Ste opened the email. The sender was ''L''.


    Frowning, she was about to delete it when her eyes snagged on the content, freezing her in her tracks.


    "Joshua found out you''re looking for Sellers Burton. He''s already moved him."


    Ste wasn''t surprised that Leonard Lerman knew about the investigation-she was using hiswork, after all. What shocked her was how terrifyingly fast Joshua had caught on. Even using an entirely separate intelligence apparatus, he still sensed it.


    After a few seconds of heavy silence, she typed a reply: "Where is he now?"


    Leonard was apparently still awake. The response came back almost instantly: "Still digging."


    This was Solmaris—the Lerman family''s backyard. If someone as wildly connected as Leonard Lerman needed more time to track a captive down, it proved just how lethal Joshua''s countermeasures were.


    Just as Ste was about to close the app, another email from L popped into her inbox.


    "Those three assistants are Joshua''s people."


    Ste''s pupils shrank.


    Joshua''s people.


    To prevent any moles from infiltrating her inner circle, Wilbur and Gideon had been handpicked by Abby from a group of operatives trained specifically by the Watson family. Their loyalty was absolute; they couldn''t be bought, and they would never betray her.


    Now that Ste held the reins of the Williams Group, she desperately needed to cultivate a loyal guard of her own. But with Wilbur and Gideon both sidelined, she had been forced to start from scratch. This was exactly why she had been in such a terrible mood recently. Finding people who were trustworthy, highly skilled, and perfectly suited for the job was no easy feat.


    And now Leonard was telling her these three new girls were Joshua''s spies?


    For a split second, Ste wondered if


    Leonard was just trying to stir up trouble. She had always trusted Joshua implicitly, believing wholeheartedly that he would never do anything to hurt her. Even reading Leonard''s message, her first instinct was to rationalize it Joshua knew she was short on reliable help, so he secretly nted three elite


    operatives to help ease her burden.


    But if he really just wanted to help, why not tell her? Why keep it a secret?


    And more importantly, these girls had supposedly been pulled by Abby


    from Antoney Watson''s ranks. If


    they belonged to Joshua, that meant the real candidates had been intercepted and swapped out somewhere along the line.


    Once the seed of doubt is nted, it grows like a weed. Ste desperately wanted to trust him, but Joshua''s way too erratic She had been writing off all his strange actions as symptoms of his illness, blinding herself to what was really going on.


    belraviertely had el


    Sleep was entirely out of the question now.


    Not knowing where Joshua had gone, Ste walked over to his study and knocked lightly on the door. No answer.


    She pushed the door open. The room was pitch ck. He wasn''t there.


    Instead of turning back, she remembered the notebook she had seen him writing in previously. She knew it was a massive breach of trust to snoop through his office without his permission.


    But her gut was screaming that he was hiding something huge.


    She nced at his massive desk. The notebook was nowhere to be seen. On the surface, there were only a few foreignnguage books on finance. Nothing useful. She warred with herself for a moment before finally pulling open the top drawer.


    Insidey a neat stack of corporate documents. She flipped through them absently, about to put them back, when a file bearing the Chapman family name caught her eye.


    Just as she reached for it to get a closer look, a crisp, elegant voice sliced through the silence from the doorway.


    "Star, what are you doing?"