Page 147 of Sugar & Shadows

I smiled against her crown. “Of course I did.”

She tilted her head back and beamed at me. “Between the tank top and the snacks, I might just have to fuck you again.”

“We’ve got all night.”

Chapter 38

Sabrina

“I’m late to meet Nina.” I scooped up a mountain of paper from the library conference table, searching for my phone charger. “What have you got?”

“Depends. On a scale of one to federal indictment, how wild are you feeling today?”

“Meg,” I chastised, straightening.

A child screamed in the background. “He flung a booger at me.”

“The Sugar Moon syrup financials. Weird.” Her fingers tapped against her keyboard aggressively.

“Weird how?” I sank into the chair, resigned to wait.

“Too clean. Too tidy. This is a regional maple syrup manufacturer in Vermont, not the Pentagon. Their cybersecurity should be basic and maintained by some IT goon named Doug who resets the passwords once per quarter.”

That was very specific. Poor Doug.

“But this? Government-level intrusion detection? Encryption? Layered authentication protocols? They spent a lot of money protecting maple syrup spreadsheets.”

A chill ran through my body.

“Not normal.”

“No shit,” I replied, pinching my eyes shut.

Another cry on her end of the phone, followed by Meg’s response of “Are you bleeding?” She was quiet for a few seconds, then, “Then go watch Elmo.”

She sighed, then the clicking started up again.

“Not that it stopped me. Servers were scrubbed eleven months ago. Seventy-two hours after Will’s body was found.”

Curiosity piqued, I sat up straighter. “Scrubbed?”

“Yup. And wait for the fun part. Gaps. Big ones. Directories removed. But they didn’t do a triple scrub of the metadata, so I found it.”

Obviously. “What did you find?”

“Research archives, thousands of files with internal and external environmental testing results, financial transfer records. Documentation of ownership shares being transferred to Arcadian Biotech.”

Motherfucker.

My pulse quickened.

“So then I got curious about Arcadian,” she went on. “Fun fact? They were purchased by a hedge fund company two years ago. Blackbriar Capital.”

My breath caught. “Isn’t that?”

“Yup, the same one that owns Sugar Moon.”

“But that’s an SEC violation.”