Ingrid Voss's office wasn't inside Prime Golden's glass tower. That was, Leanor understood within thirty seconds of walking into it, the entire point.It sat four blocks north, in a converted industrial textile building with exposed brick, heavy timber beams, and no company signage on the steel door. It was the kind of space designed to remind visitors that the person occupying it answered to numbers, cold math, and absolute leverage—not to anyone's historic family name. She didn't stand when he entered. She gestured at the heavy oak chair across from her desk the way a surgeon gestured toward an operating table."You told the board the audit would cover the lending subsidiary's write-offs going back five years," she said without preamble. Her voice was flat, devoid of social warmth. "The irregularities I've been tracking go back closer to twenty. Either your audit scope is fundamentally wrong, or you already know that and you're managing what the board hears in carefully controlled i

Martha almost didn't answer the phone.She had spent three long days rehearsing what she would say if he reached out again—something clean, something that closed the door without slamming it, the kind of line that would allow her to walk away from this entire disaster with her dignity mostly intact. She had it memorized. She had memorized it the way she used to memorize answers for exams she was terrified of failing, which should have told her something about how little she actually believed she would use it when the screen lit up."I want to talk," Leanor said when she finally picked up. "Not to fix anything. I know I can't fix two years of silence in one conversation. I want to answer whatever you ask me, in order, without deciding for you what you're allowed to know.""That's a strange thing to promise a person," Martha said, standing by her window. "Most people promise the answers will be good ones.""I can't promise that."She agreed to meet him anyway. She told herself it was fo