“Don’t contact me again.”
He stood. And something in his face changed—the careful corporate surface dropping away to something underneath that was rawer and wrong. He wasn’t angry. That was what made my skin go cold. He looked hurt.
“You don’t have to do this.” Quiet. Certain. Like he was explaining something obvious to someone who’d gotten confused. “I’ve watched you for three years, Charlotte. I know what you need better than he does. Better than anyone. What we could build together—what we’ve been building, whether you’ve seen it or not—don’t throw that away for a man who only knows how to acquire things. You don’t have to choose him.”
The music was still playing. The woman at the next table was still on her phone. The world was still turning. And I understood, standing in a coffee shop in Aspen with Richard Sterling looking at me like I owed him something I had never once offered, that this had never been about SEAS.
“Charlotte—”
“My name is Charlie. And you need to leave me alone.”
I picked up my laptop, my bag, left the scone and the espresso, and walked out. My hands were shaking. I got to the Range Rover and sat in the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel at ten and two and breathed.
The timeline restructuring. Six weeks. Signed by Pierce Industries.
Tommy’s gear should have been pulled from service.
I pulled out my phone and opened the SEAS grant portal. Logged in. Navigated to the project dashboard.
The amended timeline was there. Filed two days ago. New milestone schedule, new deliverable windows, resource reallocation memo attached. Everything clean, professional, thorough. The kind of work that would look, to anyone reviewing it, like a well-managed acceleration. An operational decision.
My name wasn’t on it.
I sat in the car for a long time. The steering wheel was cold under my hands. The mountains were enormous and still outside the windshield and I could see, if I turned my head, the ridgeline where Asher’s house sat against the sky.
He knew where to look too, I thought. Richard knew the house. The road. The ridgeline. He knew I was here and how long I’d been here and that I came into town for coffee. And the thought that followed was the one I didn’t want:how?
And then, two seconds later, the answer. The typed note in the car’s envelope, the one I’d found when I first arrived and filed under Pierce Construction efficiency:Standard safety features plus GPS tracking for field deployment logistics.The Range Rover. A company vehicle with a tracker built in, registered to Pierce Industries, accessible to anyone with the right credentials or the right bribe. Richard had always been good at finding the right bribe.
He was in the study when I got back. Half-closed door. Phone to his ear. I heard him say “Jax” and then he saw me and his expression did something complicated—relief, then a tightening, then the neutral mask sliding into place.
He ended the call. “You’re back early.”
“Richard Sterling is in Aspen.”
I watched his face. I watched it the way I watched data coming in from a new site—looking not for what I expected but for what was actually there.
What was actually there: no surprise. Not a flicker of it. His jaw tightened. His hand came up and pressed against the back of his neck—the migraine spot, I realized, the place where the tension coiled. But he did not look surprised.
“Where,” he said. Not a question. An intake.
“Cooper Street. The coffee shop you recommended. He was waiting for me, Asher. He knew where I’d be.”
Asher was already moving. Picking up his phone. Pulling up something on the screen. His body had shifted into the mode I’d seen in Roatan when the wine arrived with the card—operational, contained, every system online.
Too fast. He was moving too fast. The way you move when something confirms a fear, not when something blindsides you.
“Did he touch you?”
“No.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Not directly. He told me things.” I sat down in the leather chair across from his desk—Shane’s chair, I thought absurdly—and looked at the legal pad on the surface between us. I could see the list from here. Items in his sharp handwriting. Numbered. Organized. A plan already in motion.
“He told me about the SEAS timeline.”
Asher went still. Not the controlled stillness of a man managing his response. The stillness of a man who’d been caught.
