Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Please tell me one of you has good news, because I’ve already imagined fourteen ways this could get worse,” Bea said.
Rafael stood by the windows, one hand in his pocket. From the angle of his shoulders alone, Bea could tell he was carrying enough fury to light the entire GV tower.
Jaxon cleared his throat and rotated the tablet toward her.
The screen was filled with a forensic flow diagram mapping the movement of deposits and files across accounts, companies, and jurisdictions.
Bea shifted forward in her chair. Numbers flipped a switch in her brain. Analyst mode: activated. “So Gavin pulled the hotel corridor export?”
“Yes,” Jaxon replied.
“But he didn’t send it out.”
“No,” Jaxon confirmed. “Someone else moved first.”
Rafael spoke. “I’ll pay Trenor a second visit.”
Max folded his hands. “Trenor stored it privately after the audit. It remained untouched until Mr. Fox’s assistant made contact, around the time of your wedding. Two days later, someone downloaded a copy through a VPN. That’s when the images were altered.”
“Do we know who altered them?”
“Fox’s brother-in-law. IT teacher at a public school. He also does freelance design specializing in AI.”
Bea blinked at him. “He confessed?”
Jaxon shook his head. “People lie. Their wallets tell the truth.”
“He maintains a cryptocurrency wallet that has no purchases, whose value is now in the high seven digits.” Max slid a thin folder across the table. “For approximately six years it has received irregular Bitcoin transfers.”
Inside were printouts of articles, along with the faces of women Bea recognized from interviews she’d watched on Fox Hunt. The realization settled piece by piece.
These were all women who’d initially refused to speak to the press…until Oliver Fox.
Jaxon tapped the screen again and another line of transactions appeared. “The transfers arrive just before each interview. The timing is consistent enough to suggest a business model.”
“So he corners them,” she said. Then amended, “Us. With some kind of doctored image. Then offers a chair and a microphone like he’s rescuing us from the fire he helped light.”
Max inclined his head. “That is our working view.”
“How many times has he done this?”
“Twenty-five, give or take.”
She pushed the papers back toward the center of the table. “That’s vile.”
Rafael finally turned from the window and started toward her. “That’s why this ends now.”
“In the United Republic,” Max explained, “interference with a recognized family unit is actionable. Two documented incidents reported by the husband are enough for Domestic Security to step in.”
“So it’s Oliver against Rafael,” Bea intuited. “Not Oliver against me?”
Max nodded. “We don’t let our women suffer twice to be believed once.”
“And what happens to him?”
Max didn’t hesitate. “He’ll be detained. Questioned. Likely jailed.”
Rafael took the seat beside her. “He’ll be finished.”
The certainty in his voice should have reassured her. Instead it left a weight behind her ribs. She imagined all the quiet machinery of Westhaven doing what it did best.
He would vanish beautifully. Administratively. Into exactly the kind of whispered myth that allowed men like him to keep their legacy intact.
“That’s not enough.”
Three heads turned to her at once.
“No. It isn’t.” Rafael glanced at Max. “Do I get five minutes alone with him?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Bea interjected, turning toward him in her chair. “Fox’s power is credibility. He’s played the principled journalist for decades.”
“You value your privacy,” Max pointed out. “The Ministry can handle him quietly, and take him off the field.”
“If he disappears quietly, people will turn him into a martyr the UR silenced,” Bea countered. “And what justice do the twenty-five women before me get?”
The muscle along Rafael’s jaw hardened. He studied her like she had just started speaking another language.
Jaxon leaned back in his chair, interest in his eyes. “She’s not wrong.”
“What are you suggesting?” Max intervened.
“I want to do the interview.”
Rafael’s refusal landed before the last word had fully left her mouth. “No.”
Of course it was no. Bea felt the first flare of irritation push through the fear.
Jaxon’s expression became wary in the way of a man who had just realized he was unwittingly an accomplice to a conjugal dispute.
“You hate cameras. You hate public exposure. And you hate strangers asking intimate questions like they’re owed pieces of you,” Rafael listed. He remembered every single thing she had ever complained or worried about. “I promised you you’d never have to do something like this.”
“I know.” Her tone softened. “And you’ve kept that promise.”
“Then why are we discussing it?”
“Because this matters more than what I want right now.”
“Nothing matters more than what you want.”
Bea pressed her lips together. It was infuriating how attractive he was even when he was being unreasonable. She pushed back her chair and stood. “Rafael.”
He rose as well, and suddenly she had to look up at him. “Bea.” That single breath was pregnant with warning.
There was a particular silence that only happened when two married people started arguing in front of witnesses. This was unmistakably that silence. Max kept his attention fixed very carefully on the water carafe. Neither he nor Jaxon seemed inclined to volunteer commentary.
Tension radiated from Rafael, palpable. Part of her wanted to press her forehead against his chest and wait until it burned itself out. The other part knew that would be surrender.
“If I do this right,” she said quietly, “he loses everything that actually matters to him.”
Rafael searched her face. “You don’t even want to do it.”
“No,” she admitted. “I really, really don’t.”
“Then why? The UR is probably the only place in the world where the system protects you from this.”
You would let me hide forever if I asked. I love you obscenely for that.
But part of her knew this was the moment she either became the woman in the headlines forever…or the woman who burned the headline down.
“That’s why I have to do it,” she said, hands fisting at her sides. “For the women who didn’t have what I do.”
Rafael stepped forward until he held her face in both his hands. For a second Bea lost the thread of the argument. The heat of his hands, the closeness of him, the warning look that sent her pulse stumbling somewhere far less useful than her brain.
“This discussion,” he said, tone low, “is happening again somewhere with fewer witnesses.”