Someone within his organization. Someone close enough to authorize decisions in his name. Someone who’d been using the Lakefront project as a front for activities that had nothing to do with real estate development.
I turned to the final page.
It wasn’t documentation at all.
It was a photograph.
My photograph. Grainy, taken from a distance, showing me entering the Laurent Enterprises building three days ago. Time-stamped. Annotated with my home address, my phone number, my most recent byline.
Beneath it, handwritten in neat block letters:
STOP DIGGING. FINAL WARNING.
My hands shook badly enough that the paper crinkled.
I looked up, scanning the ballroom for the silver-haired man, but he’d dissolved completely into the crowd. Sebastian was nowhere visible either, though whether that registered as relief or something else, I couldn’t honestly have said.
This was more than corporate corruption. More than code violations and bribed inspectors. Someone had been watching me. Someone knew where I lived, where I worked, what I was building.
Someone wanted me scared.
The hell of it was, they were succeeding.
I shoved the envelope into my clutch and headed for the exit, the evening’s appetite for networking completely destroyed. Whatever I’d walked in here carrying — professional ambition, careful strategy, the complicated weight of an almost that refused to resolve itself — I was walking out carrying something heavier.
Fear. The real kind. The kind that settles in your bones and makes you check the shadows.
But underneath it, threading through it like wire through muscle, was something else entirely. The thing that had gotten me into this career in the first place. The thing that had survived betrayal and professional setbacks and every person who’d ever told me I was too stubborn, too reckless, too unwilling to recognize my limits.
Anger.
Whoever had sent that photograph thought they could frighten me into silence. They’d miscalculated.
I took out my phone and pulled up Sebastian’s number, fingers steady despite everything.
Tomorrow. Your office. 9 AM. I’m ready to discuss terms.
The response came before I’d made it to the street.
I’ll be waiting.
Three words. No signature. But I could hear his voice in them anyway — that low, controlled certainty that had been making my spine straighten since a service corridor at a gala that felt like a lifetime ago.
Whatever came next, I was done circling the edges of this.
Time to find out what we were both really made of.
Chapter Seven
Emilia “Em” Rivera
The ballroom at the Peninsula Hotel dripped with the kind of excess that made my journalist brain start cataloguing details like a crime scene investigator. Crystal chandeliers casting fractured light across silk gowns. Waiters in crisp black uniforms gliding between clusters of Chicago’s elite like well-trained ghosts. The clink of champagne flutes punctuating conversations worth more than my annual salary.
I’d agreed to come because of the alliance. That was the professional reason, the one I’d recited to Jenna three times while she watched me get ready with the expression of someone who knew exactly how many times a person needed to repeat a thing before they started to believe it.
The actual reason was standing somewhere in this room, and I had approximately thirty seconds before I found him or he found me.
I adjusted the neckline of my dress — emerald silk Jenna had insisted on, borrowed from her considerably more glamorouswardrobe — and gave up tugging at it. If Sebastian Laurent’s crowd wanted to judge me, a few extra inches of neckline weren’t going to tip the scales in either direction.
