His expression shifted, storm-gray eyes narrowing. “I didn’t authorize that release. Daniel sent me a draft this morning, and I told him to hold it until we could?—”
“Until you could what? Ask my permission? Because that clearly wasn’t the priority.”
“Someone on the communications team jumped the gun. I’m handling it.”
“You’re handling it.” I laughed, and the sound came out bitter enough to etch glass. “Like you handle everything else? Behind closed doors, making decisions for both of us, letting me think we were actually equal partners in this?”
Around us, people pretended not to watch while absolutely watching. Phones appeared in hands. Someone was definitely recording this.
Sebastian stepped closer, his voice dropping. “Can we discuss this somewhere private?”
“Why? So you can control that narrative too?”
“Because what I have to say isn’t for public consumption, and neither is what you’re feeling right now.”
The intimacy of that statement — the presumption that he knew what I was feeling, and the infuriating accuracy of it — made me want to scream. Or kiss him. Or both, which was the entire goddamn problem.
“You don’t get to manage this.” I held my ground, refusing the step back my body wanted to take. “You don’t get to spin what’s happening into some story about miscommunication and corporate bureaucracy. You knew what that op-ed meant to me. You knew it was supposed to be ours — both our names, both our perspectives. And the first chance your company had to absorb it into your brand rehabilitation, they did. And you let them.”
“I didn’t let them do anything. I found out twenty minutes ago, the same time the story started trending.”
“Then say that publicly.” I gestured toward the stage where some charity executive droned about donation goals. “Get up at that podium and tell everyone your company published my work without authorization. Clear my name the way you promised.”
His hands flexed at his sides. The signet ring caught the light as he turned it unconsciously. “It’s not that simple.”
“It never is with you.”
The band shifted into something slow and elegant, providing soundtrack to our destruction. Couples drifted toward the dance floor while we stood frozen in our private catastrophe.
“The board is already calling for my resignation,” Sebastian said, his voice tight. “Half my investors are threatening to pullout. If I publicly contradict the press release my own company issued, I undermine whatever credibility I have left with the people I need to bring the Corsetti case to its conclusion.”
“And what about my credibility?” My voice cracked despite my best efforts — not with weakness, but with the specific force of something that had been held too tightly for too long. “What about every source who trusted me? Every editor who gave me space? Every reader who believed my reporting was independent?” I held the press release up between us. “You just handed ammunition to everyone who wants to say I traded integrity for access. For intimacy. For you.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched. “That’s not fair.”
“Neither is being erased from my own story.”
We stood there, breathing each other’s air, close enough that I could smell cedar and leather beneath his expensive cologne. Close enough that my body remembered every way his hands had touched me, every promise whispered in the dark.
It made the betrayal cut deeper.
“Em.” He reached for my arm.
I stepped back before he could touch me. “Don’t.”
“This isn’t what you think.”
“What I think is that you made a choice.” My throat ached with words I didn’t want to say in public, didn’t want to say at all. “You could have called me the second that release hit. You could have pulled it before it went to press. You have an army of people who exist specifically to manage situations like this. And instead, you’re standing here telling me it’s complicated.”
“Because it is?—”
“No. It’s simple.” I stepped back one more time, creating distance that felt like miles. “Either I’m your partner, which means my name and my work get treated with the same respect as yours. Or I’m just another asset to be managed, leveraged, absorbed into the Laurent machine whenever it’s convenient.”
Sebastian’s expression cracked — something raw and desperate breaking through the control he’d been working so hard to dismantle. “You know that’s not how I see you.”
“Do I? Because right now, all I see is a man who still can’t stop trying to protect his empire long enough to protect me.”
His legal team materialized like vultures sensing carrion. Three suited figures who arranged themselves around Sebastian with practiced precision, creating a wall between us as efficiently as any physical barrier.
