Chapter 8 EIGHT

Lennox thought about her studio apartment with the broken water heater and walls so thin she could hear her neighbors breathing. Thought about Detective Chen waiting to arrest her. Thought about five years in prison or living in a billionaire's penthouse as his fake wife.

Not really a choice at all.

"I'll take it," she said.

"Good." Callum stood, signaling the conversation was over. "Gerald will contact you with details. Pack light, anything you need can be purchased. And Miss Rivers?"

She looked up at him, this cold, beautiful man who'd just bought her like a piece of furniture.

"Don't make me regret this," Callum said. "I'm taking a considerable risk bringing a stranger into my life. If you do anything to jeopardize my family's company or reputation, the consequences will be severe. Do you understand?"

If you only knew, Lennox thought. If you had any idea who I really am and what I've been doing to your precious company.

"I understand," she said out loud.

Callum nodded once, sharp and final. Then he walked out of the conference room without another word, leaving Lennox alone with the weight of what she'd just agreed to.

The door clicked shut behind him, and suddenly the room felt too quiet. Too empty. Lennox slumped back in the chair and tried to catch her breath.

Her future husband, god, her future husband had just looked at her like she was a problem to be managed. He'd made it painfully clear that she meant nothing to him, that this was purely transactional, that she was only here because she was desperate enough to say yes.

And the worst part? He was right about all of it.

She was desperate. She was nobody. She was exactly the kind of person who could be bought and discarded without anyone caring.

Except she wasn't just nobody. She was Cipher. She'd spent two years exposing corporate corruption, tracking money trails, building cases that brought down companies who thought they were untouchable. She had skills Callum Westbrook couldn't even imagine. Power he didn't know existed.

And now she'd be living in his house, sleeping down the hall from him, with access to everything she needed to finish her investigation.

Lennox pulled out her phone and opened her encrypted files. Her Cipher investigation stared back at her, months of work tracking money through Westbrook Industries, following trails that led nowhere and everywhere at once. Someone was stealing billions. Someone close to the family, probably. Someone who knew the systems well enough to hide it.

The transfers always followed the same pattern. Late night transactions, complex routing through shell companies, money disappearing into offshore accounts. She'd traced it back eight months, watching millions vanish month after month. The embezzler was careful, methodical, patient.

But they'd made mistakes. Small ones, barely noticeable. A transaction that went through five minutes too early. A shell company registered to an address that didn't quite match the others. Patterns that didn't quite fit.

Lennox had been collecting those mistakes like puzzle pieces, waiting for enough of them to form a picture. To show her who was behind this.

And now she'd be living inside the puzzle.

Her phone buzzed, it was an alert from her monitoring system, the automated program she'd set up to track specific financial patterns within Westbrook Industries' network.

Lennox's heart stopped.

New activity. Another transfer, happening right now. Three million dollars moving through one of the shell companies she'd been tracking. The same pattern as before, complex routing, multiple intermediary accounts, designed to disappear into the offshore system where she always lost the trail.

But this time she had something she'd never had before: a timestamp showing it was happening in real time, and a location marker from the IP address initiating the transfer.

The transfer was coming from inside this building. Right now. Somewhere in this tower.

Lennox stared at her phone screen, watching the money move. Three million dollars, flowing through digital channels like water, splitting and merging and disappearing. Whoever was stealing from Westbrook Industries was here. Maybe floors above her, maybe floors below. Close enough that their digital fingerprints were lighting up her tracking system like fireworks.

Her laptop was in her bag. She could pull it out right now, try to trace the transfer back to its source. Maybe finally identify who was behind this. Maybe get actual proof instead of just patterns and suspicions.

But that would mean hacking from inside the building. Possibly triggering security systems. Definitely taking a massive risk before she'd even signed the contract that would protect her.

The smart choice was obvious. Wait. Move into Callum's house tomorrow as planned. Get access to internal systems she could never reach from outside. Investigate properly from a position of relative safety.

But whoever was moving that money right now might cover their tracks before she got another chance. Might delete logs, might change their pattern, might disappear completely.

Lennox's finger hovered over her laptop bag. Her Cipher instincts screamed at her to chase this lead, to not let it disappear like all the others. But her survival instincts, the ones that had kept her out of prison so far, told her to wait, to be patient, to not blow everything before it even started.

She watched the transfer complete on her screen. Three million dollars, gone into the offshore void in less than two minutes.

And Lennox sat there in the conference room, forty two floors above Manhattan, realizing that tomorrow she was moving into a house with a man who'd just told her he didn't trust her, to investigate a crime happening inside his company, while pretending to be his loving wife.

The embezzler was close. So close she could almost feel them. Someone in this building, someone with access to Westbrook's systems, someone who thought they were untouchable.

Someone who had no idea Cipher was about to become family.

Lennox closed her encrypted files and put her phone away. Tomorrow everything changed. Tomorrow she became Lennox Westbrook, or whatever name they decided she should use. Tomorrow she moved into a penthouse in Tribeca and started living a lie.

But tonight, she was still herself. Still Cipher. Still the woman who'd spent two years fighting against people who thought money made them invincible.

And she'd just agreed to marry one of them.

What could possibly go wrong?