Page 52 of Ghost

I let them work while I watched her face. Every few minutes, her brows drew together over a date or quantity, then smoothed once she found the matching record. When one entry stopped her completely, the change was small enough that only I caught it.

Her fingertip stayed planted beside the job number. She read the line once, then again, and reached for the tablet holding the company’s digital reports with a quickness that knocked one photograph sideways. I covered her wrist before she could send anything else to the floor.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This was one of the first displays I supervised by myself.” Tamsin pulled the tablet closer and entered the job number, her lips parting slightly as the report loaded. “I remember it because I checked everything three times and still barely slept the night before.”

The amount on the recovered list matched material found at the storage property. Bellamy’s final report claimed that same quantity had been fired, damaged, or destroyed during Tamsin’s display, but the field sheet she had saved showed it returning to the warehouse. She placed the original beside the digital report and traced the numbers with one finger, her expression tightening as the same material appeared in two places it could not have been.

“This job predates the fully electronic closeout system,” she explained, turning the papers so Stryker could see them. “Final adjustments were written into binders after the material came back. Anyone changing a quantity had to write the correction by hand and initial it.”

“Where are the binders?” Stryker asked.

“Locked cabinets inside the administrative office at our test range.” Tamsin’s gaze remained on the recovered list. “The binder for this job should still contain my original total, the handwritten adjustment, and whoever approved it.”

I looked at her. “Who has the keys?”

“Me, my parents, and the operations manager.”

The words settled into the room without anybody wasting breath pretending the answer was harmless. Cipher held out one hand for the job number and began searching an older Bellamy backup he had already copied after all this shit started. Waiting for permission was not something he was very good at.

Tamsin leaned closer to his shoulder while files opened and closed across the screen, and I moved behind her chair, resting one hand along the back.

“Partial digitization project seven years ago,” Cipher muttered as he worked. “Looks like somebody scanned pieces of the older binders and quit halfway through.”

“Probably when they realized how many years were in those cabinets,” Tamsin quipped, but the faint humor vanished when a scanned page filled the monitor.

Her original count sat near the top in handwriting I recognized from the field sheets Tamsin had kept at home. Lower on the page, another hand had increased the reported usage and placed two initials beside the altered figure. Tamsin stared at them long enough that the color slowly receded from beneath her freckles.

Cipher opened a second scanned closeout page tied to material recovered the night before. The same slanted handwriting changed another total, and the same initials marked the correction. Tamsin’s breath left quietly as she raised one hand toward the screen without touching it.

“He changed it.”

I came around the chair and closed my hand around the back of her neck. Her skin was warm beneath my palm, but the muscles there had gone rigid while betrayal hollowed the softness from her face. The bastard had taught her the business, watched her work twice as hard to earn respect and authority, then used records carrying her name to hide his thefts.

I wanted Len in a room without windows with his hand spread across a table while I caused some damage for every time he’d written Tamsin’s name beside one of his lies. But the steady pressure of my thumb beneath her hair kept my attention on the woman he had hurt instead of the bones I intended to break.

“I need the originals,” Tamsin muttered, pulling in a careful breath. “The scans only cover part of the binder.”

“Would you normally request them through the system?” Stryker asked.

He didn’t make the obvious assumption that the owner’s daughter could access whatever she wanted whenever she pleased. Because it had been clear from the start that this wasn’t how Tamsin operated. She’d done everything by the book so no one could accuse her of favoritism.

“Yes. The range office receives the retrieval request.”

“Which means he sees it,” Hawkeye concluded.

Tamsin looked at me. Her blue eyes remained hurt, but anger was beginning to harden beneath it. “He’ll know we found the old job number.”

I kept my hand at her neck. “Send it.”

Cipher got into the system and angled the laptop toward her. Tamsin entered the request, and I watched the submission go through without changing expression. We already knew Len was dirty. Letting him see the request gave him a reason to move while Black Crowns were watching.

The call came nineteen minutes later. Tamsin’s phone vibrated against the desk, Len’s name appearing on the screen while every conversation in the room stopped. Stryker pointed toward the speaker icon, and she answered with a steadiness that made pride cut through my rage.

“Hello?”

“Tamsin, I just saw your records request.” Len’s concern was smooth enough to sound practiced. “I came out to the range this morning to check the prep building, so I pulled the binders while I was here. They’re on the worktable in the administrative office.”