I froze. Had he lost his mind?
It wasn’t pointed at me. Not exactly. His hand shook, the barrel hovering somewhere between my chest and the wall behind me. What scared me most was that his finger was over the trigger. One slip and I was dead whether he meant it to happen or not.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said, his breath labored as if he was warding off his own panic attack. “But you don’t get to decide how this goes. I don’t care if you’re fucking the whole trio. You’re going to fix this.”
There was that phrase again.Fix this.Nothing was broken. Not that I knew of. What type of trouble was he in?
I lifted my hands slowly, trying my hardest to keep my voice even.
“You brought a gun into my apartment,” I said. “That’s not leverage. That’s a mistake.”
His jaw clenched. “You think I don’t know that?”
Good. At least he knew.
Which meant he was scared.
“Sit.”
He flashed the photo of me coming out of Sanctum. “I warned you.”
I sat down in the chair at my kitchen table and folded my arms. Why was he going through all of this? Then it hit me. “It was you. You hacked the system.”
“And if you had left things alone, I would have been very rich right now and no one would have been the wiser.”
“You still have a good sum of money. Just take it and go.”
Stan laughed. Not loud. Not amused. The kind of laugh that said he thought I was naive.
“Go?” he repeated. “You really think that’s an option?”
I held his gaze. “You got what you wanted. Enough to disappear.”
His smile thinned. “I didn’t get what Iearned.”
Something flickered in his eyes. It wasn’t greed.
It was panic.
“You don’t understand how this works,” he said. “I don’t get to just walk away.”
I felt it then. The shift.
This wasn’t about money anymore. It was about survival.
“You don’t understand how close I was,” he continued. “How clean it would have been if you hadn’t started asking questions, hadn’t started snooping where you didn’t belong.”
“I was looking out for the company,” I said.
“No,” he snapped. “You are paid to take orders from me.” He pointed a finger at his chest.
He reached into his bag and pulled out a laptop, setting it on the table between us.
What was he doing with Victor Hale’s company laptop?
My pulse spiked despite myself.
“You’re going to fix this,” he said through gritted teeth.
