The Trust

Malik Fenwick read the printout twice before he said anything at all.

"This doesn't just look bad," he said finally. "This looks like fraud, and it looks like it goes all the way up. Which means before we say one more word out loud in this building, I want it on a source I control."

He pulled the archived executive backups himself that night — the mirrored drive IT kept from every departing officer's laptop, sealed and dated the week of Warrick's resignation. Naomi stayed. Dahlia brought coffee nobody drank.

Most of what they found was ordinary: calendars, expense reports, a decade of board slide decks. But buried in a folder labeled, almost carelessly, "C.L. — Private," Malik found something else.

A hospital birth record from twenty-nine years ago. A sealed paternity test, results dated just after. A string of letters, warm at first, then increasingly tense, addressed to a woman whose last name Naomi recognized from the vendor file the second she saw it.

Lindqvist.

Naomi's throat went dry. "Corey Lindqvist isn't Warrick's nephew."

"No," Malik said slowly, reading the paternity result a third time to be sure. "He's his son. Kept off every family record, every biography, every press bio Warrick ever gave. Twenty-nine years of silence — and then, right before he walks out the door, he hands his own kid a forty-million-dollar contract with a company that's never poured a single bolt."

Naomi stared at the folder like it might rearrange itself into something less devastating. It didn't. "This isn't nepotism. This is theft with a family tree attached."

Her phone lit up on the desk between them before she could say anything else — Imogen Sato, board chair, calling at 11:40 at night.

Malik looked at the screen, then at Naomi. "Don't answer that yet."

She answered it anyway.

"Naomi." Imogen's voice was tight, careful, the kind of careful that meant she already knew something. "I need to see you first thing tomorrow. Before you go any further with whatever it is you're doing."