Chapter 2 #2
"I don't trust you," I said.
The words came out harder than I intended, a blade unsheathed. Her expression flickered at the sudden shift from professional fencing to open confrontation, but she didn't step back. Didn't flinch.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your father." I took a step closer, closing the distance between us, watching her face for any crack in the composure. "A lifetime of trust shattered because one man decided his needs mattered more than everyone else's."
A flash of pain crossed her features, raw and real, before she locked it down. I'd put that there. Filed the observation. Kept going.
"And you think that's relevant to my work here?" Her voice was steady, but I heard the effort it cost her.
"I think it's relevant to who you are." Another step.
Close enough now to see the slight dilation of her pupils, the rapid pulse at her throat.
"You grew up in wreckage, Ms. Ashford. You built your whole career on the ruins of your father's crimes.
And now you're here, auditing me, and I'm supposed to believe it's just professional diligence? "
"What else would it be?"
"A chance to prove something. To yourself. About yourself. Using me as the proving ground."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then poured sugar into her coffee, the spoon clinking against the ceramic with maddening calm.
"You've thought about this," she said finally. "About me. About my motivations."
"I think about everyone's motivations."
"No." She shook her head slowly, something shifting in her expression. "You've thought about me. Specifically. That's... a lot of homework for someone who claims these complaints are baseless."
Miscalculation. Again. Instead of destabilizing her, I'd revealed something about myself, the attention I'd paid, the hours I'd spent turning her over in my mind. She saw it. Of course she saw it. She was trained to see exactly this kind of tell.
"I expect you to judge me by my work," she continued, her voice dropping to something almost intimate in its quietness.
"Not by my father's sins. Not by your assumptions about my psychology.
I'm here to follow the evidence, wherever it leads.
If it leads nowhere, I'll say so. If it leads to something ugly.
.." She held my gaze. "I'll say that too. "
"And I'm supposed to just trust that? Trust you?"
"I don't need you to trust me." She picked up her coffee mug, cradling it in both hands. "But I'll tell you what's interesting, Mr. Steele. You want me to justify myself, to prove my objectivity, to earn your confidence. Can you say the same about yourself?"
"What do you mean?"
"You have a reputation." She tilted her head, studying me.
"Ruthless. Cold. A destroyer of careers.
The legal community whispers about you like you're a cautionary tale.
And yet here you are, running a successful firm, taking on cases, building something.
Either the reputation is wrong, or the reality is more complicated than the rumors suggest."
"Maybe the reputation is perfectly accurate."
"Maybe." A faint smile ghosted across her lips. "But monsters don't usually corner forensic accountants in break rooms demanding justification. They don't care what anyone thinks."
She'd done it again. Turned my own approach back on me, found the contradiction at the heart of my performance. I wanted her to see me as dangerous, but I also, for reasons I wasn't going to examine, wanted her to see past the danger to whatever lay beneath.
"You should be afraid of me," I said quietly.
"Probably." She took a sip of her coffee, calm as still water. "But I spent the early part of my life being afraid of what people might really be underneath their masks. At some point, you get tired of the fear. You just want to know the truth."
"Even if the truth is ugly?"
"Especially then." She set down her mug and gathered herself to leave. "The ugly truths are the ones that matter most. They're the ones people work hardest to keep hidden."
She walked past me toward the door, close enough that I caught the scent of her, coffee and something plain, like soap. At the threshold, she paused.
"I'll have more questions for you tomorrow, Mr. Steele. About the Harrington case. Specifically about a shell company called Meridian Holdings that appears in your discovery documents."
My blood went cold.
Meridian Holdings. She'd found it. In less than twenty-four hours, she'd identified the thread that could unravel everything. Not just the Harrington case, but the entire architecture of what I'd built over seven years.
She smiled, not triumphant or cruel, just quietly satisfied. "I thought that might get your attention. Have a good day."
The door swung shut behind her.
I stood in the break room, holding a dry cup in still hands, my carefully constructed world shifting on its axis. The rational part of my brain was already running contingencies. Meridian was defensible. The documentation was solid. There were legitimate reasons for its existence.
But beneath the calculations, something else stirred.
Not fear, exactly. Something I couldn't categorize, which was unusual, because I categorized everything.
She'd looked at me and talked about wanting to see what was underneath, and some part of me, some deeply inconvenient part, had responded to that.
I didn't name the response. Naming things gave them power.
I put the clean mug away in the overhead cabinet and left the break room. She would dig into Meridian. She would find connections. She would ask questions I couldn't answer without revealing everything.
I had two choices: Stop her, or trust her.
I didn't trust anyone. That was the foundation of everything I'd built. Trust was how people got hurt. Trust was how monsters flourished. Trust was a weakness I couldn't afford.
But as I walked back to my office, Lindsey Ashford's words echoed in my head. The ugly truths are the ones that matter most. They're the ones people work hardest to keep hidden.
She wasn't wrong.
The question was whether I was willing to let her find mine, and what would happen if I did.