13. Cassie
CASSIE
Bianca spreads the files across the table like she’s laying out a crime scene. She is, technically.
The resort is already dark with weather before we even speak. Heavy clouds hang low over Azure Cay, pressing down on the glass windows of the business center. The kind of storm that hasn’t fully broken yet—but refuses to leave.
“Look at this one.” She taps a signature block on page four, her voice low even though we’re alone in the back corner of the resort’s business center. “Carrington’s sign-off. Except Gideon was in New York that entire week. I checked the travel logs myself.”
My stomach drops. “Meaning someone forged it.”
“Meaning someone forged it.” She slides three more pages toward me. All different dates. All the same problem.
I press my fingers against the documents like touching them will make the truth less awful.
Two years I’ve watched Gideon rebuild what his father almost destroyed.
Two years of impossible hours, brutal meetings, sacrificing everything to protect this company.
And someone inside it is trying to burn it down quietly.
“How deep does this go?” I ask.
“Deep enough that I’m whispering in a back corner instead of calling legal.” Bianca’s dark eyes cut sideways. “We need to be careful, Cassie.”
Rain has started falling in slow sheets outside the glass walls, distorting the marina view into something blurred and restless.
That’s when Elias strolls in, tablet under his arm, looking annoyingly unbothered.
“Ladies. Finance projections—” He stops, reading the room. “Okay, what’d I walk into?”
“Nothing.” We both say it exactly together.
He squints. “Uh huh.” He sets his tablet down and grabs a water bottle. “Hey, random thought. You know that back dock near the east bluff? Caught Nolan Reeve out there last Tuesday around midnight. Thought it was weird, the way he was with those guys.”
My head comes up. “What guys?”
“Didn’t recognize them. Not company. Too polished for resort contractors.” Elias shrugs like it was nothing. “Probably nothing.”
It’s definitely not nothing.
After he leaves, Bianca and I stare at each other.
“Outside investors,” she says quietly.
“At midnight,” I add.
I gather the files carefully, pressing them flat. My chest feels like something heavy just settled inside it.
Gideon finds me on the veranda an hour later. I don’t hear him until his voice comes from directly behind me.
“You’ve been quiet all afternoon.”
I don’t turn around immediately. I’m still organizing my expression into something that doesn’t look like the company you rebuilt is being stolen out from under you.
“Long day,” I say.
He steps beside me, forearms resting on the railing, close enough that his shoulder almost brushes mine. The breeze off the water catches his collar. He looks tired in that deeply private way only I ever seem to notice.
“Cassie.” His voice drops. Just my name. It still does something embarrassing to my pulse.
I finally look at him. “If something was wrong,” I say carefully, “and you didn’t know yet—would you want to know?”
Those gray eyes settle on my face with the kind of focus that makes boardrooms go silent. “I’d want you to tell me.”
My throat tightens. Everything Gideon spent years building sits on the other side of what I know. And I’m standing here terrified that telling him will shatter something he cannot afford to lose again.
“I trust you more than anyone in this company,” he says. Quiet. Absolute. Like it costs him something to admit it out loud.
The heavy thing in my chest shifts into something warmer and more dangerous.
I turn back to the water. “Okay,” I say softly. “Then I need to show you something.”
Gideon goes still beside me the way he does right before he dismantles someone in a board meeting. Not loud. Not explosive. Just — still.
I’ve laid four documents across the veranda table. The forged signatures. The approval timestamps that don’t match travel records. The vendor contracts cycling money through three different subsidiary accounts that shouldn’t exist.
He hasn’t touched any of them yet.
“I need to know how long you had these.” His voice is dangerously quiet.
“Bianca and I put it together today.” I watch his jaw tighten. “Gideon?—”
“How long have you suspected something was wrong?”
I don’t look away, even though part of me wants to. “A few weeks. I thought it was clerical errors at first. Mismatched numbers, sloppy paperwork.” I press my fingertip to the signature block I showed Bianca earlier. “Then I saw this.”
He finally looks down at the pages. I watch his eyes move across the documents with that cold, methodical precision he uses when he’s stripping a balance sheet down to its bones.
His expression doesn’t crack. It never does.
But his hands flatten against the table, and I notice the tension that travels up his forearms.
“Someone inside the company approved these,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And Nolan was meeting with outside investors. At midnight.” He says it the same way Bianca did. Quiet. Careful. Like the words themselves are loaded.
“Elias saw them at the east bluff dock last Tuesday.” I stay even. “He didn’t recognize the men. Said they weren’t company, weren’t contractors.”
Gideon pushes off the table and turns toward the water. I give him a moment because I know what’s happening behind that silence. He’s calculating. Measuring. Running scenarios the way other people breathe.
I also know what he’s feeling, even if he’ll never just come out and say it. Because I know him.
“You hesitated,” he says without turning around. “Before you told me. Why?”
There it is.
I clasp my arms across my body and stare at the back of his broad shoulders. The tailored shirt, the posture that never really relaxes, the faint tension he carries everywhere like a second skin.
“Because if this is what it looks like,” I say carefully, “it’s not just fraud, Gideon.
This is organized. Someone inside this company has been running a parallel operation beneath the acquisition for months, maybe longer.
” I pause. “That means someone you trusted built this while standing right next to you.”
He finally turns. The setting sun catches the sharp angles of his face, and the look in those eyes does something to my chest that I refuse to examine right now.
“You were afraid telling me would break something,” he says.
It’s not a question. He always does that — reads straight through me like I’m made of glass, even when I’m trying my hardest to be unreadable.
“You spent years rebuilding after your father,” I say.
I hear myself say it softer than I intend.
“You rebuilt everything. The company, the name, the trust. And the idea that someone has been quietly dismantling it from the inside while you were—” I stop.
Press my lips together. “It made me want to be absolutely certain before I said a word.”
Something shifts in his expression. A small fracture. The kind only I ever see.
He crosses the distance between us in three unhurried steps, and my pulse behaves completely irrationally about it. He stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, which he is absolutely aware of and probably enjoys on some level.
“Cassie.” His voice drops to that register that does absolutely nothing to help me think clearly. “When have I ever needed you to protect me from the truth?”
“You haven’t,” I admit.
“Then don’t start now.”
I search his face. All that control, all that cold precision — but underneath it, the exhaustion. The weight of a man who has spent years trusting almost nobody. And he’s standing here in the dying light telling me, without actually saying it, that I’m the exception.
That lands harder than I expect.
“There’s more,” I say quietly. “The shell companies Bianca flagged — they trace back toward board-level approvals. Which means this doesn’t stop at Nolan.”
His eyes go sharp and cold in the specific way that means someone is about to have a very bad week.
“Then we figure out exactly how far it goes,” he says. “Together.”
That last word is so matter-of-fact coming from him, like together was always the obvious answer.
Like two years of careful professional distance never happened at all.
And maybe it’s the warmth left over from last night, or the way he keeps staring at me as though I’m the only steady thing in a room full of moving pieces — but I believe him completely.
“Okay,” I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. With Gideon, it never quite makes it all the way.
But I know what it means.
He doesn’t move away.
That’s the thing about Gideon that nobody outside this veranda would ever believe — when he decides to be present, he is completely present.
No phone. No half-attention drifting toward the next crisis.
Just those gray orbs, steady and unblinking, like I’m the only problem worth solving in the entire Caribbean.
It’s terrifying, honestly. In the best possible way.
“Sit down,” he says. Not an order exactly. Something quieter than that.
We settle at the veranda table, the documents between us, the ocean doing its indifferent thing in the background.
Gideon pulls the forged signature page toward him and studies it again.
I watch him think. I’ve watched him think for two years — in conference rooms, in the back of cars, at 11pm over cold coffee — and it never gets less impressive.
“You said Bianca helped compile this,” he says.
“She came to me first. She’d flagged the contract inconsistencies through legal channels and hit a wall.” I fold my hands on the table. “Someone kept rerouting her requests.”
“Nolan,” he says flatly.
“Almost certainly.”
He sets the page down and looks at me. “Most people would have taken what Bianca found, handed it straight to me, and let me deal with it.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t.”
“I wanted to understand it first.” I meet his gaze. “I didn’t want to bring you a mess. I wanted to bring you answers.”
Something in his expression shifts — barely perceptible, the way a tide changes before you notice the waterline moving.
He leans back in his chair, and for a minute he just looks at me with an expression I don’t have a clean name for.
Not the look he uses in meetings. Not the look he uses when he’s running numbers. Something rawer than either of those.
“You know what you are?” he says.
I raise an eyebrow. “Overqualified and underpaid?”
That almost-smile again. It does something unfair to his whole face. “The best judgment call I’ve ever made.”
I go quiet. That’s not a compliment Gideon Carrington hands out. Ever. To anyone. I’ve watched him review billion-dollar acquisitions with less conviction than he just said that.
“That’s—” I start.
“I’m serious, Cassie.” He leans forward slightly, forearms on the table, cutting the distance between us just enough to make my next breath require slightly more effort than usual. “I have a boardroom full of people I pay extremely well to give me information. You know what most of them do?”
“Tell you what you want to hear,” I say.
“Tell me what they think will keep them employed.” He keeps his eyes on me. “You have never once done that. Not in two years. Not once.”
I think about all the arguments. The times I pushed back on decisions that had already been made, corrected errors in front of investors, told him flat out when he was being unreasonable. I always assumed it irritated him. Tolerated at best.
“I thought I was mostly driving you insane,” I admit.
“You were.” A beat. “It was the most useful thing anyone has ever done for me.”
The honesty in that — unguarded, unpolished, nothing like the Gideon Carrington who makes executives sweat through their collars — lands somewhere behind my sternum and just stays there.
I look down at the documents. All the careful work, the hours Bianca and I spent cross-referencing dates and accounts, the weight of knowing what this could mean for the company he loves.
And he’s sitting across from me telling me, in his characteristically impossible way, that he would’ve wanted me doing exactly what I did.
“We have to be strategic about this,” I say, because someone has to stay practical and it might as well be me. “If whoever is involved suspects we’re this close, they’ll move fast. Documents disappear. People lawyer up.”
“I know.” His voice is calm. Already tactical.
“Bianca can work the legal angle quietly. She knows which channels are compromised.” I tap the shell company paperwork. “But we need someone to trace the outside investor connection before Nolan has any reason to clean it up.”
Gideon nods slowly. “I’ll handle it tonight.”
“Gideon.” I wait until he looks at me. “This has to stay between us until we know who else is involved. No one inside the executive team.”
He meets my eyes and holds them for what feels like forever . “Agreed.”
The word settles between us like a handshake — firm, certain, the kind that means something.
Outside, the island goes on being beautiful and completely unbothered by the fact that everything is about to get very complicated. The water turns copper and gold in the last of the light. Somewhere down on the beach, I can hear resort guests laughing.
Gideon reaches across the table and covers my hand with his, briefly — just a few seconds of warm pressure before he pulls back. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.
With Gideon, the gestures are always the confession.
I gather the documents carefully and slide them into the folder. Two years of watching him hold this company together with sheer force of will. Two years of filing his schedule, managing his chaos, convincing myself the ache I felt around him was just professional loyalty.
I’m not convincing myself of anything anymore.
“Same time tomorrow,” I say, standing. “We review what you find tonight.”
“Six a.m.,” he says.
I give him a look. “Seven.”
“Six-thirty.”
“Fine.” I tuck the folder under my arm. “Try to sleep.”
He watches me go with that look — the one that used to make me pretend I hadn’t noticed it. I notice it now. I let myself notice it.
The warm night air wraps around me as I step off the veranda, and I don’t look back, because if I do, I won’t leave.
And we have work to do.