"I bought the gold dress," he murmurs, his breath warm against my lips, "because I want to spend the entire night imagining what it is going to look like pooled on the floor of my bedroom."
My stomach drops, a hard, dizzy heat settling low in my stomach.
He doesn't give me time to respond. He kisses me, his mouth claiming mine with a slow, devastating precision. I open up for him immediately, my hands gripping his shoulders to anchor myself as the world tilts on its axis.
He pulls back slightly, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw.
"We have two weeks until the party," he says, his eyes dark and completely focused. "For the next fourteen days, Preston is going to try to find a way to break this. He will use the media. He will use the board. He will try to make you doubt me."
"He can try." I look at him, the absolute certainty in my chest leaving no room for fear. "He won't succeed."
"No." Malcolm kisses the corner of my mouth. "He won't."
He lifts me off the counter, carrying me out of the kitchen and down the dark hallway.
The war is coming. The Vance family is going to throw everything they have at us to protect their empire.
But as Malcolm carries me into the bedroom and kicks the door shut, I realize I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
I am not the collateral damage anymore.
I am the architect. And we are going to burn their house down together.
CHAPTER 20
MALCOLM
Thirteen days.
For thirteen days, the Vance holding company has been a battlefield of quiet, vicious attrition.
Preston attempted to freeze the discretionary accounts twice; I countered by invoking the shareholder agreement and threatening to liquidate the security division's proprietary software. Simon gave anonymous interviews to mid-tier gossip blogs, trying to sustain the narrative that Audrey is a corporate spy. We ignored him until the media grew bored of his whining.
Audrey did not ignore him.
She rebuilt.
Every morning, she walked into the office I had made from the spare guest suite, tied her hair up with a pencil, and worked until the city outside the windows went dark. She secured freelance contracts. She argued with hotel owners about fire exits. She marked up blueprints on my kitchen island and left graphite smudges on the marble. The apartment no longer felt like a bunker. It felt occupied. Claimed.
That should have made me uneasy.
It did not.
It made me reckless.
I stand in my home office now, watching the secure server finish copying the encrypted ledgers onto two identical black drives. The files are not a bluff. Offshore accounts. Forged zoning permits for the South Side project. Shell corporations Simon used to reroute Audrey's contracts and operating funds. A decade of rot, all of it wrapped in my father's signature and protected by the infrastructure I built when I still believed control was the same thing as survival.
The progress bar reaches one hundred percent.
I remove the first drive and set it on the desk. The second goes into the inside pocket of my jacket.
Grant stands on the other side of the room, his hands clasped in front of him, his expression carved from stone.
“Sterling confirmed the board meeting before the toast,” he says. “Preston is insisting on it. He also hired an outside security firm for Simon’s engagement party. Four plainclothes contractors inside the ballroom. Armed.”
“Preston expects me to lose control in public,” I say.
“He expects to give you a reason.” Grant hesitates, which is rare enough to draw my attention. “There is one more thing. Russo was not the end of the inquiry into Barbara Jennings. Preston hired another investigator after the dinner.”
