"They weren't just the photos I'd sent him." The words are coming faster now, tumbling, the dam cracking. "He'd recorded me. Without me knowing about it. In the shower. When we were… " I gesture vaguely, uselessly. "He angled the camera so his face never showed—"
"Maya." Reid stops my rambling. I look up. His face is absolutely still. "You don't have to rush this."
But I do. Because if I stop I won't start again.
"I was fired." I say it simply. "They said I wasn't suitable to be around children. They didn’t even let me say goodbye."
Jace makes the sound of a man whose body has reacted before his mind can intervene. He pushes off the desk and takes two steps toward the window and turns back and his face is filled with rage.
"He didn't stop," I say. "He created fake dating profiles. With my name, my photos, my phone number, my address. The descriptions said I… " I swallow against the nausea that rises every time. "That I was into things I'm not into. That liked to be forced to…Men came to my apartment," I say. "Strange men. At my door. Calling me names I—" I stop. I'm shaking. I didn't realize until now but my whole body is vibrating, a low-grade tremor that starts in my hands and extends to my shoulders and I press my arms against my sides to contain it. "I moved.Changed my number. He found out. It started again. I moved again. And Again."
"Did you go to the police?" Owen asks.
"I filed a report. Pressed charges. He is a lawyer, he has connections, money, the kind that buys better attorneys than the DA's office can field." The bitterness in my voice is something I can't scrub out and I don't try. "They brought him in. He said his phone was hacked. That he wasn't responsible for the distribution. That he understood my frustration but I should have been more careful because… " I recite it from memory, the exact words, because they have been living in my head for months rent-free, " 'nothing dies on the internet.' "
"Fuck," Jace swears.
"I couldn't prove it was him. The photos I sent voluntarily muddied the case. The DA declined to prosecute. I gave up because the alternative was my mental health and I'd already lost my job, my apartment, my dignity in front of every parent and colleagues and I didn't have anything left to spend on a fight I couldn't win."
I run out of words.
Not gradually. Abruptly. Like a tap turning off. I've said everything. Every piece of it. The worst thing that's ever happened to me is now in this room with these three men and I am standing on the other side of a desk. Just standing here. Waiting.
The silence stretches.
Jace reaches me first.
He doesn't speak. He wraps both arms around me and pulls me against his chest and holds me there with a grip that doesn't ask anything and doesn't offer platitudes and doesn't pretend this is fixable with a hug. Just holds.
"If you want to fight him," Jace says, into my hair, "we will fight him. I don't care what it costs. I don't care how long it takes. If you want him to answer for this, we will make him answer."
I shake my head against his shirt. "I can't. He has resources I can't match. Connections. Lawyers. He's untouchable."
Jace pulls back. Just enough so he can look me in the eyes.
"Maya," he says. "We also have resources” He takes a deep breath in and says the most unexpected thing. “We own True North."
The words don't register. I blink.
"The company." He says it plainly. Matter-of-fact. "Reid and Owen and me. We built it. We own it."
I look at Reid. He meets my eyes. Nods once.
I look at Owen. Owen is looking at the laptop screen. He hasn't closed it. His face has the same careful blankness I saw in my colleague's expression at the Christmas party.
"And we are in the process of a major capital injection," Jace continues. "We're talking about significant resources. Enough to make Daniel Hargrove's legal team look like a public defender's office."
I can't process this. The dissonance between the men I know and what Jace is telling me is so vast that my brain simply stalls, caught between the before and the after like a gear that can't find the next tooth.
And then Owen's voice with the precision of a scalpel.
"The deal will not hold. There's a morality clause."
33
MAYA
True North.
