Chapter 6 The Weight of Silence
Zara
THE FLIGHT FROM Marrakech to Dubai was twelve hours. Zara spent eleven of them staring at the encrypted files her mother had left behind, and one of them sleeping—a dreamless, heavy sleep that felt like
drowning.
She woke to the sound of the landing gear and the smell of coffee.
Damien was across the aisle, working on his laptop. He hadn’t slept. She could tell by the set of his shoulders, the way his fingers moved across the keyboard—precise, controlled, like a man holding himself together through sheer force of discipline.
Their kiss in Marrakech sat between them like a third passenger. Zara hadn’t mentioned it. Neither had he. But she’d felt his gaze on her several times during the flight, and each time she’d pretended to be absorbed in her files.
The problem wasn’t that the kiss had been a mistake. The problem was that it hadn’t been a mistake at all.
She landed in Dubai with a plan: go back to the evidence, finish the analysis, and build an airtight case against Marcus Webb. The personal stuff—the attraction, the guilt, the complicated tangle of a man who’d loved her mother—that could wait. It had to wait.
But the universe, Zara had learned, rarely cooperated with plans.
The email was waiting in her inbox before she even cleared customs. No sender address. No subject line. Just a single line of text:
Check the Singapore server logs. Look for Meridian exports after March 2015.
She stared at it. The email had been sent to her personal account—not the Blackwood one. That meant someone knew who she was outside the company. Someone who’d done their homework.
Damien was waiting at baggage claim. She showed him the email on her phone.
“This is bait,” he said.
“Probably.”
“It could be Marcus trying to lure you somewhere he can control.” “Or it could be someone trying to help.”
“Or it could be both.”
She looked at him. “The Singapore data center. Does Marcus have access?”
“Everyone on the C-suite has access. It’s our primary backup facility for the Asia-Pacific region.”
“Then we go to Singapore.”
“We just got back from Berlin and Marrakech. You haven’t slept.” “I’ll sleep on the plane.”
“Zara.”
“Damien.” She met his eyes. “Every day we wait is a day Marcus has to destroy evidence. My mother documented this conspiracy twelve years ago, and it’s still running. If we stop now, it runs for another twelve years.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled out his phone and called his assistant. “Book two first-class seats to Singapore. Tonight.” They flew out at midnight. This time, Zara didn’t pretend to work. She sat beside Damien and talked.
“Tell me about the board,” she said. “Who do we trust?”
Damien considered. “Victoria Chen. She’s been asking questions about the offshore accounts for two years. Marcus doesn’t like her, which is a point in her favor.”
“And the others?”
“Robert Halloway. He’s old money, been on the board since the beginning. Loyal to me personally, but he’s in his seventies and I don’t think he fully understands what Marcus has been doing.”
“That leaves…”
“Three others who are either in Marcus’s pocket or too scared to cross him. Priya Sharma, David Kim, Thomas Okafor.”
“Five board members plus you. We need three allies to take action.”
“Victoria and Robert give us two. We need a third.”
“Or we bypass the board entirely and go to the authorities.”
“Which authorities? Marcus has contacts at the FBI, the NSA, Interpol. Going to them is like walking into a lion’s den and asking for a ride home.”
Zara leaned her head against the window. The stars outside were impossibly bright—no light pollution at thirty thousand feet.
“My mother tried to do this the right way,” she said. “She went to the people she thought would help. And they killed her for it.”
“I won’t let that happen to you.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I just did.”
She turned her head. He was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before—not the guarded, strategic gaze of a man managing a crisis, but something raw and unguarded and almost desperate.
“Don’t,” she said softly.
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like I matter.”
“You do matter.”
“I know. But not like that. Not in the way you’re thinking.” He held her gaze. “You’re wrong about that.”
The cabin was quiet. The engines hummed. Somewhere below them, the ocean was dark and vast and indifferent.
Zara closed her eyes. She could feel the warmth of him through the space between their seats, could feel the pull of something she didn’t want to name.
She fell asleep to the rhythm of the engines and woke to the sound of the pilot announcing their descent into Singapore.
Damien was still awake. His hand rested on the armrest between them. Close enough to touch.
She didn’t touch it.
Not yet.