Sebastian’s hand found my lower back. This time the touch was different from the earlier ones — less social choreography,more something I didn’t have a clean word for. “I don’t know. But he’s been watching you for the past twenty minutes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” Ice in his voice. “And he’s been moving through Ashford’s people all evening.”
I watched the man hand something to the woman — a folded piece of paper, the same practiced discretion as a drug deal conducted in plain sight. She glanced toward the ballroom, then at me, and even from thirty feet away I could read the calculation in her eyes.
“The whispers,” I said slowly. “They didn’t start organically.”
“No.” Sebastian’s grip tightened slightly. “Someone is running them.”
The man at the edge of the terrace turned. For one fraction of a second our eyes met across the dark — his face forgettable, the deliberate anonymity of someone who moved through rooms without wanting to be remembered in them. But his gaze wasn’t anonymous at all.
He looked at me the way a predator looks at something that doesn’t yet know it’s being hunted.
Then he smiled — a small, unhurried thing — inclined his head in a mockery of greeting, and slipped through the doors into the ballroom.
“We should leave,” Sebastian said.
“Not yet.” I shook my head, the journalist instinct overriding every survival impulse telling me to go. “He wants me scared. He wants me to retreat. If I leave, he wins.”
“Em—”
“You brought me here to be seen.” I turned to face Sebastian fully, finding the steadiness in my voice that I always found when it mattered. “So let them see me. Let them see that whatever game that man is playing won’t make me flinch.”
Sebastian studied me for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression — not approval, but the particular recognition of someone seeing a thing clearly for the first time and understanding its full dimensions.
“You’re either the bravest person I’ve ever met,” he said, “or the most stubborn.”
“Can’t it be both?”
His laugh was low and reluctant and genuine. “With you, I’m beginning to think it always is.”
We walked back into the ballroom together. Sebastian subtly shifted his position as we moved — placing himself between me and the clusters of hostile conversations with a casualness that suggested it was instinct rather than strategy. I kept my head up. The whispers continued — I could feel them trailing me — but they mattered less now than the man in the shadows and the growing certainty that whoever was behind the Lakefront corruption was willing to do considerably more than whisper to protect their secrets.
Sebastian stayed at my side for the rest of the evening. He didn’t touch me again — not overtly — but his presence was a constant, steady weight at the edge of my awareness. When conversations turned cutting, he redirected them. When certain glances lingered in ways that had nothing to do with professional assessment, he positioned himself between me and the source with the quiet precision of someone who’d learned to shield without smothering.
I didn’t need his protection. I’d told myself that more times than I could count.
But standing in that ballroom surrounded by people who’d decided to make me a target, I couldn’t pretend that having someone at my back felt the same as fighting alone.
Because it didn’t. It felt completely different, and that was a problem I was adding to the growing list of problems I’d deal with when I had time.
Around eleven, the man from the shadows reappeared near the exit, deep in conversation with a tabloid journalist I recognized from various press events. Brief, intense — heads bent together, voices too low to carry. When they separated, the journalist’s gaze found mine with the specific hunger of someone who’d just been handed material.
“That’s going to be a problem,” I murmured.
“Already handled,” Sebastian replied. “His editor owes me a favor.”
I turned to look at him. “You can’t silence everyone.”
“No.” His eyes tracked the man, who was moving smoothly toward the exit with the unhurried purpose of someone who’d accomplished what he came to do. “But I can make sure the people coming after you have to work harder than they planned.”
“Why?” The question came out before I could decide whether to ask it. “Your company is the one I’m investigating. By every logical calculation, you should be hoping I fail.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to face me, and in the chandelier light his storm-gray eyes held something I couldn’t fully name.
“Because the truth matters,” he said simply. “And because you’re the only person I’ve met in years who seems to believe that as much as I do.”
