He was already selling me out.
My hand tightens on the wine glass. The anger is clean, familiar, useful. Anger I know what to do with. Anger has a target, a strategy, a resolution. It's the other feeling, the one that lives lower in my chest, the one I haven't been able to name or aim since a man with dimples touched my jaw on a mountaintop, that's the problem.
A knock on my door.
I check the time. Twenty-one hundred. Hayes's nightly check-in is usually at twenty-one-thirty. He's early.
I open the door.
He's in dark jeans and a thermal, same as always, but he's been out in the cold. His cheeks are flushed, his hair pushed back from his face by the wind, and he's holding a to-go container from the lodge kitchen.
"Cade made pot roast," he says. "You skipped dinner."
"I wasn't hungry."
"You skipped yesterday too." He holds the container out. "Not a request."
I take it because arguing about pot roast with a man standing on my porch in the March cold feels absurd even by my standards. The container is warm in my hands. The smell is obscenely good.
"Thank you."
He nods. Turns to leave.
"Hayes."
He stops. His shoulders shift when I say his name. A small tightening across the back of his thermal that he probably doesn't know I can see.
"You can come in."
He turns back. Studies me for a beat. Whatever he reads in my face, he takes it as the invitation I'm barely willing to admit it is, and steps inside.
The cabin feels smaller with him in it. He fills space differently than most men. Not just physical presence, though that's considerable. It's the way he occupies a room with quiet attention, tracking details, processing, filing things away. He sees my wine glass, the financial reports spread across the table, the reading glasses I've pushed up on top of my head. He sees all of it and doesn't comment.
"Sully send you the Whitfield financials?" he asks, taking the chair across from me.
I sit back down and open the container. The pot roast is perfect. Thick-cut vegetables, rich gravy, tender meat. Cade Marshall cooks like a man who believes food is medicine. "He did. It's damning."
"Damning enough to move on?"
"Almost. The shell companies need to be traced to their ultimate beneficiary. If it's a competitor, we hand everything tothe FBI and let them build the prosecution. If it's something else..." I take a bite. It's absurdly good, and I'm hungrier than I thought. "If it's something else, we have a bigger problem."
Hayes leans forward, forearms on the table. "Something else meaning what?"
"Meaning the break-in at my penthouse wasn't just intimidation. It was a message to someone. Proof that they have access. Proof of concept." I push the financials toward him. "A corporate competitor stealing research data is expensive and illegal. A hostile entity with physical access to a CEO is a leverage operation. That's a different threat level entirely."
He scans the documents. His reading pace is fast, and his eyes track the key data points without me having to highlight them. When he looks up, the easygoing charm is gone. The man looking at me now is the operator. Cold assessment, tactical mind, combat focus.
"You think someone's trying to force a sale," he says. "Destabilize the company, terrify the CEO, drive the stock down, and make an acquisition bid."
"It's a theory."
"It's a good theory." He sits back. "Have you told Warren?"
"Not yet. I want Sully to confirm the financial trail first. I don't move on theories."
"You move on data."
"Always."
