I was almost to the door when his voice stopped me.
“There’s a file on your editor. Howard Chen. Gambling debts he doesn’t want anyone knowing about. I could make those very public.”
I turned back.
“Touch him,” I said, “and I’ll make sure your remaining six months are spent in a prison hospital.”
Something flickered in Victor’s eyes — surprise, then something that looked almost like satisfaction, the expression of a man who had gotten the confirmation he was looking for.
“You’re more like Sebastian than you realize,” he said quietly.
I left without responding.
The cold outside hit me like a correction.
I sat in my car for a long time without starting the engine, working through the adrenaline crash in the particular silence of a street in the warehouse district at dusk — no traffic, no voices, just the distant sound of the river and the city’s low hum somewhere beyond the buildings.
Victor’s accusation sat with me.
The old man died in a house fire.
I turned it over the way I turned over everything — looking for the shape of it, the weight of it, what it would require to verify or disprove. Sebastian had told me his father drank himself into a grave. That was the version he lived with. Victor’s version was something else entirely, and the two couldn’t both be true.
I was a journalist. I knew what I needed to do with an unverified accusation from a dying man with a vendetta.
I also knew what I needed to do with the fact that I’d just turned down a briefcase full of evidence that might have answered the question definitively — because I hadn’t been willing to be used, even for the truth.
That choice would follow me. I understood that. If Victor’s accusation was real and I’d walked away from the proof, I’d have to find another way to the answer. If it wasn’t real — if it was thelast desperate move of a man trying to detonate something on his way out — then I’d made exactly the right call.
I didn’t know which it was yet.
What I knew was that I wasn’t going to figure it out sitting in a car in the warehouse district.
My phone buzzed.
Sebastian:Where are you? Daniel said you left the Tribune hours ago. I’m worried.
I stared at the message. Three hours ago I’d been watching him dismantle his empire at a press conference podium. Two hours ago I’d been in a warehouse with the man who wanted to finish the job.
I typed back:Coming to you. We need to talk.
His response was immediate:I’ll be waiting.
I started the engine.
The drive back through the city gave me time to settle into what had actually happened in that warehouse — not just what I’d refused, but what Victor’s desperation had confirmed. A dying man didn’t arrange elaborate traps for people who didn’t matter. Victor had spent years, resources, and what remained of his life trying to destroy Sebastian Laurent.
That kind of hatred required a specific kind of wound at its source.
I didn’t know yet what that wound was. But I would find it.
On my terms.
Chicago’s skyline glittered against the darkening sky as I crossed back into the city — all those towers of glass and steel, monuments to ambition and the complicated people who built them. Somewhere in that maze of light, Sebastian was waiting in a penthouse that smelled like expensive decisions and, now, a little like me.
I drove toward it with empty hands and a full head and the steady certainty of a woman who had just refused to be a weapon and was still figuring out what that made her.
Whatever conversation waited at the other end of this drive, I was ready for it.
