Or the right moment. I still couldn’t decide which.
And then she’d been standing at the back of the ballroom with her champagne glass nearly slipping from her fingers, and our eyes had met across the crowd, and I’d seen the exact moment she understood. The fury that replaced the shock. The way she’d set her glass down with that precise, controlled motion and reached for her pen like it was a weapon.
Game on, her expression had said.
I hadn’t been able to look away.
My fingers found the signet ring on my right hand — rolling the heavy gold band, I realized, for twenty minutes without noticing. A tell Daniel would notice. I stilled my hand.
The smart move would have been to bury her. Not literally — I wasn’t a monster — but professionally. I had resources. Contacts. The kind of influence that could make an investigativejournalist’s sources dry up overnight and her editor suddenly discover budget constraints that required restructuring her position.
I’d done it before. Not often, but when necessary.
The thought lasted approximately four seconds before I recognized it for what it was — and rejected it with a force that surprised me.
She called it refreshing. No — I had called her refreshing. Standing in that corridor, watching her refuse to be intimidated, I’d thought the word before I could stop it and recognized it for the rare thing it was. People did not surprise me anymore. I had spent fifteen years building a life in which surprises were engineered out of every equation, in which I knew the angle of every approach before it arrived.
Emilia Rivera had surprised me three times before she’d told me her name.
I wasn’t going to bury her. I was going to meet her.
A knock at my office door pulled me from the spiral.
“Come in.”
Daniel Mercer had been my executive assistant for seven years — the only employee in my company who regularly told me things I didn’t want to hear. He stepped inside with a tablet tucked under his arm and an expression I recognized. He’d found something I wouldn’t like.
“Good morning, Mr. Laurent.” He crossed to my desk, setting the tablet in front of me. “I thought you’d want to see this before it gained traction.”
The headline glowed on the screen: LAKEFRONT DEVELOPMENT: FOUNDATION FOR FRAUD?
No byline yet. Just a preview piece from the Tribune’s online platform, clearly a teaser for something larger. But I recognized the precision of it — the way each sentence built on the last, methodical and controlled, leaving no exit routes for the subject.
“Emilia Rivera,” I said. Not a question.
Daniel nodded. “Freelance investigative journalist. She’s broken three major corruption stories in the past two years. Two resulted in criminal indictments.”
“Tell me everything.”
He pulled up a file, rattling off details with the efficiency I paid him handsomely for. “Thirty-one years old. Northwestern Medill graduate. Staff positions at the Tribune and Sun-Times before going freelance after a dispute with an editor about four years ago. Sources describe her as tenacious, thorough, and —” he paused, scrolling — “‘annoyingly unwilling to accept no for an answer.’”
A smile found my mouth before I could stop it.
Daniel’s eyebrows rose a fraction. He’d worked for me long enough to notice when something was off.
“She was at the gala last night,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “We spoke.”
“You spoke to an investigative journalist who’s actively building a case against your development project.”
“I didn’t know that’s what she was doing at the time.” The lie rolled off my tongue with the ease of long practice. It tasted worse than usual. I’d known exactly what she was doing the moment I caught her in that hallway. I’d seen the notebook, the recorder-shaped outline in her clutch, the ink on her thumb. I’d cataloged all of it and chosen to stay anyway — chosen the balcony, chosen for now, chosen to leave before she could ask the question I didn’t yet know how to answer.
None of that was something I was prepared to explain to Daniel.
“What’s her angle?” I said.
“From what we can gather, she’s looking into the foundation work on Building C. There are implications that inspections were...” he paused, “expedited.”
Expedited. A polite word for bribed.
