Chapter 6: The Headline Nobody Expected

Evelyn read the text three times.

Stop digging, Miss Hart. Your father didn't listen either.

Her father had not just published a story. Someone was saying he had been warned. And had kept going anyway. Which meant either her father was braver than she had ever given him credit for, or he had not understood what he was walking into.

She was not going to make the same mistake.

She screenshot the message, emailed it to herself, and deleted it from her phone. Then she walked to the media center, sat down at her assigned desk in the press pool, and wrote the cleanest, most straightforward season opener preview piece of her career. Fifteen hundred words on the championship favorites, the circuit changes, and the technical developments fans should watch this season. She filed it to Clive by noon and got a reply in under four minutes.

Good. More like this. We need content not silence.

She typed back, Working on a follow-up feature. Driver profile. Will have it by end of week.

What she did not tell Clive was that the driver profile was going to be the container she used to stay close to Ryder Blackthorne while she figured out what Lucas Thorn did not want her to find.

The afternoon session was a media walkthrough of the circuit modifications. Evelyn joined the press group, asked her questions, filed her notes. She was almost back to the media center when her voice recorder buzzed with a calendar alert she had set the night before.

League transparency archive. Document window closes at five PM.

She had forty minutes.

The archive room was in the administrative building, two floors below the executive suites. A clerk with reading glasses and a policy manual gave her the access form. She filled it out, showed her credentials, and was escorted to a reading room with a single table and a box of physical files.

She had requested the financial disclosure records from the period surrounding the Blackthorne scandal. Eight years ago. The months immediately before and after her father's exposé ran.

The clerk set the box down and left.

Evelyn opened it.

Most of it was standard. Budget approvals. Facility costs. Racing team operational grants. She moved through it methodically, the way her professor at journalism school had taught her. You do not read for what you expect to find. You read for what does not fit.

Thirty minutes in, she found it.

A payment record. Dated three weeks before her father's article published. A consulting fee, paid from a league development account, to an entity called Grey Meridian Advisory. Forty thousand credits. No project reference. No signatory name beyond a set of initials she could not immediately identify.

Grey Meridian Advisory did not appear anywhere else in the file.

She photographed every page. She wrote down the initials. She put the box back in order and thanked the clerk on her way out.

She was walking across the lobby when her phone rang. Clive.

"Your preview piece just went live," he said. "It's already the most read item on the network today."

"Good."

"Evelyn." His voice shifted. "I got a call this afternoon. From the league's communications director. Asking why one of my journalists was pulling historical financial records from their archive."

She stopped walking. "That was a legitimate access request. I filed the correct paperwork."

"I know. I told him that." Pause. "Who rattled the cage?"

"I don't know yet."

"Be careful," Clive said. "I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you that someone noticed you in under three hours. That's not normal."

He hung up.

She stood in the lobby and counted backwards from ten and reminded herself that being noticed was not the same as being stopped.

She went back to her desk and searched Grey Meridian Advisory for two hours.

The company did not appear in any public business registry. No website. No filings. No listed directors.

It did not exist. Which meant someone had created it specifically to move money and made sure it left no trail.

She was so deep in the search that she did not notice anyone approach until a coffee appeared on the desk beside her laptop.

She looked up.

Noah Rivers stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking deeply uncomfortable about something. "Ryder sent me," he said.

"To bring me coffee."

"To check that you were still alive, technically. The coffee was my idea." He pulled up a chair without asking. "He told me about the text you got."

She stared at him. "He told you."

"He tells me everything. I'm his best friend and his beta. That's how it works." Noah's expression was honest in a way that felt out of place in this building. "He's worried."

"He doesn't worry about me. He wants me gone."

"He wants to want you gone." Noah said it like it was a simple correction. "Those are different things. Look, I'm not here to get in the middle of whatever is happening between you two. I'm here because someone sent you a threat on day one and Ryder thinks you're not taking it seriously enough."

"I'm taking it very seriously." She paused. "I'm just not stopping."

Noah looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled. It was a good smile. Uncomplicated. "Yeah. He said you'd say something like that." He stood. "Just. Watch your back in this building. Not everyone here is what they look like."

He left.

Evelyn looked at the coffee. Then at her screen. Then at the empty doorway.

She picked up her phone and opened a new note.

Grey Meridian Advisory. Payment three weeks pre-story. Initials on signatory line: L.T.

She stared at those two letters for a long time.

Then she started typing the fastest, most urgent email she had ever sent to a source.

She hit send.

Her screen went dark.

Not sleep mode. Off. Completely black, like the power had been cut, except the lights in the room were still on and her phone still worked.

She turned the laptop over.

The battery compartment was open.

Someone had been at her desk.

The woman appeared from nowhere.

One moment Evelyn was standing at the tech support desk trying to explain that her laptop had been tampered with, and the next, a hand closed around her arm and pulled her sideways into a service corridor.

She spun, ready to fight, and found herself looking at a woman roughly her age with copper hair, a Blackthorne Racing jacket, and an expression that said this was not a social call.

"You need to stop asking questions about Lucas Thorn in this building," the woman said.

Evelyn pulled her arm free. "Who are you?"