The question hung between us. I could have been offended — should have been, maybe. But I understood what he was really asking. After everything he’d told me about his past, about the people who’d taken what he’d trusted them with and used it as a weapon, he was asking if I was going to be one of them.
“I’m interested in the truth,” I said carefully. “Not Victor’s version of it. Not yours either.” I dropped my bag onto the chair across from his desk. “I want to write a story that exposes the corruption in your company, names the people responsible, and gives the public enough information to understand what really happened. If that story makes you look like a hero, fine. If it makes you look like a complicated man who made complicated choices, that’s fine too.”
“And if it makes me look like a villain?”
I met his eyes. “Then you’ll deserve it.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not anger — something rawer. More vulnerable.
“Victor was right about one thing,” he said quietly. “I have been trying to control the narrative. Protect my company. Protect my reputation.” He stood, moving around the desk toward me. “Protect you.”
“I don’t need?—”
“I know.” He stopped a foot away, close enough that I caught cedar and leather and the particular exhaustion of a man who’d been making calls since midnight. “You don’t need protection. You’ve never needed it. That’s what terrifies me.”
My breath caught. “Sebastian?—”
“I’ve spent my entire life learning that the only way to keep people safe is to control everything around them. The threats. The information. The outcomes.” His voice dropped. “But I can’t control you. I can’t predict what you’ll do or how you’ll react or what you’ll decide when this is over. And instead of making me want to push you away?—”
He stopped. Swallowed.
“It makes you want to keep me closer,” I finished.
“It makes me want things I don’t know how to ask for.”
The admission cracked something open between us. All the tension, the arguments, the push and pull of the past weeks — it crystallized into this moment. This choice.
“Then ask,” I said.
His hand came up, fingers brushing my jaw. “Stay. Not because I can protect you, but because—” He struggled with the words, and I let him struggle, because some things needed to be found rather than reached for. “Because you make me want to be the man you think I could be. Not the one I’ve been.”
“And what if that man doesn’t exist yet?”
“Then help me find him.”
I should have pulled back. Should have maintained the professional distance, kept the lines clear. But I’d already crossed those lines — on a balcony, in a car, in an elevator, in hiskitchen in the gray morning light. What was one more step into territory I’d stopped pretending I wanted to map?
I kissed him.
Not like before — not fueled by anger or desperation or the electric charge of antagonism finally given permission. This was slower. Deeper. An acknowledgment of something that had been building since the moment he’d looked at me on that balcony and seen past every defense I’d constructed, and I’d looked back and done the same.
When we finally separated, his forehead rested against mine.
“We need to take down Victor Corsetti,” I said.
“We do.”
“And I’m going to write this story. All of it. Including the parts you’d rather keep buried.”
“I know.”
“Are you ready for that?”
He pulled back enough to look at me — really look, the way he had that first night when he’d called me fascinating and terrifying in the same breath without using either word.
“No,” he admitted. “But I’m ready to stop hiding.”
It wasn’t a declaration of love. It wasn’t a promise that everything would work out. But it was honesty — raw and unvarnished and more valuable than any carefully chosen words could have been.
