Chapter 5 - The Software Audit
Six weeks after the engagement gala, the corporate fallout from the midnight severance had reached its peak. The Langley family had pulled their capital from the North Wharf development, and the Chicago financial papers had spent three days speculating about a "software glitch" inside Asteron Systems that had caused the sudden breakup of the city’s most prominent tech billionaire and the Langley real estate heiress.
Camille Harper sat at the large mahogany desk in the newly renovated secondary office on the first floor of Alder House. The room had once been a decorative library, but Mason had ordered the old velvet drapes removed, replacing them with wide glass partitions and three high-resolution security monitors that displayed the real-time operational status of the estate’s infrastructure.
She wore a simple, tailored navy blue dress—her new coordinator uniform—and her hair was pulled back into a neat, professional twist. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she verified the access logs for the north gate vendors.
"The catering logs from last Tuesday don't match the delivery manifests, Camille," a low, familiar voice said from the doorway.
Camille looked up. Mason Aldridge stood in the threshold, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms as he held a digital tablet. He looked tired—the shadows beneath his dark eyes deeper than usual from the corporate warfare he had been fighting downtown—but his posture remained entirely unyielding.
"I noticed that too, Mr. Aldridge," Camille said, sliding a printed spreadsheet across the desk toward him. "The gourmet produce supplier listed four deliveries of imported truffles, but the kitchen logs only register two. I flagged the invoice this morning before the accounting team issued the payment."
Mason walked into the office, his eyes tracking the neat, organized layout of the files on her desk. He took the spreadsheet, his fingers brushing against hers for a fraction of a second—a brief touch that sent a strange, warm spark straight to Camille’s chest.
"Excellent catch," Mason said, his voice dropping into that quiet, appreciative tone she had grown to look forward to over the past month. "Victoria used to manage the gourmet vendor approvals personally. It appears she was using the luxury food accounts to route secondary payments to her personal assistants in the city."
"It’s fraud," Camille noted quietly.
"It’s a pattern," Mason corrected, setting the tablet down next to her keyboard. "She spent five years building a structure based on the assumption that nobody would look at the small numbers. She didn't realize that when you build an empire on a flawed foundation, it only takes one person looking closely to bring the whole thing down."
He walked over to the wide glass window, looking out at the rear courtyard where the afternoon sun was turning the fallen autumn leaves into a sea of deep gold and amber.
"How is Lily adjusting to the new daycare center in Lake Forest?" Mason asked without turning around.
"She loves it," Camille said, her face softening into a bright, genuine smile. "She told her teacher yesterday that she lives in a castle with a grumpy giant who fixes computers."
Mason let out a short, dry laugh—a sound that had become far more frequent in the house over the past six weeks. "A grumpy giant. That’s fair, I suppose."
He turned back to face her, his arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes studying her face with an intensity that made the breath catch in Camille’s throat. "Camille... the board meeting next Thursday is the final clearance for the Asteron medical software infrastructure launch. The Langley group has filed a formal injunction attempting to block our utility patents, claiming the software was developed using their proprietary market research during the engagement."
Camille stood up from the desk, her heart beginning to hammer against her ribs. "Can they block it?"
"They can try," Mason said, stepping closer to the desk until he was standing just inches from her. "But to win the injunction, they need to prove that Victoria had direct access to the Asteron development servers between June and August. The security chief found an unlogged external hard drive in the west suite vanity after she left. It was encrypted using a private Langley key."
He reached out, his hand gently touching the edge of the mahogany desk near her fingers. "I need someone I trust completely to present the internal residential access logs to the federal grand jury in Chicago next Tuesday. The logs you’ve been organizing. The ones that prove the server drops occurred only when Victoria was on the property without my knowledge."
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Camille looked down at his large, steady hand, then up into his dark, analytical eyes. She didn't see the tech billionaire or the cold corporate engineer anymore; she saw the man who had stood in a servant’s bedroom and dismantled his own future to protect her child from a lie.
"I’ll do it, Mason," she said, using his first name for the first time in the light of day. "I’ll tell them exactly what the logs say."
