But buried in the financial labyrinth was something else entirely. Something that made me sit back in my chair and stare at the water-stained ceiling of my apartment.
Sebastian Laurent wasn’t just innocent — he’d been hunting the corruption himself long before I walked into his world with accusations and a recorder. He’d been actively investigating it for months before I ever showed up at that gala with my righteous indignation and a voice recorder in my clutch.
“Damn it,” I muttered, shoving my hair back from my face.
My phone buzzed. Jenna, checking in for the third time since dawn.
You alive? Saw the news. Some blogger is running a hit piece about you and Billionaire McBroody.
I typed back quickly.Alive. Working. Will explain later.
That’s what you said yesterday. And the day before. I’m starting to think you’ve been kidnapped by expensive suits.
I almost smiled. Almost.
Victor’s threat from last night wasn’t just another reputational attack — it was personal. A photograph of his mother’s nursing home. A single line of text:Everyone has something to lose.
Sebastian had gone cold when he’d shown me the screen at The Obsidian. Not angry — cold. The kind of stillness that came from years of learning to mask every emotion, every weakness.
He’d sent me home and spent the night making calls. I’d come home and spent the night making my own kind of calls — to Marco, to my notes, to the financial records that were assembling themselves into a picture far larger than anything I’d originally imagined.
By the time Sebastian had tripled security at the nursing home and arranged for his mother to be moved to a private facility under a different name, I’d already been awake for hours with documents spread across every available surface.
And then he’d texted:I need you to stay out of this.
That was three hours ago. I hadn’t responded.
My phone rang — not a text this time. Sebastian’s name lit up the screen, and I let it ring once before answering. I’d promised him the morning. It was morning.
“I’m not staying out of this,” I said.
A pause. Then his voice, rough with exhaustion that twelve hours of calls couldn’t fix: “I know.”
“Good. Because I found something.”
“Em—”
“Richard Hartley has been funneling money to Victor Corsetti for three years. Not just kickbacks from the Lakefront project. We’re talking systematic embezzlement across multiple Laurent Enterprises subsidiaries.” I flipped through the printed pages, my journalist brain cataloging details even as my chest did the complicated thing it always did at the sound of his voice. “But here’s the thing, Sebastian. You already knew that, didn’t you?”
Silence stretched between us.
“You’ve been building a case against your own CFO,” I said slowly, the realization settling in as the pieces aligned — my investigation and his had been circling the same truth from opposite sides all along. “Quietly. Without going public. Without involving law enforcement or the board.”
“Victor has people everywhere.” His voice was flat, controlled. “The police. The regulatory agencies. Even my own security team — I’ve had to vet them three times in the past year.”
“So you were going to handle it yourself.”
“I was going to protect my company and the people who work for it. The same way I’ve protected everything that matters since I was seventeen years old.”
I closed my eyes, remembering what he’d told me at The Obsidian. His father’s violence. His mother’s silence. The moment he’d finally fought back and discovered that power was the only currency that mattered in a world that respected nothing else.
“That’s not protection,” I said quietly. “That’s control.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes.” I stood, moving to the window where gray morning light was filtering through the curtains. “Protection means standing with someone. Control means standing in front of them and blocking their view.”
He didn’t respond immediately. I heard movement on his end — footsteps, a door closing, the particular quality of silence that meant he was somewhere private now.
