"I'm capable of walking to a building."
"Seventeen-forty-five," he repeats, and then he's gone. The door closes with a soft click, and I'm standing alone in a mountain cabin eight hundred miles from my corner office, listening to the wind move through pine trees and the fading crunch of his boots on gravel.
I exhale through my teeth and sit back down on the bed.
My phone buzzes. Warren Park.
"Tell me you've settled in," he says when I answer.
"I've settled into a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a bodyguard who looks like he graduated college last spring."
"Hayes Donovan has a Silver Star and twelve years of?—"
"I read the file, Warren."
A beat. "And?"
"And he's competent. Annoyingly."
Warren, who has known me for six years and survived every one of them, laughs. "Give him a chance, Lex. Cross doesn't put his B-team on high-profile details."
"I don't need a chance. I need results. What's the status on the internal investigation?"
Warren shifts to business, and I shift with him. This is where I live. Data, strategy, outcomes. He walks me through the latest from the FBI team: the three suspects have been narrowed to two, both with access to the leaked research files, both with financial irregularities that suggest motivation. The break-in at my penthouse produced no usable forensic evidence, whichmeans either professional execution or someone on the inside who knew exactly where the cameras don't reach.
"The note," I say. "Any trace analysis?"
"Standard printer paper, laser printed, no prints. Whoever did it wanted you scared, not dead. This is leverage."
"Leverage implies they want something."
"Or they want you out of the way long enough to finish what they started."
My jaw tightens. I built Morrison Pharmaceuticals from a mid-tier generics company into a Fortune 500 powerhouse. I performed open-heart surgery before I was thirty, left medicine because the bureaucracy was killing my patients faster than their diseases, and turned my frustration into an empire that develops drugs other companies are too afraid to pursue. Everything I have, I built with my own hands, my own mind, my own refusal to accept the word no from anyone.
And someone is in my house. In my company. Selling what I've built to the highest bidder.
"Find them, Warren. I don't care what it costs."
"That's what I'm doing. Let the mountain men keep you safe while I work. Two weeks."
I end the call and open my laptop. The encrypted connection takes a moment to establish, and I use the time to unpack. Suits hang in the small closet. Heels line up beneath them. My toiletry bag goes in the bathroom, where the mirror reflects a woman who looks exactly like she's supposed to: composed, sharp, in control.
I lean closer. Forty looks back at me. The fine lines at the corners of my eyes that my dermatologist calls "expression lines" and I call evidence of a decade spent refusing to sleep. The first hints of softness along my jawline that no amount of discipline can prevent. The platinum blonde that my colorist maintains every three weeks without being asked.
I run a Fortune 500 company. I performed cardiothoracic surgery. I own property on three continents.
And twenty minutes ago, a thirty-three-year-old man with dimples looked at me like he could see past every single one of those accomplishments to the woman underneath.
That's what shook me. Not his age. Not his confidence. Not even his quiet refusal to be diminished by my dismissal.
It was the way he looked at me.
Men look at me all the time. In boardrooms, across negotiation tables, at charity galas where my dress costs more than their car. They look at me with respect, with desire, with calculation, with resentment. I've catalogued every variety of male attention over twenty years, and I can identify each one in under two seconds.
Hayes Donovan looked at me like I was a problem he intended to solve. Not my safety. Not the threat. Me. Like I was the most interesting challenge he'd encountered in years and he'd already decided how it was going to end.
No man has looked at me like that since before my divorce. And Robert was fifty-two, silver-templed, and the CEO of a tech firm worth twice what mine is. He was my peer. My equal on paper. Our marriage ended not with screaming but with the quiet realization that two people who need to be in charge of everything cannot be in charge of each other.
