Howard nodded slowly, something like pride flickering across his weathered face. “Then we do this right. Ironclad sources, documented six ways to Sunday, legal review at every step. Laurent wants to play games with ownership structures and media leverage, we make sure there’s nothing he can use against us.”
“And if it implicates the parent company?”
“Then we take it to outlets he doesn’t own.” Howard gathered the documents into a neat stack. “You’re not alone in this, Em. But you need to understand — from this point forward, you’re not just investigating a real estate scandal. You’re potentially taking on a man with the resources to destroy your career, your reputation, and this newspaper if he decides you’re a threat.”
I stood, tucking my clutch under my arm. The voice recorder inside it contained hours of audio from the gala — evidence I’d need to transcribe, analyze, and protect.
“He already thinks I’m a threat,” I said. “He just hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.”
Howard almost smiled. “Then let’s make sure you’re ready when he does.”
I walked out of his office into the quiet newsroom, my heels clicking against industrial carpet. The night shift was sparse — a few reporters chasing deadline stories, the cleaning crew emptying trash bins. Normal. Familiar. Unchanged.
My phone buzzed. Jenna.
You never answered. Hot worse or corrupt worse?
I stood in the middle of the empty newsroom, looking at the screen for a long moment.
The honest answer was neither. The honest answer was that hot and corrupt had turned out to be the same person, and I’d found that out in the worst possible order, and the part that scared me most wasn’t the corruption at all.
It was the balcony. It was for now. It was the way he’d pressed his lips to my temple afterward like punctuation on a sentence neither of us had finished writing.
Both, I typed back.Definitely both.And it’s so much worse than I expected.
The response came immediately.When has that ever stopped you?
Never. That was the problem.
I stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the parking garage, watching my reflection in the metal doors. A journalist in a borrowed dress, clutching evidence against a billionaire who might already own part of her employer — and who had, twenty minutes before she’d known his name, dismantled her completely on a balcony forty floors above the city.
I wasn’t walking away from this story. Not from the corruption, not from the man at the center of it, and definitely not because he thought he could outmaneuver me.
Sebastian Laurent thought he knew how this would end.
He was wrong.
But for the first time, standing in that elevator with the city falling away beneath me, I wasn’t entirely sure I was right either.
Chapter Three
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The morning after the gala, I couldn’t focus worth a damn.
I’d been staring at the same quarterly report for twenty minutes, the numbers blurring into meaningless shapes while my mind kept circling back to her. Dark hair twisted into something that looked held together by sheer force of will. Hazel eyes that sparked with challenge every time she parried one of my questions. The way she’d stood in that service corridor like she owned it, completely unintimidated by a room full of people who would have tried, if they’d noticed her.
And then the balcony.
The city spread out below us, her hands gripping the iron railing, the November wind doing to her hair what it had done to everything I’d been telling myself about the evening — stripping away the careful arrangement and leaving something I hadn’t planned for.
I’d left deliberately. That was the part I kept returning to, the part that sat wrong no matter how many times I examined it from different angles. The assistant had come. The speechesneeded me. Both things were true. But I’d also known, in the three seconds between the door opening and my decision to leave, that she was about to ask my name — and that once she knew it, something would shift irrevocably.
So I’d made the shift happen first. On my terms. The way I made everything happen.
The problem was that it hadn’t worked.
I’d walked back into that ballroom and delivered a keynote address to three hundred people while some part of my mind stayed on that balcony, cataloging details with the obsessive precision I usually reserved for acquisition targets. The specific way she’d laughed when I pushed back. The sound she’d made when the last of her resistance finally gave — breathless and surprised, like she hadn’t expected to come undone quite so completely. The moment afterward when she’d turned her cheek against the cold railing and opened her mouth to ask, and I’d been saved by a door swinging open at exactly the wrong moment.
