“Bullshit.”
The word landed hard. Something shifted behind his eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“You expect me to believe that Sebastian Laurent — the man who controls every detail of his empire — had no idea what was happening on his flagship development project?”
“And you expect me to believe,” he said, moving around the desk with the slow, deliberate patience I remembered from a balcony railing, “that Emilia Rivera would sit across a café table from her investigation target and then walk into his office alone if she truly thought he was guilty of everything she suspects?”
He was close now. Too close. Close enough that I could see the individual threads of gray in his eyes, the faint scar on his knuckle, the careful control in the set of his jaw.
The balcony was in the room with us. It had been since I walked through the door. Neither of us had said it and both of usknew it and the knowing was louder than anything either of us had actually said.
“Maybe I’m here to get a confession,” I said.
“Maybe.” His voice had dropped. “Or maybe you’re here because you can’t stop thinking about it either.”
He didn’t say me. He said it. And we both knew exactly what it was.
The response that moved through me was immediate and unwelcome and completely unsurprising by now. I held my ground.
“That’s incredibly presumptuous.”
“Is it wrong?”
I should have said yes. I should have stepped back, re-established the professional distance, remembered every reason this man was dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with corruption scandals and everything to do with the fact that he was looking at me exactly the way he’d looked at me on a balcony before the city disappeared.
Instead the space between us contracted, degree by degree, the way it had in a corridor, on a balcony, across a café table — like proximity to him was something my body had decided to pursue regardless of what my better judgment had to say about it.
His hand came up slowly, telegraphed, giving me every opportunity to step back.
I didn’t step back.
His fingers brushed my jaw — barely a touch, the same barely-a-touch as a strand of hair tucked behind an ear in November wind — and I felt it in my spine.
“Emilia.” My full name this time. Not Em — the only name he’d known me by on the balcony. Emilia. Like he’d been waiting to say it since the moment he’d learned it.
The distance between us had become almost nothing.
And then I remembered.
Not the investigation — though that was there too, the weight of it, the months of work and the source I had to protect and the story that mattered. What I remembered was simpler and more devastating than any of that.
I remembered standing at the back of a ballroom with my champagne glass nearly slipping from my fingers. I remembered the careful, deliberate unreadability of his expression — the expression of a man who had known exactly who I was the entire time. On the balcony. In the corridor. Every moment he’d looked at me like I was something worth figuring out, he had already known.
He’d left before I could ask his name. On purpose.
And now here he was, saying my name like he’d earned the right to.
I stepped back.
Not far. Not dramatically. Just enough to let the air back in, to let the space between us mean something again.
His hand dropped.
“I can’t.” The words came out quieter than I intended, stripped of the professional armor I’d walked in here wearing. “I won’t.”
Sebastian went very still. Something moved across his face — not surprise exactly, something more complicated. Respect, maybe. The real kind.
