Daniel stops. His fists are clenched at his sides, the knuckles gone pale.
"I will sue you." His voice has climbed half an octave. The composure is gone. What's left is the man I saw in our apartment the night I told him it was over, the one who gripped my wrist and told me I was making a mistake I'd regret. "You stupid bitch. You think your life has been hell? Wait until—"
"Go ahead," I interrupt him. "Sue me. Your lawyers will have the pleasure of meeting mine. Adrian Kade."
The name hits him like a physical thing.
His face changes. The anger doesn't disappear, but something else arrives beneath it, something colder and more calculating,because Daniel knows that name. Everyone in LA corporate law knows that name. Adrian Kade doesn't take cases he loses, and the fact that he's representing me tells Daniel everything he needs to know about how thoroughly the ground was prepared before I walked through this door.
"He was present for the interview," I don't know where the steadiness in my voice is coming from but it's here and I'm using it. "So I don't think you'll find much ground for legal action. And the optics?... What will people think when you sue me for mentioning that the photos were stolen from your phone? Because that's what happened, right? That's your version. On the record."
Daniel opens his mouth to say something but stops when we start to hear several phones chime with notifications.
Dozens of them. A cascade of notification chimes rippling through the open floor beyond the glass walls of his office, the specific digital chorus of fifty devices receiving the same message in the same moment. Pings and buzzes and the soft percussive vibration of phones against desks.
The open floor has gone quiet. Heads bent over phones. A few people already looking up, their eyes finding the corner office, finding Daniel standing there, and the expressions on their faces are a study in the exact moment when professional neutrality collides with personal shock.
Daniel turns back to us.
"What have you done?" His voice is louder now. Rising. "What the hell did you say?"
Owen steps forward.
"The same thing you did to her," His voice is measured. "We made sure that everyone on this company's contact list received a link to the interview. With your name highlighted."
He turns to me. The corner of his mouth curves into a smile.
"I thought it would be a nice touch," he says.
I didn't knew he was going to do this. I smile back. "It was a really nice touch."
I turn to Daniel. He is standing, his face the color of old paper. Suddenly he looks smaller than I remember. Diminished. The office and the view and the nine-hundred-dollar-an-hour power structure he built his identity around, and all of it just became the backdrop to his exposure instead of his shield.
"We won't take any more of your time," I say. "Enjoy having your name associated with a crime." I hold his eyes. "After all, is like you said… Nothing dies on the internet."
We turn and walk out of his office.
Through the open floor, I feel the eyes. Every desk, every face, every person in this space looking at the four of us moving through their grid of glass and light. I keep my back straight. I keep my pace even. I don't rush. I don't look down.
We reach the elevator. Jace presses the button. The doors open immediately, as if the building itself wants to help us leave quickly.
We step inside. All four of us. The doors close.
The silence lasts two seconds.
I lean back against the elevator wall. My knees give first, then my spine, then my shoulders, the whole scaffolding of composure I've been holding releasing in a single controlled collapse. My head tips back against the cold steel.
Jace reaches me first, his arms wrapping around me from the side, pulling me into his chest. "You were terrifying," he says against my hair. "I mean it. That was the scariest thing I've ever seen, and I've watched Reid fight a bear."
"It wasn't a bear," Reid says from behind me. His hand finds the back of my neck. Wraps around it. Holds. The grip is warm and steady and contains more than any sentence he would know how to build. "It was a cub."
Owen steps close on my other side. He puts his hand on my waist and his forehead against my temple and breathes me in.
My eyes burn. I close them.
Reid pulls me closer. His mouth is near my ear.
I nod against his chest.
