The Heiress Gambit-Chapter 51- No lead. New lead

PAIGE

Four days.

The screaming headlines have softened to a persistent, worried hum. The office feels different. The air is thinner, charged with a quiet panic everyone is trying to hide. Reomen is a ghost in his own building.

He’s either sealed in his corner office, a fortress of silence and strategy, or he comes home long after dark, his shoulders tight with a fatigue I’ve never seen in him.

The kind that sleep doesn’t fix.

The swelling in my cheek is gone. Just a faint, yellowish bruise remains, a fading ghost of the pain. A souvenir. But the other wound, the one from the leak, is still raw and open.

I’m at my desk. My screens are a constellation of financial models, server logs, and email timestamps. The official investigators are doing their thing. Let them. They look for the obvious. A disgruntled employee.

A digital footprint.

I’m looking for a ghost. A pattern. A whisper.

Because if Daki Tech falls, my revenge dies with it. Everything I’ve worked for, the plan we meticulously built—the slow, beautiful unraveling of my family—it all turns to dust. We can’t have that. I can’t have that.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, pulling up the access records for the Luminex deal documents. My deal. The one I built from the ground up. Someone used my work as a weapon against him. Against us.

Anger is a cold, sharp stone in my gut. It’s better than the fear. It fuels me.

Find the thread. Pull it.

He’s carrying the weight of the entire company. He’s fighting the war on the outside.

So I’ll fight the one on the inside. In the shadows. In the numbers.

I lean closer to the screen, my eyes scanning line after line of data. There’s a truth here. I can feel it. And I will dig it out with my bare hands if I have to.

They have no idea who they’re dealing with.

– – –

Damn it.

Nothing. For hours. Days. I’ve scoured every server log, cross-referenced every access key, traced every digital ghost that ever looked at the Luminex files. And there’s nothing. It’s clean. Too clean.

It’s like trying to grab smoke. Every time I think I see a pattern, it dissolves. A login from an unusual location? Verified as a legitimate business trip. A file accessed after hours? An analyst working late to meet a deadline. It’s all so... fucking... logical.

I push back from my desk, the chair rolling back with a sharp screech. My hands are fists in my hair, pulling slightly at the roots. The dull throb is a punishment for my failure.

"Goddamn it!" The curse cracks in the silent, empty office. It sounds pathetic. Swallowed by the expensive furniture and the hum of the servers.

Where did it come from? How? This wasn’t some clumsy, amateur leak. This was surgical. Precise. Someone knew exactly which wires to cut to make the whole machine scream. Someone with access. Someone with intelligence.

Someone who knew it would destroy my work to get to him.

I lean forward, elbows on the cool glass of the desk, and drop my head into my hands. The faint, lingering ache in my cheek mocks me. I could handle a physical fight. A broken tooth. But this? This invisible enemy, this perfect crime... it’s suffocating.

"Come on, you bastard," I whisper to the empty screen, my voice thick with frustration. "Show yourself. Give me something. Anything."

Silence.

The ticker on my secondary monitor continues its silent, grim parade. Daki Tech is still down. Not plummeting anymore, but bleeding out slowly. Eroding confidence. Dying by a thousand cuts.

And I’m just sitting here. Staring at a wall of clean data. Completely, utterly stuck.

"Fuck!" I slam my palm flat on the desk. The impact stings, a sharp, satisfying pain that’s at least something I can feel. Something real.

This isn’t over. It can’t be. I won’t let it be. But right now, in this silent tomb of an office, frustration isn’t just a companion. It’s a cage.

The data mocks me. Rows and columns of perfect, sterile information that give up nothing. I lean back, my eyes aching from the glare. It’s too clean. A professional job.

My mind, tired of chasing digital ghosts, starts to wander down a darker, more personal path.

The Rimestones.

It’s always them, isn’t it? The root of every poison tree in my life. Could they have a mole? It feels too subtle for my father’s brute-force approach.

But my mother... her cruelty was always more surgical. A precise cut, not a bludgeoning. And Payton? Vain, but not stupid. She’d love the idea of ruining something I built.

Someone.

The thought solidifies, cold and hard in my gut. There has to be someone on the inside. Someone with access. Someone who knew which deal would hurt the most. Someone who knew it was mine.

The sun is dipping below the skyline, casting long shadows across my desk. The workday is over, but the work isn’t. It’s just changing shape.

I can’t do this alone. I’ve hit a wall. And he’s been carrying this entire weight on his own, trying to shield me from it.

But he doesn’t need to be shielded. He needs a partner. And I need his mind.

I shut down my screens, the room plunging into a deeper gloom. A new kind of resolve clicks into place, quieter than the frantic searching, but steadier.

I’m going home. To our home. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to lay it all out. Every dead end. Every suspicion. The Rimestone theory.

Maybe, between the two of us, we can find a thread he missed. Maybe my inside knowledge of that viper’s nest, combined with his ruthless logic, can finally see a pattern in the dark.

Together. We’ll find the lead.

– – –

REOMEN

The investigator’s voice was a dry, factual rasp in my ear. I stood at the penthouse window, watching the city lights, my body a coiled spring of contained fury.

"We’ve traced the digital footprint," he said. "It was sophisticated. Routed through three proxy servers, designed to look like an external hack."

"I’m not paying you for the problem," I bit out, my voice low. "I’m paying you for the source."

There was a pause on the line. A hesitation I didn’t like.

"That’s just it, Mr. Daki. The initial entry point was external, yes. A phishing vector we’re still tracing. But the data itself... the Luminex files... they weren’t pulled from the main server."

My grip tightened on the phone. "What are you saying?"

"The files were accessed and transmitted from a terminal with direct, internal access. The logs are clear. The digital key used to encrypt the data packet for transfer was unique to that machine."

The city outside the glass seemed to sharpen, every light a pinprick of cold focus. "Which terminal?"

Another pause, longer this time. "The access credentials, the key... it all points to one machine, sir."

"Spit it out."

"It was the machine in Ms. Rimestone’s office."

The world didn’t slow down. It stopped.

The phone felt suddenly cold and heavy in my hand. The investigator kept talking, something about the specific timestamps, the impossibility of it being a remote spoof, but the words were just noise.

Paige’s office.

The call ended. I must have said something, some grunt of dismissal. I don’t remember.

I lowered the phone, my hand trembling with a fine, almost imperceptible shake. I stared at my reflection in the dark glass, but I didn’t see myself.

I saw her. The look in her eyes when I found her in that hallway. The feel of her trembling against me. The way she’d buried herself in the data for days, trying to find the leak herself.

Confusion.

It hit me like a physical blow to the chest, stealing my breath. It wasn’t anger. Not yet. It was a white-hot, blinding static, scrambling every thought, every certainty.

Her computer.

Why? How?

It made no sense. It was the one answer that answered nothing.