I smiled again.
“You thought she’d protect you,” I said. “She won’t. She never planned to.”
He shook his head.
“You can’t?—”
I leaned in, let my smile sharpen.
“But I will.”
I pushed another photo toward him. And another. Flight logs. Off-the-record meetings. One blurry picture of him holding hands with someone half his age at a hotel Selene owned.
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
“You’re going to tell the press Selene orchestrated the audit to sabotage us and take our board seats.”
“That isn’t true,” he whispered.
“It doesn’t need to be true,” I said. “It needs to be loud.”
He was still staring at the pictures. I knew what he saw. Not the evidence. Not the damage. His reflection. A man who thought he could lie to a Lawlor and walk away.
I tapped the cigarette once more. And exhaled war.
Loyal
I didn't turnon music. Didn't light a candle. Didn't pour a drink.
The silence was sharper than any of those comforts could have softened. I liked it that way. I liked the stillness, the hush that came just before collapse.
I wasn't here to be soft. I was here to ruin her.
The glow of the screen was the only light in the apartment. It flickered over the glass in my hand, untouched. Half-melted ice floated like the last remains of mercy.
The numbers on the screen didn’t blur. They never did.
I ran my fingertip across the audit reports, tracing the patterns I knew better than her own lawyers. Selene had built her empire like a fortress. Tidy. Polished. Pretty. But even fortresses rot when the bricks don’t match the foundation.
She forgot I knew what was under the floorboards.
She forgot who kept her secrets clean in the early days. Who sanitized her shell companies. Who caught the first three wire errors she pretended didn’t matter.
She forgot me.
So now I was going to remind her.
I opened a cloned copy of her real estate filings. Cross-referenced the digital timestamp with the private entry she thought I’d never find. The one registered under an alias we used to joke about.
She had a sense of humor back then. It was one of the first things she buried when she decided power looked better in red lipstick. A flick of a key. One date altered. Another keystroke. A discrepancy introduced.
A signature I copied from a perfectly legal agreement, inserted onto one that should have never seen daylight. Just enough. Just a crack.
The kind of mistake that gets flagged by junior auditors. The kind that makes boards nervous. The kind that ends empires quietly. I zipped the file. Attached it to a burner account.
Drafted the email to a journalist I knew from the charity circuit. The kind who still believed in stories that made people bleed.
No name signed. No return address. Just the facts. Just the noise. I hit send. Then I leaned back. Closed my eyes. And breathed.
