My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Something in the pattern made me reach for it.
Daniel’s message contained a photo and three words that turned my blood to ice.
Threat confirmed. Old rival.
The photo showed Emilia leaving her apartment that morning — time-stamped, annotated, a red circle drawn aroundher face with the particular precision of someone making a point rather than a mistake.
The message below was four words:
She’s next. Move fast.
I looked at Emilia, still warm against my chest, her breathing evening out toward something close to sleep for the first time in what I suspected was days.
I looked at the photograph on my phone.
I looked at the city beyond the glass — the empire I’d built from nothing, the skyline I’d been chasing since I was seventeen years old and helpless in a kitchen that smelled like alcohol and broken things.
I hadn’t been strong enough then.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand, pulled her closer, and started making calls in my head.
Whatever game had been running in the shadows of this investigation had just declared itself openly.
That was a mistake.
I was very good at dealing with mistakes.
Chapter Twelve
Emilia “Em” Rivera
Iwoke up to an empty bed and the low murmur of Sebastian’s voice somewhere in the penthouse.
For a moment I lay still, orienting myself — the unfamiliar ceiling, the city light coming through glass that stretched floor to floor, the particular quality of silence that belonged to spaces that cost more per square foot than my entire building. Sebastian’s bedroom. His sheets, which did in fact smell like expensive decisions and fresh linen, exactly as I’d imagined in my less professional moments.
Then his voice sharpened in the other room — clipped, controlled, the voice he used when he was issuing instructions rather than having a conversation — and the warmth of waking up here dissolved into something cooler.
I found my clothes, dressed, and followed the sound.
He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows with his phone pressed to his ear, his back to me, the city spread out behind him like a campaign map. He hadn’t heard me come in. I stood in the doorway and watched him pace — three steps left, three stepsright, the contained movement of a man who needed to be doing something physical but had confined himself to a room.
The tension in his shoulders told me everything his words didn’t.
He’d been at this a while. He hadn’t woken me.
I waited until he ended the call before I spoke.
“How long have you been up?”
He turned. The mask was back — the boardroom version, the one that processed problems and issued solutions and didn’t leave room for anything messier than strategy. I’d learned to read what lived underneath it. Right now, underneath it, was a man who’d seen a photograph of me with a red circle around my face and had spent the predawn hours trying to build a wall between me and whoever had taken it.
“A few hours,” he said.
“And you didn’t wake me because?”
