beginning of the crisis.
The beginning of the crisis was not the beginning.
"Four people had the necessary access," she continued. "I've eliminated seven. The remaining four are Harrison your CFO, a senior board member named Aldrich, your head of external communications, and one name that surprised me." She paused. "Your father's former personal assistant. A woman named Claire Moran who technically retired two years ago but whose system credentials were never fully deactivated."
Sebastian went very still.
"Claire Moran still has active credentials," he said slowly.
"Level three access. Which is more than enough." Olivia watched his face. "Did you know?"
"No." His voice was flat and controlled in the way it got when something was serious. "My father trusted her completely. She was with him for nineteen years."
"Nineteen years is long enough to know where everything is buried."
Sebastian turned away from the board and walked to the window. She gave him a moment because this was not just business information. This was personal in the way that betrayal by someone your father trusted was always personal, layered and complicated and mixed up with grief for things that had nothing to do with stock prices.
She was still watching him when the conference room door across the hall burst open.
Not opened. Burst.
Olivia was on her feet before she registered moving because the sound was wrong, too sudden, too loud, the particular sound of someone who had been running and hit a door handle without slowing down.
Rachel Cross stumbled into the hallway. She was breathing hard and her face was blotchy and her mascara had tracked in two dark lines down both cheeks. She looked at Olivia through the glass wall of the small office and then at Sebastian's back and then she said his name in a voice that made Olivia's chest tighten.
"Sebastian."
He turned around immediately.
Rachel pushed through the office door. She was shaking slightly. Not from cold. From the particular kind of shaking that happened when a person had been holding something frightening alone for too long and had finally reached someone they trusted enough to put it down.
"I know who it is," Rachel said. "I know who's behind all of it."
The room felt like it shrank.
Olivia looked at Sebastian. He had crossed to his sister in three steps and had both hands on her shoulders, steadying her the way older siblings did, automatic and immediate.
"Breathe," he said quietly. "Then talk."
Rachel took one breath. Two.
Then she looked between them both and said the name.
And Olivia's four-person list suddenly became irrelevant because the answer was bigger than any name on it.