1. Isabel #2
"We're sorry we kept you and Owen in the dark," Linda started, her voice soft but steady.
"But because of..." She paused, glancing at Darius, who offered her a warm, reassuring smile.
"Because of Owen's past connection to Dr. Wineberg and...
" She shifted her gaze toward Gill. "...
well, everything that happened in Charleston, we had to be extremely careful with how we structured our information. "
"So..." Isabel felt a hot spurt of anger flare in her chest. "If we hadn't happened to walk past that alleyway a little while ago, we would still be in the dark?"
"You and Owen have just been through so much lately..." Darius started, his tone characteristically protective.
"Whoa," Owen interrupted. He instinctively leaned closer to Isabel, his arm brushing against hers in a silent show of unity that made her heart give a sudden, crazy leap.
"Don't hit us with that protective excuse, Darius.
" His eyes narrowed as he locked gazes with the younger man.
"You didn't include us because you decided we were too close to the blast radius.
You thought our personal connections would make whatever plan you're running too messy to control. "
"Okay," Penny interrupted, raising her hands to de-escalate the tension. "Let's not turn this into a family showdown. We were also trying to limit the overall liability to the plan. The fewer people who knew the exact moving parts, the safer the strategy remained."
"So now we're liabilities?" Isabel asked.
She knew she was being slightly unreasonable, but the presence of this mysterious woman from Owen's past was making her chest tight.
More than that, she despised being handled.
She had always lived by a strict personal code: Better to look a storm in the eye and take the bruising than to get caught sleeping when the roof caves in.
If her life, her home, or the people she cared about were in the path of danger, she wanted the truth—no matter how raw or painful it was.
Darius knew this about her better than anyone, yet he had still chosen to shut her out.
"That was not what I meant," Penny told her, setting her empty tray down and folding her arms.
"Okay," Darius said, raising a hand to cut off the impending argument before it could draft in more heat. "We should not have excluded you. Things moved fast, and we needed to move with it."
"Then tell us about all this 'movement,'" Owen said. Beneath the wooden table, his hand reached out and clasped Isabel's, giving her fingers a gentle, reassuring squeeze. The solid warmth of his palm sent a wave of comfort straight to her chest.
She squeezed back. They were a united front here. Whatever was coming, they were meeting it together.
"Not long after we arrived in Sweet Blossom Bay, and after I'd met Linda," Darius began, leaning his forearms on the table. “I was having doubts about the Hearts Hotel Project.”
"Actually, you had started to have doubts about the project before you'd even met Linda," Baxter reminded him. The interruption was smooth, but it drew a sharp look of surprise from Isabel.
"Correct," Darius conceded, adjusting his cuffs.
"I can confirm that," Penny stated. "Although I wasn't entirely sure of the landscape until Baxter arrived on the island."
A cold, uneasy feeling started to creep up Isabel's spine as she looked between them.
"May I?" Baxter asked, leaning slightly forward to catch Darius's eye. "You're not starting at the beginning."
"Sure," Darius said, offering a brief hand gesture. "Go ahead."
"Remember when Darius was furious with me and banished me to the South Carolina office?" Baxter looked directly at Isabel, and she nodded slowly, remembering the explosive fallout at the corporate headquarters. "Well, it started a little before that."
"This all started before that?" Isabel looked from her cousin to her brother, then back to her cousin.
"Yup," Darius nodded. He reached for his mug, taking a slow sip of his black coffee with a dramatic pause that immediately grated on Isabel's nerves.
He had always used that tactical silence in boardrooms, and she despised it.
"I was furious when I learned that Baxter was seemingly taking kickbacks on our mainland structural contracts. "
"Only it wasn't kickbacks," Baxter carried on, his voice serious. "He came down on me like a ton of bricks, ready to fire me and ruin my career. But I showed up at his house the night before I was scheduled to leave, carrying an encrypted hard drive and a thick folder."
"Inside that folder was undeniable evidence that someone was selling our proprietary project templates and bid metrics to a rival developer," Darius explained, setting his mug down with a soft click. "South Coast Hotels."
"Okay..." Isabel frowned, trying to map the corporate link. "But what about the kickback paperwork?"
"It showed a trail of digital signatures, certified purchase orders, and wire transfers suggesting I was authorizing bribes to local zoning officials," Baxter said, his jaw tightening at the memory.
"All executed under my unique employee security token.
Paperwork I had absolutely never seen, let alone signed off on. "
"Baxter hadn't signed them," Darius continued, his analytical eyes locking onto Owen.
"I brought in an external forensic data specialist under a non-disclosure agreement.
We managed to recover the original, deleted source files passed from Baxter's terminal before they were encrypted.
It turned out someone had cloned his security profile to authorize bulk supply purchases from unauthorized distributors—companies we never deal with because they manufacture inferior, structurally compromised building materials. "
"We have since discovered, thanks to Baxter's quiet digging over these past few months," Darius went on, "that those offshore supply companies were all subsidiary shell corporations owned by South Coast Hotels."
"Wait..." A sudden realization dawned on Isabel, her eyes shifting rapidly between her brother and her cousin. "So, Baxter, you weren't actually exiled in disgrace, were you?"
"No," Baxter said, a dry, humored smile touching his lips. "I was exiled as a spy."
"Darius did want to kick me out for good initially," Baxter admitted, offering a short chuckle.
"But the evidence proved that this exact same pattern of proprietary leaks had occurred on three of our major coastal developments over the past five years.
On each of those three projects, South Coast Hotels miraculously stepped in to acquire the adjacent parcels right after our internal data leaked. "
"We tied the leaks directly to their bidding timeline," Darius told them, his tone dropping into a hard, defensive register.
"But we couldn't identify the source of the breach within our own executive registry.
The mole in the Wayne Group was incredibly sophisticated, using dead-drops and encrypted routing to cover their tracks.
So, Baxter and I orchestrated a public falling-out.
We made his banishment look as real and messy as possible to keep the mole comfortable. "
Owen leaned forward, his interest sharpening. "And you sent him to South Carolina because that's where South Coast Hotels is headquartered."
"Exactly," Baxter nodded. "Darius had me handpick a project team to take down there under the guise of restructuring our regional division.
I packed the roster with everyone who had high-level access during the previous leaks, along with a dozen non-suspects to keep the cover intact.
I had to monitor their digital footprints daily while pretending to be a disgraced executive hanging onto my job by a thread. "
"Every single communication we had over the company servers had to reflect our ruined relationship," Darius added, tapping his finger against his coffee cup.
"If the mole suspected for a second that Baxter and I were still aligned, the trap would have snapped shut before we could identify them.
We communicated solely through Clyde's secure, encrypted channels. "
"And what happened when you got to South Carolina?" Isabel asked, her irritation fading into deep suspense.