The phone slipped from Ryan’s hand and skidded across the thin rug; its screen glowed with the lawyer’s name and a link he hadn’t wanted to see. For a second the room existed in a blur, Eve’s hand, warm on his wrist; the hum of the air-conditioning; the faint clatter from the little kitchenette below. Then the news landed like a fist.
“Oh my God,” Ryan muttered, voice low as concrete. He thumbed the link and the page bloomed: a feed, an exposé, a dossier pulled together by a freelance financial journalist who’d smelled blood in the water.
Screenshots of private emails, redacted bank transfers, anonymized testimonies, pieces that, if stitched together, painted a single, ugly picture: Jonathan Ashbrook, chairman, had been feeding tips, arranging trades before board announcements, buying a
