Page 172 of Knot For A Moment

I shook my head. With the way his mind worked, Jace should have been a lawyer. But he loved his field too much for it. “And they opened up?”

“Like desert flowers in a rainstorm. The delays were all due to theater repairs that had been inexplicably scheduled over the weekend of the performance. Always something that ‘really needed to happen’ and was extensive enough to take up time.”

I looked down at the numbers in front of me and their dates. I punched the button on my phone. “Anna?”

“Yes, Mr. Black?”

“Can you pull me the full budgetary breakdown from both this year and last year? I want it itemized, no matter how small.”

“Of course. I’ll email it now.”

Jace leaned his elbows on his knees. “You’ve got an idea?”

“I need confirmation, though I still don’t understand why Ian would bother to do it. I don’t see the motivation.”

Grabbing my cell, I called Mark Thurman. He answered on the third ring. “One of these days I’m just going to say no, Gabe.”

“No favors this time, just a question. One that might help solve some of our… problems.”

“Shoot.”

My email pinged with the documents from Anna, and I opened the spreadsheets. “When was Ian given access to SCB’s accounts and authority to use them?”

“Six months ago. His contract was signed, and he needed some expenditures for things. It was easier, rather than him go through five layers of approval for things we were already going to agree to. I gave him a budget, he didn’t exceed it. Why?”

“I’ll let you know. Thank you.”

He was quiet for a second. “Please do.”

The stage repair that had fucked over the schedule was complete now, and it was beautiful, thanks to the substitute contractors I brought in. The work was good and it was a good investment. But the date of the original repair? Too coincidental.

“Anna,” I called, not wanting to talk through the phone about it.

She pushed open the door. “Yeah?”

“Were you the one who scheduled the original stage repair?”

“No,” she shook her head. “I don’t know who did. Mr. Chambers informed me about it when he came in the first time for all those meetings. Seemed pretty pissed about it.”

“Okay, thanks.”

The stage floor wasn’t the only strange expense. There was enough here to account for the discrepancies we were seeing, but because they happened in between the official seasons, they hadn’t made it onto the spreadsheets. Accounted for, but in the dates we didn’t usually look at.

“So he did it,” Jace said. “And he’s done it before. Over and over.”

“Butwhy? And why is he so focused on Sloane?”

He pointed at me. “I thought about that. And I think it’s exactly what Trent said. Reputation.”

“How does pushing people to their breaking point help his reputation?”

Jace stood, pacing back and forth. “But that’s the thing. He didn’t push them to breaking anywhere else. He pushed them until they begged him to push the show back, and he did. He wasgraciousandgenerous. As soon as they pushed him to give them a break, it sounds like he turned into a completely different person.”

“And we didn’t do that,” I said, the truth dawning. “I wouldn’t let him push the show back because of the tickets and the marketing. No one came to beg for it. They just buckled down and did it.”

“Not only did the whole company do it, they did itwell. Sloane was fucking glorious and she danced through her heat to do it. It wasn’t a failure. The whole company, and Sloane, overcame all the obstacles he threw at them. The show opened brilliantly, and it’s still going well. Instead of viewing him as a savior, they don’towe him shit.”

“Fuck me.” I sat back in my chair. He manipulated things so wherever he went, he looked like a hero. The creative director who truly cared and gave people a break when it was too much—at the expense of the company. He made them think he cared about them no matter the cost, without anyone knowing he’d put them in that position in the first place.

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