I didn’t have a response for that. My professional instincts said manipulation — longer game, can’t see the shape of it yet. My gut, the one that had led me to every major story I’d ever broken, said something different.
It said Sebastian Laurent was exactly as complicated as he appeared. And it said that whatever was happening between ushad stopped being something I could manage from a careful distance.
We left separately — his suggestion, to avoid feeding the gossip mill — but his text arrived before I’d reached my car.
The man from the terrace. My security identified him entering with the Thornton party. I’ll have more by morning.
I typed back: You don’t have to do this.
His response was immediate: I know. That’s precisely why I’m doing it.
I sat in my car for a long moment, phone screen glowing in the dark, the city quiet around me.
The last time someone had chosen to stand beside me instead of in front of me, I’d been too young and too green to understand what it meant. Every time since, the people I’d trusted to have my back had eventually calculated that the cost was higher than they’d budgeted for.
Sebastian Laurent was calculating constantly. He’d told me that himself, on a balcony in November, with the city spread out below us and neither of us pretending we were there for any reason except each other.
The question was what his numbers were telling him.
And the more dangerous question — the one I sat with all the way home to my apartment, the one I was still sitting with when I finally fell asleep — was what mine were telling me.
Chapter Eight
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The Peninsula Hotel disappeared behind us as my driver pulled away from the curb, and the town car settled into the particular quiet of a city moving past tinted glass.
Emilia sat in the corner opposite mine, the emerald dress catching streetlight in flickers, her hands folded in her lap with the studied stillness of someone whose mind was moving very fast. I recognized the posture. I’d been watching her long enough to know the difference between Em at rest and Em processing — the slight tension in her jaw, the way her eyes tracked the passing city without really seeing it.
She was running calculations.
So was I. Mine kept arriving at conclusions I wasn’t ready to act on, which was a new experience for a man who had built his entire life on the principle that clarity preceded action.
“You’re staring,” she said without looking at me.
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?” The familiar edge in her voice, but softer than usual — the evening had worn something down in both of us. “New ways to make my job harder?”
“About whether you have any idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
She turned to face me then, hazel eyes catching the glow of Michigan Avenue’s storefronts. “I’ve been investigating corruption since before you built your first skyscraper. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Do you?” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’re being tracked by people who don’t play by journalist rules. They don’t care about your sources or your ethics. They care about silencing problems.”
“And I’m a problem?”
“You’re a goddamn catastrophe waiting to happen.”
She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Coming from the man whose empire might be built on fraud, that’s rich.”
The accusation should have stung. Instead I found myself drawn to the fire in her expression — the way her jaw set when she was preparing for a fight, the way she never once adjusted her posture to make herself smaller in a space. Every executive in my boardroom had, at some point, made themselves smaller in my presence. Emilia Rivera had never once tried.
“I told you before — I didn’t authorize those materials. Someone in my organization is using the Lakefront project to line their own pockets, and when I find out who, they’ll wish they’d never heard my name.”
“Such confidence.” She shifted slightly, her knee brushing mine through the fabric of her dress. The contact sent heat racing up my thigh. “You really believe you’re innocent in all this?”
“I believe you’re too smart to think I’d personally oversee concrete specifications on a development project. I have peoplefor that. People who are apparently better at betrayal than I gave them credit for.”
