Before I could respond, a soft knock interrupted us. Cassie’s voice came through the door, polite but insistent. "Roman? May I have a word?"
My jaw clenched involuntarily. Even now, after everything, her voice still sent electricity through my veins. The woman who’d hidden pregnancy from me, who’d proven that even she couldn’t be trusted with the truth.
I looked at Declan, who shrugged and stood. "We’ll continue this conversation later."
"We’re done," I corrected, but he was already walking toward the door.
Cassie entered as Declan left, and I caught the way his eyes lingered on her, calculating, assessing. The look made something protective flare in my chest despite everything.
"How are you feeling?" I asked, studying her face with new wariness. She’d been released from the hospital that morning after another episode, but now I wondered what else she might be hiding. Her color was better, but there were still shadows under her eyes that I couldn’t read anymore.
"Better." She closed the door behind her and moved to the leather chair across from my desk. The same chair where she’dsat as my assistant for five months, keeping secrets. "But I wanted to talk to you about something."
I settled into my chair, maintaining a careful distance. "What’s on your mind?"
"Sean." She said the name carefully, watching my reaction. "I’ve been thinking about him being the mole, and something doesn’t add up."
My spine stiffened. Of course, she was questioning my judgment. Everyone seemed to be doing that lately. "What do you mean?"
"How would a low-level bodyguard have access to anything worth selling?" Her voice was gentle but persistent, and I hated how that tone still affected me. "He was muscle, Roman. He took orders, he didn’t make strategic decisions."
"He was in my inner circle," I said, but even as the words left my mouth, doubt crept in. The same doubt whispered that maybe I’d been wrong about everything lately. "He heard conversations, knew schedules?—"
"Did he, though?" Cassie leaned forward, that analytical mind I’d come to respect—and apparently underestimate—fully engaged. "Think about the operations that were compromised. The warehouse locations, the meeting sites, the shipping routes. Those decisions were made at the executive level."
I wanted to dismiss her concerns, to maintain the certainty that Sean’s death had solved our problem. But Cassie’s mind worked differently than mine—where I saw threats and reacted with violence, she saw patterns and asked questions. Even when she was lying to my face about carrying my child.
"You once found a five-dollar accounting error in a twenty-million-dollar deal," I said, remembering how she’d spent three days reconciling numbers that everyone else had written off as rounding errors. "Now you think you’re Sherlock Holmes?"
Her mouth curved into a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. "I think patterns matter."
Despite everything—the lies, the betrayal, the way she’d made me question everything I thought I knew about trust—I felt my lips twitch. This woman, who’d accidentally sexted me into her life, was now questioning my judgment on matters of life and death.
And she might be right. Again.
I pulled out the burner phone Declan had found in Sean’s quarters, the evidence that had sealed his fate. "Three calls to Torrino associates. The timeline matches perfectly with our security breaches."
Cassie took the phone, and I noted how careful she was not to let our fingers touch. The distance she maintained felt deliberate, like she knew exactly how her proximity affected me. Just another manipulation in a long line of them.
She scrolled through the call log with the same focus she’d once applied to quarterly reports. After a moment, she frowned.
"Roman, look at this." She pointed to the digital timestamps, two calls logged at 8:47 PM and 9:23 PM on the night of the Flanagan Foundation Gala. "Sean was with us that entire evening. I remember because he arrived late and apologized to you at our table."
The memory hit me like ice water. Sean had been visibly present, standing behind my chair during dinner, scanning the crowd for threats. There was no way he could’ve made those calls.
"Maybe he called earlier, and the timestamp is wrong," I said, but the words felt hollow. Just like every other assumption I’d been making lately.
Cassie continued scrolling. "There’s something else. Look here—there’s a gap in the call log. A blank space where data should be."
I leaned closer despite myself, studying the screen. The scent of her perfume hit me, that familiar mix of jasmine and something uniquely her that had always made me want to bury my face in her neck. Even now, knowing what I knew about her capacity for deception.
She was right. Between the suspicious calls and the legitimate ones, there was a digital void that looked deliberately scrubbed.
"Probably nothing," I said, but my mind was already racing.
"It’s not nothing." Her voice carried absolute certainty, the same tone she’d used when insisting our marriage was just business. "Someone edited this phone. Added calls that never happened, deleted others that did. This whole thing is a setup."
The implications crashed over me like a tsunami. If Sean wasn’t the mole, then I’d executed an innocent man. And the real traitor was still out there, laughing at how easily I’d been manipulated.
