Julian didn't ask why Anita reappeared after all these years.
He didn't ask why she suddenly cared about GNV again—or how she knew so much.
He just followed her lead, like he once did in boardrooms, like she now needed him to in war.
They operated from the shadows. Meetings held in unlisted offices, burner phones switched weekly. Anita let Julian think she was simply angry, calculating, back in the fight.
What he didn't know—what no one could—was that she had died for trusting Marcus Delaney. Literally.
And now, she had been given a second chance.
This time, she wasn't here to survive.
She was here to win differently.
Julian delivered data the way he always had: chaotic brilliance wrapped in cynicism. Financial trails, offshore accounts, stolen board minutes—enough to trace the bleeding of GNV straight into Marcus's ghost companies.
"He's positioning himself for a silent takeover," Julian said, dropping a folder on her desk one night. "Ashcroft Holdings is the core. It's where the siphoned money ends."
Anita froze.
Ashcroft.
The name hit like a ripple in her bones. Before, it was a whisper she dismissed. Now, she recognized it as the lockbox Marcus used to fund the betrayal. The account from which he paid the woman who delivered the poison.
In the past, she'd been too late.
This time, she had the key.
"You're quiet," Julian said.
"I'm processing," she replied.
He nodded, then stood, stretching. "You're different, you know."
She didn't look up. "People change."
"No," he said, voice low. "You've hardened. Like someone who burned and came back colder."
Anita paused.
Just for a moment.
Then, she looked him in the eye. "The fire teaches you how to survive. But the ice teaches you how to win."
Julian studied her, but said nothing.
Later that night, alone in her apartment, Anita pulled the Ashcroft folder back out.
She traced the movements, the names, the signatures. All of it exactly as she remembered.
But this time, she wasn't the one walking into the trap.
She was laying it.
Every move Marcus made now added fuel to the fire he thought he'd already lit.
But Anita George was no longer the woman who died.
She was the woman who came back.
And she was going to bury him.
Not with fury.
But with silence.
And strategy.
And no one—not even Julian—would see it coming.