Chapter Three
Rowan
Before the vendor portal, she'd pulled up the Yard's security footage, three cameras covering the lot and the loading dock, and scrubbed back through six hours of nothing, gravel and shadows and a stray cat that had been living under the patio deck since spring, because some small, unscientific part of her needed to know Vanessa hadn't actually driven past the building itself, hadn't stopped, hadn't sat in that unfamiliar car at the edge of the lot working up the nerve to do whatever it was she'd come back to Millhaven to do.
There was nothing on the footage. That should have made her feel better.
It mostly made her feel like she was watching the wrong camera, like the actual threat was somewhere she didn't have eyes on yet, and by the time she'd finally closed the laptop and gone to bed, sleep had felt like something happening to someone else in a different, calmer life.
She found it herself before Cole ever crossed the lot to tell her.
The duplicate charge Preacher had flagged was real, four hundred and twelve dollars, paid twice six weeks apart, and on its own it might have been nothing, a vendor system glitch, a keystroke error on somebody's end.
But once Rowan started pulling the thread, it didn't stop at one line item.
There was a second charge, smaller, routed to a different account number than the one Metro Party Rentals had on file for the last two years, four hundred dollars that had gone somewhere Rowan had never authorized and never would have.
And a third thing, not a charge at all, just an access log entry from a username she hadn't looked at in seven months because she'd made herself stop looking at anything with that name attached to it.
She sat with her coffee going cold in front of her and did the math twice, because the first time she'd done it her hands weren't steady enough to trust the number. Eight hundred and twelve dollars, minimum, that she could account for. There was no telling yet what she couldn't.
The bell over the loading dock door rang at seven-fifteen, and she knew it was Cole before she looked up, because nobody else in this club knocked that quietly on a door that technically didn't need knocking on.
"You should sit down," he said, from just inside the threshold, the way he always stood now, and she almost laughed, because she was already sitting, elbows on the bar, staring at a laptop screen that had ruined her night before he'd said a single word.
"I already found it," she said instead. "Eight hundred and change, routed to an account that isn't Metro's. You want to tell me how long you've known, or are we doing the part where you make me guess?"
Something moved across his face, quick and unhappy, and she recognized it as the look of a man who'd hoped to be the one delivering news instead of confirming it.
"Walt caught the duplicate yesterday morning.
Sent me to check the login history on the vendor portal because I'm the only one who remembers the credentials from when we set it up.
" He said it flat, no dressing on it, the way he'd learned to say things to her in the last seven months, plain facts with nothing softened around the edges.
"It's Vanessa's old login. Never got deactivated.
Somebody's been using it for six weeks, maybe longer. "
"Deactivated by who? That was never my job, Cole.
You set the accounts up. You had the credentials.
" She heard her own voice go sharp and didn't apologize for it, because she'd earned the right to be sharp about this specific thing and she wasn't going to spend it apologizing to the man who'd handed Vanessa a login in the first place.
"How does a woman who hasn't worked here in seven months still have a working key to my vendor accounts? "
"Because nobody thought to change the lock.
" He didn't flinch from it, didn't try to hand the blame anywhere but where it belonged.
"I should have thought of it. I set the system up, I knew exactly what access she had, and I was so busy trying to stay out of your business the right way that I never once went back and checked whether the wrong way was still standing wide open behind me.
That's on me. I'm not going to pretend it isn't."
"You've had seven months, Cole. Seven months to think of a lot of things. Why is this the one that fell through?"
It was a fair question and she watched him take it as one, watched him actually consider the answer instead of reaching for something easy.
"Because thinking about anything that touched Vanessa meant thinking about her, period, and I made myself stop doing that the same week you told me to leave.
I locked the whole subject down, not just the parts that were safe to lock down.
I'm not saying that to excuse it. I'm telling you because you asked, and because I told myself I was done giving you half answers a long time before I actually managed to stop doing it. "
Rowan looked at him for a long moment, weighing the plain accounting of it against the old, worn-in instinct that told her not to let him off easy for anything, ever, even when the thing he was owning was true and specific and exactly the kind of admission she'd have accused him of avoiding six months ago.
She didn't say it was fine, because it wasn't, and she'd promised herself a long time ago she was done saying things were fine when they weren't. But she filed the honesty away somewhere she didn't examine too closely, and turned the laptop toward him instead.
"Eight hundred and twelve dollars I can confirm.
There might be more. I need someone who actually understands how this portal talks to my bank feed, because I built a business, Cole, I didn't build accounting software, and Preacher's good with a checklist but he's not going to catch what you'd catch in ten minutes. "
"You want my help."
"I want this fixed before Saturday, before my license renewal in the fall, before it turns into something the county has a reason to look at twice." She closed the laptop with more force than it needed. "That's different from wanting your help. Don't confuse the two."
"I wouldn't dream of it," he said, and there wasn't an edge in it, just a kind of careful, weary honesty that made it harder to stay angry at him than she wanted it to be, which annoyed her almost as much as the eight hundred dollars did.
Walt showed up twenty minutes later, before Rowan had decided what she was going to do about any of it, before Jonas had even come in for his shift, and let himself in through the loading dock door with the particular unhurried authority of a man who owned the land the building sat on even if he'd never once acted like he owned what was inside it.
"Preacher told me you two found the same thing I already knew," Walt said, settling onto a barstool like he did this every morning, which he didn't, which meant he'd come specifically for this. "I'm not going to waste your time pretending I don't have an opinion about how we handle it."
"I run this business, Walt." Rowan kept her voice level, the same voice she used on suppliers who tried to run a shortchange past her. "Whatever's happening with that login, it happened inside my accounts, and I'll decide how it gets handled."
"I don't disagree with a word of that." Walt folded his hands on the bar top, patient in a way that told her he'd rehearsed this on the drive over.
"But you and I both know this isn't just a bookkeeping problem anymore, not once a login that should've been dead six months starts pulling money the same week somebody spots a face back in Millhaven that neither of us wanted to see again.
I've got a club dealing with a rival crew sniffing around our supply routes for the better part of a month, and now I've got a hole in the one business under my territory that's supposed to be clean enough the county's got no reason to look twice.
Those two things might be connected. I'd rather find out they are before it costs us both, instead of after. "
Rowan felt the floor shift again, the way it had the night before on the phone with Deb, the particular vertigo of watching a problem that had started small and personal reveal itself as something with teeth. "You think Vanessa's tied up with the Vultures somehow."
"I think I've got a login that shouldn't exist pulling money out of your accounts the same month a rival club starts asking questions about our routes, and I've been in this life long enough to know coincidences that convenient usually aren't." Walt's eyes went to Cole, steady and unblinking.
"I want this traced properly, fast, by somebody who actually knows the system inside and out, and I want it done before it turns into a bigger problem than eight hundred dollars.
That's Cole. I know that's not the answer either of you wants to hear. "
"I told you I wasn't touching her business," Cole said, quiet, and Rowan heard something in it that surprised her, a kind of reluctance that wasn't about avoiding the work so much as avoiding exactly this, being handed a reason to stand in her space again whether she wanted him there or not.
"You told me that seven months ago, and I told you I'd respect it right up until it stopped being the smart call.
" Walt didn't raise his voice. He never did.
"This stopped being the smart call the second a security hole in her accounts turned into a possible thread on a rival club casing our territory.
I'm not asking either of you to like this.
I'm telling you I need it handled by the two people who actually know that system, and that's the two of you, whether that's comfortable or not. "