"Tell me what you found," he said. Not confirming that he already knew. Listening.
She told him. She had been thorough — more thorough than he had expected, though he wasn't sure why it surprised him. She had cross-referenced the energy bills with the production reports, identified the pattern in the logistics company's client billings, run the numbers against publicly available ministry procurement data and found the gap. She had done in one evening what it had taken Dev three days to piece together from archive sources.
"I confronted him," she said. "Not immediately — I spent a week trying to convince myself I was wrong. I had a friend — a CA I trust completely — review what I had. She confirmed it. Then I talked to Rohit."
"What did he say?"
"He said the structure was a temporary measure to manage a cash flow problem from two years ago. He said it was being unwound. He said he would show me the documentation." A pause. "The documentation arrived the next day. Very detailed. Very professional." She looked at him. "It was fabricated. I'm certain of it."
"How certain?"
"The dates on the unwinding documents reference a Ministry of Finance directive that doesn't exist. I found the actual directive it's supposed to reference and the content doesn't match." She said it with flat certainty — she was past anger, past the initial shock of it. She was in the cold, clear state that followed shock when you were a particular kind of person. "He lied to me with fabricated legal documents. This is not a temporary oversight. It is deliberate fraud."
"And then the threats started," Arjun said.
The silence was very complete.
"Yes," she said. "Then the threats started." She looked at him. "You knew. When you asked about whether anyone's access concerned me, that first week — you already suspected."
