The scar tissue across my right hand pulls tight as I make a fist beneath the table. "What are our legal options?"
"Cease and desist, potential defamation suit—though the facts aren't technically false. Just... selectively framed." Beck meets my eyes. "We have grounds for invasion of privacy on some details."
I scowl. "That's a slow play. What else?"
"We could sue for defamation and invasion of privacy anyway. Costly, hard to prove, but it drains their resources and keeps them in court for months."
Rachel leans toward the camera. "I'd recommend starting with a retraction request. Sometimes these outlets fold rather than face legal exposure."
"I agree," Avery says, and there's steel beneath the softness. "Let’s give them a chance to do the right thing before we go nuclear."
I almost admire how much she still believes in second chances. In forgiveness. Hell, if she hadn’t, she and I wouldn’t be together now. Still, every instinct inside me rejects the thought of showing these bastards a speck of mercy.
"No." The word lands harder than I intended, and I feel Avery stiffen beside me. "We're not asking them for anything. They made their choice when they hit publish."
"There's a middle path." Gabe shifts forward. "We build a file on Rennick. Ethics violations, sloppy sourcing, prior complaints. I’m sure there’s plenty of ammunition if we look for it. Then Beck and I sit down with their brass and make it clear. Pull the article and discipline everyone involved, or Baine International takes its business elsewhere. Permanently."
I turn it over in my mind. Gabe's approach is elegant. Surgical pressure applied to financial weak points, the kind of leveragethat usually appeals to me. It protects Avery without creating headlines. It punishes without destroying.
But my mind keeps circling back to those photographs. Brenda's mugshot beside Avery in silk and diamonds. The implication dripping from every carefully chosen word.
All the solutions I’ve heard so far are too clean. Too slow. We’d be letting them walk away with their business intact, free to do this to someone else.
"It's not enough," I say. "Not for this. I need to be certain Avery’s safe."
“We can assign a protection detail. One for her mother too,” Gabe suggests.
I feel Avery stiffen next to me. "No security detail." Her voice is calm but certain, and she turns to face me directly, those green eyes holding mine without flinching. Then she glances at Gabe. "I appreciate it, Gabe, but I won't live like a prisoner. And I won't put my mother through that either, not after everything she's already survived."
I move my hand to her knee. "Avery—"
"I can handle this." Her chin lifts. "Maybe the best response is no response. Let the story die on its own instead of feeding it oxygen."
I would never call her naïve, but she doesn't understand how these people operate, how blood in the water only brings more sharks. I’m shark enough myself to know that. The tabloids will keep circling. They’ll dig deeper, looking for other wounds to scrape until they bleed. Wounds like the ones I’ve kept hidden for most of my life.
Avery's past has been ripped open for public consumption, and she's not crumbling. She's not hiding. She's looking for a path forward that doesn't require burning everything down.
If it were my past splashed across those headlines instead of hers—the abuse I endured, the betrayal of a boy by thegrandfather who was supposed to love him, and the night, many years later, when I sat with a gun in my hand and a stranger's self-portrait the only thing standing between me and oblivion—I know I wouldn't survive the exposure. Not intact. Not the way Avery's sitting here, spine straight, voice steady, trying to find a way through.
She's handling this with more grace than I ever could.
The realization doesn't comfort me. It makes the fear sharper, because if she can face this and I can't, what does that say about the man she's marrying? I don’t intend to find out.
"We're not letting this die." I push to my feet. "We're going to bury them."
I stalk to the window, rigid with determination. Behind me, I feel Avery's attention like a hand on the back of my neck.
I turn a hard look on my attorney. "Beck. Give me other options. All of them."
He nods. "We can acquire their debt. Force a sale, shut them down." He pauses, watching me. "Sixty to ninety days."
“Too slow. What else?"
"Pull all Baine International advertising from Rennick properties immediately. Without our accounts, they collapse inside two months."
Better. But still not immediate enough. I nod for him to continue.
"Or we pursue all three tracks simultaneously. Legal action, debt acquisition, advertising withdrawal." Another pause. "That's significant escalation, Nick."
