Page 7 of Monochrome (ORCA #4)

CHAPTER

SEVEN

JULIUS

Offering to come over to Ethan’s house had been a colossal mistake.

I’d known it the second the words had slipped out of my mouth.

The moment he opened the door wearing that damn Harvard sweatshirt and those jeans that slung low on his hips, I knew I was in so far over my head I could no longer see the surface.

I’d tried for the last two weeks to ignore what I knew to be true, that Ethan was my fated mate, that he was mine.

Up until he opened the door, I thought I’d been doing a pretty damn good job of keeping my distance.

Sure, I’d bought him coffee and lunch almost daily, but that was just a congenial thing to do.

I was just being nice.

It didn’t mean anything.

But it did, and when he opened the door, I could no longer lie to myself.

Not that it had really been working all that well anyway.

And then, when I factored in the twins, who had me wrapped around their little fingers from the very first time I met them, I knew I was totally doomed.

It was all too comfortable to eat pizza and watch a movie with Ethan’s little family.

And when Jude had fallen asleep against my side, the last of the objective, professional wall I’d tried to erect to keep Ethan out crumbled to nothing more than dust blown away by a stiff breeze.

In my heart, I didn’t believe Ethan was involved in skimming money from his company.

It didn’t matter that his credentials had been used to access and delete the transactions and associated files.

I knew it wasn’t him.

It couldn’t be.

But now, I had to know.

Ethan and I resettled on the couch, but this time, I didn’t reach out to link our fingers together.

I left space between us, tucking one leg underneath me and turning to face him.

My heart was lodged in my throat, and I swallowed hard to clear the ball of apprehension that had taken up residence and was making it hard to breathe.

“Do you ever go back to the office at night? After hours?”

Ethan’s brow creased.

“No. Not since the twins moved in. Before that, I’d either work late at the office or bring my laptop home and connect to the VPN. I haven’t even done that with the twins here. Usually by the end of the day, I’m so tired I zone out watching the Food Network or lie in bed staring at the ceiling, praying neither of the twins has a nightmare.” His gaze hardened.

“Why?”

His answer made the knot in my stomach unkink a little bit, but we weren’t out of the woods.

“I’m trying to put together a few pieces. I promise I’ll explain, but I have more questions, and I need you to be honest with me.”

Ethan crossed his arms over his chest. “Fine, and I’ll do my best. If you ask me about anything deemed proprietary, I won’t answer.”

I nodded.

“Do you know anything about offshore accounts that are tangentially tied to Grove Core via several different shell companies?”

The color drained from Ethan’s face.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I’ve discovered several offshore accounts that are not part of the Grove Core financial portfolio linked to a number of different shell companies that have received substantial deposits over time.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Is this a joke? Someone has been skimming from the company and hiding it offshore?”

“From what I’ve been able to tell, yes.”

Ethan shoved to his feet and paced across the room, his distress palpable.

His reaction could be a clever show, but I didn’t think anyone was that good an actor.

Ethan looked like he was a second away from throwing up the pizza he’d eaten onto the living room rug.

“Oh my fucking god. How? Why?” His gaze swung up to meet mine, his dark eyes going hard.

“How much is missing?”

“I don’t have an exact figure, but it looks like at least two hundred and fifty million over the last decade.”

“This has been going on for a fucking decade?” Ethan collapsed back on the couch, his head in his hands.

“How did I not see it?”

“When you were CFO, the outgoing transactions were small. Ten thousand here. Five thousand there. Amounts that were easy to explain away as line item expenses.”

Ethan cocked his head my way.

“I should have seen it.”

“That’s the point, though. You wouldn’t have.” I blew out a breath, hating myself for the question I was about to ask.

“Do you think your sister knew?”

Ethan went as still as a statue.

I wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

Longing to reach out and soften the blow thrummed in my fingertips, but I couldn’t cross that line, not until he answered my question.

He shook his head before he opened his mouth.

“No. Tessa loved Grove Core more than anyone. She was so proud to be leading the company. There’s no way she was skimming money off the top.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and when he looked at me again, he looked like he’d aged a decade in the ten minutes we’d been talking.

“If she’d been stealing from Grove Core, there would have been more in her accounts. She was well-off, but her liquid cash made sense given her income. She certainly wasn’t sitting on a quarter of a billion-dollar nest egg.”

“Is it possible she died before she could transfer the money?”

“No way. I taught her better than that, and there is no way in hell she would have left something like that to chance.”

“Okay.” I believed what Ethan was telling me, but I didn’t like where it was leading.

But before I could figure out the next question I needed to ask, he spoke again.

“Why did you ask if I ever went back to the office after hours?”

“I was able to find some evidence that the recent large transactions to the offshore account were deleted from Grove Core’s servers.”

Ethan’s eyes narrowed.

“And?”

“And it looks like you’re the one who deleted the transactions. Last week.”

He looked like I’d slapped him.

“What the fuck? When?”

“Last Thursday. At almost midnight.”

I watched Ethan’s face as he thought back to last Thursday.

“That was the day of the board meeting. When I asked you to look into the company’s full financials.”

“Yes.”

Ethan let out a humorless laugh.

“I can assure you I wasn’t in my office or on my computer here at home. I actually forgot to bring it with me when I left. After the shitty board meeting and forgetting to pick up the twins, I was pretty scattered. I left it on the charging dock in my office when we left. You were there.”

Mentally scrolling back to that day, I tried to remember if I saw Ethan grab his laptop.

He was right. He hadn’t.

Lily had handed him a picture she’d drawn, and he’d been fawning over it as we walked out of his office.

He’d left his whole briefcase behind.

He could have gone back to get it after I helped him load the twins into the car, but I already knew his security key card hadn’t been used to unlock any doors after hours because Felix had finally been able to pull those records.

“No. You didn’t have it.”

“So, what does this mean?” His face was unnaturally pale again as he started putting the pieces together.

“I think someone is trying to make it look like you’re stealing from the company and trying to hide it.”

“But why?”

I shook my head, wishing I had answers for this part.

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do? If I don’t know who is targeting me or why, how am I supposed to shut it down?”

“I know this is a big ask, but can you let me work on that?”

The crease between Ethan’s brows deepened.

“Why?”

Closing my eyes, I sighed.

Telling Ethan the truth wasn’t part of the plan for tonight, but I couldn’t keep it from him anymore and expect him to continue being honest with me.

“Because I haven’t told you the truth since our first meeting.”

His gaze turned icy, and I hated it.

“Explain.”

“My brothers and I have spent the last few months trying to untangle an intricate web tied to our grandmother and a famous painting.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Yes. She was an art history and classics professor by day and a renowned art thief by night.”

Ethan’s mouth dropped open.

“Before you get the wrong idea, it’s important to know she only stole art and antiquities that had been stolen already and sold on the black market, and she ensured the art and artifacts were returned to their rightful owners. She never made a dime from her extracurricular work, outside of the finder’s fees she claimed when she returned the art pieces.”

“Okay, but what does an art thief have to do with me?”

“I think I told you I have four brothers, right?”

He nodded.

“My oldest brother, Nero, was my grandmother’s protégé, but when she retired, he went into bounty hunting instead. He used to do some work with the Seattle PD. As a favor to a buddy of his, he took a job as a bodyguard for a hacker who was the target of a serious death threat. Long story short, Felix—that’s Nero’s mate and the hacker he was protecting—had gotten into the FBI servers and stolen a file as a prank when he was in college. Turns out, someone wanted the file he stole. He was kidnapped, and when we got him back, we found out the file contained a list of art thieves associated with a specific painting, The Evolution of Man .”

I looked up to make sure Ethan was still with me.

He didn’t look happy, but he gestured for me to continue.

“Our grandmother’s name was on that list, so my brothers and I launched our own investigation into the painting. A few weeks ago, my brother Quin tracked the painting to a private auction in Amsterdam. He installed himself as a potential buyer, and I hacked into the financials—that’s kind of my thing—being used by the black market dealer. As the final bids were tallied and the funds were transferred to the dealer, a transaction in an identical amount was redeposited into the buyer’s account.”

“The buyer was buying the piece for someone else.”

“Exactly. We were able to trace the transaction back to a shell company, AB Holdings Limited, and from there, we found first one, and then several transactions that originated from Grove Core’s accounts. The funds were bounced around through a series of other shell companies and banks, and it took us a while to figure out this was a pattern and not a one-off.”

“So, they sent you in to spy on me?”

My next words sat heavy and bitter on my tongue.

“Yes. I needed to see if I could match up any transactions from Grove Core directly.”

“But I just gave you access to our full financials last week.”

I tried not to wince.

“Yes, that’s technically true, but remember how I told you Felix hacked the FBI? He created a program he could use to remotely access your systems. We’ve had access to almost everything on your servers since the day you handed me login credentials.”

Ethan stood, rage burning in his eyes.

“Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my house. Right fucking now.”

But I didn’t move.

There was something about Ethan pissed off, fire shooting from his eyes, that turned me the fuck on.

“Please, let me finish.”

“If you don’t get out of here right now, I swear to god, I will call the police.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and unlocked the screen.

“Ethan, I believe it’s not you, but the fact remains that someone is trying to frame you, and it’s probably the same person who kidnapped Felix. The same person who is after the painting.”

“So, let them fucking have it.”

I stood too, getting as close to Ethan as I dared.

“We don’t know who it is. If we knew, we would have shut this down already.” I reached out to touch his face, but he batted my hand away.

“We need your help to figure out who is targeting our family. We have a common enemy. We need you to help us solve this.”

Fire still burned bright and hot in Ethan’s eyes.

“I’m so fucking pissed off right now.”

“I know.” The words were barely out of my mouth before Ethan’s hand curled into the front of my shirt and he tugged me into him, his lips crashing hard against mine.