The Leak
They found out about the photo the way they found out about everything that week — badly, and too late to stop what came next.
"He knows we're working together," Daniel said, phone in hand, jaw tight. "Someone's been feeding him information since the article ran. It's not the reporter — she wouldn't burn a source before the story's even developed further. It's someone closer."
It took a day and a half of quiet, furious work by Eleanor's assistant — the one whose predecessor, it turned out, now worked for Victor Ashford directly — to find the leak, and when they did, it wasn't the scandal Daniel had braced for.
It was his own executive assistant, Priya, who'd taken a call three weeks earlier from a headhunter offering double her salary at Ashford Capital, contingent, the email trail eventually showed, on "keeping her current employer informed of anything unusual."
Priya cried when Daniel confronted her. She hadn't known what she was feeding him would end up in a blackmail folder — she'd thought she was reporting harmless scheduling gossip to a recruiter to secure a better job. By the time she realized what Victor actually wanted, she said, she was too afraid to come forward.
Daniel believed her, mostly. It didn't change what it cost them.
"He knows about the meeting with Eleanor," Daniel told Claire that night. "He knows you're planning to speak at the vote. Which means he's had eleven days to build a defense, and we've had about six hours."
Claire sat very still in her kitchen — the same kitchen where Eleanor had asked her to trust her, the same table where this entire second act had started. "Then we stop being careful and start being fast."
The shareholder meeting was in three days. Somewhere across the city, Victor Ashford was rehearsing a very different version of the story than the one they were about to tell — and for the first time since the folder had landed on Daniel's desk, Claire realized she wasn't afraid of standing in a room and telling the truth in front of people who'd already decided who she was.
She was afraid of what Victor might have prepared to make sure nobody believed her.
