Leverage

The board session ended without a vote — Imogen adjourned it the moment the room devolved into raised voices, citing procedure, buying Naomi exactly one night she didn't feel grateful for.

Warrick found her afterward in the empty executive kitchen, pouring coffee she didn't actually want, just to have something to do with her hands.

"You've been busy," he said, leaning in the doorway like he still had every right to it.

"Say what you came to say, Warrick."

"Fine." He stepped inside, closed the door softly behind him — a courtesy, or a threat, depending on how you read it. "You have a folder full of things that will look, to the wrong audience, like this company is rotten to the core. Investors don't distinguish between one man's mistake and institutional failure. Employees don't either, not really, not once it's a headline. You blow this open publicly, you don't just end me. You end the paychecks of eleven thousand people who had nothing to do with any of it."

"That's not a reason to bury a crime. That's a description of the damage you already did."

His smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes went colder. "There's a version of this where you take the exit package I'm still owed a say in, quietly step back from the investigation, let legal handle it internally with discretion. Nobody outside this building ever needs to know whose name is on that trust."

"And the worker who could've been standing under that scaffolding?"

"Compensated generously, I'm sure, and quietly." He said it like a settled fact, not a threat, which somehow made it worse. "Naomi. I built half of what you're standing in. I know where every wire runs in this company — including the digital ones. Servers have a way of cleaning themselves up, when the people with old access privileges don't get around to being revoked in time."

He straightened his cuffs, unhurried, already turning for the door.

"Think about it overnight," he said. "By morning, some of what's in that folder of yours might not exist anymore."