Isabella POV

The printer rattled again, adding another stack of budget reports to the mess on my desk. I pulled the pages closer and reached for my highlighter.

It was past midnight, and the student union basement had switched into its after-hours mode. The fluorescent lights buzzed, and the editors had gone home leaving behind cold coffee and sticky notes. I had the place to myself, and I loved it.

My laptop sat in the middle of the desk, surrounded by three versions of the athletic department’s allocation logs from the past two years. I’d started with the boring pages first. Coaching salaries, away game travel, equipment, facility maintenance. Everything sat where it was supposed to.

Then I hit the executive lounge renovation.

I pulled up the contractor invoice and checked the total. Then the university ledger. Then the donor index, to see who had paid.

Whitmore Holdings.

I tapped my highlighter against the desk. That was the third time tonight. First the athletic scholarship fund. Then the lounge. And now a fifty thousand dollar payment that the donor index called an equipment donation and the quarterly athletic report called a loan repayment.

Same amount, same quarter but different story.

"You're still here?"

I jumped, not that I’m ever going to admit that, though. Marcus stood in the doorway with a paper cup of vending machine coffee and his glasses halfway down his nose, and his gray hoodie was so wrinkled it looked like he’d been wearing it for days.

"Apparently," I said. "You could ask yourself the same question."

"I was waiting on the final proofs. Then I saw your light on."

"And you couldn't resist checking whether I was still alive?"

"Someone has to." He drifted over and looked at the mess. "Still on the athletic budget? I thought parking was your great love story."

"Parking was boring. This is better."

"It's numbers, Isabelle."

"It's where the numbers came from."

He sipped his coffee, grimaced, and set it down like it had personally offended him. Then he tapped the top page, where one name glowed yellow three times. His voice dropped. "Careful with that one. Whitmore money is everywhere. Scholarships, buildings, the basketball program. Walk around campus long enough and you'll trip over a plaque."

"I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm checking the records. If they're clean, they'll prove it."

"Sure. And when the administration gets nervous because a student started asking about donors?"

"Quiet is where the good stories hide."

"Of course it is." He shook his head. "Go home. Sleep and be a person."

"Goodnight, Marcus."

The door clicked shut, and all that was left was the wall clock ticking over the whiteboard.

I'll be honest about something. I've never cared about basketball. I knew the Whitmore name the way everyone on campus did. The plaque outside the library. Whitmore Atrium. Whitmore Scholars. The banner over the main gym entrance. Somewhere along the way, I'd stopped seeing it as a name and started seeing it as wallpaper.

That bothered me now. Wallpaper is the easiest thing in the world to hide something behind.

My mother has a rule I carry into every story: find out what actually happened before you decide what you think. I learned why when I was sixteen and spent a whole Saturday on the floor of a municipal office, reading construction complaints everyone had agreed to ignore. One document in that pile changed the entire story. I will never forget it. It's the reason I'm sitting in a basement at midnight instead of asleep in my dorm.

So I didn't decide anything. I pulled the audit report closer and flipped to the appendix, checking the scholarship entries I'd flagged earlier. One of the funds was managed through the Whitmore family trust.

I checked the account number against my notes. Then I checked it again.

It matched the account on the fifty thousand dollar entry.

That didn't prove anything. Donors move money through trusts constantly. But two different descriptions, one amount, one quarter and one account was not a coincidence I was willing to ignore.

I opened a fresh page in my notebook and wrote WHITMORE HOLDINGS across the top. I drew a line under it hard enough to dent the paper.

If the records were clean, I'd find that out.

If they weren't, I wanted to know why.

***

Nolan POV

Midnight in the gym is the only time nobody wants anything from me.

I'd stayed up late to put up extra shots, which is what I do when my wrist is talking and I don't want anyone to know. By the time I finally left, most of the team had already cleared out. Only Eli and a couple of guys were still dragging their bags toward the doors.

Eli caught his foot on his own shoelace. His bag hit the floor and every water bottle he owned went rolling.

The other two groaned and kept walking. I didn't. I crouched down and started grabbing bottles.

"Sorry, Cap," Eli mumbled. "I'm an idiot."

"You're a freshman. Same thing." I handed him the last bottle and clapped him on the shoulder. "Nobody helped me with mine either. Now go to bed."

He grinned and we headed out.

The walkway outside the student union runs right past the basement windows. I never look because nobody is ever in there at this hour.

But tonight, one light was on.

A girl sat alone at a desk buried in paper. Dark hair twisted up with a pencil through it. Highlighter in one hand, pen in the other. She didn't look like she was studying. She looked like she was working.

I slowed down. I'm not sure why.

The page closest to the glass had one word highlighted over and over in yellow, and I could read it from the walkway. It's the word on my passport. It's on the gym banner and the library plaque and half the buildings I walk past every day. I have never once seen it highlighted.

She glanced up and caught me.

Most people look away when you catch them staring back. She didn't; instead she held my eyes, calm and a little annoyed, like I'd walked into her office without knocking.

I should have kept walking but I stayed where I was.

"You coming, Cap?" Eli had stopped a few steps ahead. He followed my gaze toward the window. "Oh. That's Isabelle Reed."

"You know her?"

"My roommate writes for the paper. She's the one who made the dean admit the parking numbers were fake. They still talk about it like it's a legend." He shrugged. "She goes through everyone's budget. Why?"

"No reason."

I looked back. She'd already returned to her work. She wrote something at the top of a blank page and drew a line underneath it, hard enough that I could see her arm move.

I couldn't read it from the walkway. I'd been born under that word. What I had never seen was someone underline it like a question.