“Because you needed sleep.”
“Because you wanted to handle it before I could argue with you about it.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. Not a denial.
“I’ve arranged additional security at your apartment,” he said, his tone shifting into the register he used for board presentations. “Two men, rotating shifts. Discreet. You won’t notice them.”
“You arranged.” The words came out flat. “Without asking me.”
“The situation required immediate action.”
“The situation required a conversation.” I crossed my arms, aware that I was standing in his penthouse in yesterday’s clothes with my hair in a disaster and no shoes, and choosing to be entirely unbothered by that. “What else did you arrange while I was sleeping?”
Something flickered across his face. “My legal team is working on suppression for the article.”
I stared at him. “Suppress it.”
“We have a narrow window before?—”
“Sebastian.” I laughed, but there was nothing in it that resembled humor. “You cannot suppress a news article. That is not how journalism works. That is not how any of this works.”
“I can try.”
“And in trying, you prove every accusation they’re making.” I took a step toward him, because standing across a room from him while we had this argument felt like exactly the wrong geography. “Every move you make to protect me just confirms the narrative that I’m compromised. That I’m an asset you’re managing. That the story I’ve been building for months is just pillow talk dressed up as investigation.”
His jaw tightened. “So I should do nothing.”
“You should talk to me before you do something.”
“There wasn’t time?—”
“There was time to make four calls before six AM but not to wake me up for thirty seconds?” I held his gaze. “That’s not about time, Sebastian. That’s about control.”
The word landed the way I’d known it would. I watched him absorb it — the slight stillness, the recalibration behind his eyes.
“You don’t understand what these people are capable of,” he said finally. His voice had dropped, lost the boardroom quality. Something rawer underneath. “Hartley is just the piece you can see. The people above him have been moving money and influence through this city for years. If your investigation keeps pulling threads, you’re going to expose something far larger than one development deal gone wrong.”
I held his gaze. “Then explain it to me. Stop managing the situation and actually talk to me. Who’s above Hartley? How high does this go?”
Something moved across his expression — and I recognized it now, this specific flicker, because I’d seen it in the kitchen when he’d talked about his mother and in the car when he’d catalogued my habits. It was the expression of a man who was about to say something true.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “And that’s what terrifies me. Because whoever they are, they’re organized enough to have been watching you for weeks. They’re connected enough to place people at two separate events. And they’re ruthless enough to put your home address on a photograph and slide it under your door.” His voice dropped further. “They knew that would reach me. They did it because they knew.”
“Knew what?”
He looked at me across the charged space between us. The morning light was coming through the glass now, gray and early, catching the exhaustion in his face — the hours of calls, the weight of whatever he’d been sitting with since the text from Daniel had lit up his phone while I was nearly asleep on his chest.
“That you matter to me,” he said simply.
The words settled in the room quietly, the way true things sometimes did.
I moved toward him. “Then stop making decisions that treat me like something to be protected instead of someone to fight alongside.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“In practice they are, for you.” I stopped close enough to see the tension still living in his jaw, the controlled breathing. “Every time things get complicated, you retreat into this version of yourself that thinks protection means isolation. That thinks—” I stopped. The next word arrived without permission, without planning, without any of the careful management I’d been applying to this situation for a month.
“That thinks love means control.”
