“It’s not.” She walked to my desk with purpose, her hands steady despite the gravity of whatever she was about to tell me. “It’s about Dex.”
My blood turned cold. “What about him?”
“He called me today. At the office.”
I was on my feet before she finished the sentence, my chair rolling back to hit the window behind me. “He what? How did he get this number? How did he know where?—”
“Kieran.” Her voice was calm, controlled, and somehow that was more terrifying than if she were panicking. “I need you to listen to me. All of it.”
She told me everything then. The phone call, the threats, the forty-eight-hour ultimatum that had already been counting down for six hours. But more than that, she told me about Dex’s admission—that he had been behind the systematic destruction of Cross Security, that he had found people with grudges to help him, that every crisis of the past week had been orchestrated to force exactly this moment.
“He’s been planning this for weeks,” she said, her voice steady despite the magnitude of what she was revealing. “Maybe longer. He knew about the merger, about our clients—about everything that mattered to you. And he’s been systematically destroying it to get to me. It almost feels like he had help . . . someone feeding him information he shouldn’t have access to.”
I felt something cold and violent unfurl in my chest. Not just anger, but something deeper, a protective rage I had never experienced before. “Son of a bitch.”
“There’s more. He has client information. Real information. Federal judges, corporate executives, people whose lives could be destroyed if their security details end up in the wrong hands.”
“We’ll contact law enforcement. The FBI, if necessary. This is domestic terrorism.”
“And how long will that take? How many people will get hurt while we’re building a case?” She leaned forward, her hands flat on my desk. “He’s not bluffing, Kieran. He’s patient now, methodical. This isn’t the drunk, impulsive man who shot me in an alley. This is someone who’s learned to plan.”
I started pacing then, my mind racing through options and finding them all inadequate. “We’ll trace the call. Find where he’s hiding. My team can?—”
“Your team has been compromised. Someone on the inside has been feeding him information for weeks.”
“I know. We found the breach days ago. It was Sarah’s login.”
Of course. This level of coordination, this intimate knowledge of our systems and clients—it could only come from someone with access. Someone I trusted.
“Who?” I asked, though part of me already suspected.
“It’s the only way?—”
“It’s not the way at all. It’s surrender. It’s letting a terrorist win because he’s threatening innocent people.”
“I don’t know. But Kieran, that’s not the important part right now. The important part is that he’s offering a trade.”
“What kind of trade?”
“Me for everything else. I go back to him, and he makes all of this disappear. The merger goes through, your clients stay safe, Cross Security survives.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Those innocent people are your responsibility. Your clients trusted you to protect them, and now their lives are in danger because of me.”
“Their lives are in danger because of him. Because he’s a psychopath who can’t accept that you left.”
“But I did leave. And he’s right about one thing—people are going to get hurt because of that choice.”
I moved around my desk then, needing to be closer to her, needing to make her understand. “People get hurt when they negotiate with terrorists, too. You think he’ll just disappear after this? You think he’ll honor whatever deal you make?”
“I think he’ll get what he wants. Me. And once he has that, he won’t need to hurt anyone else.”
“Until the next time you try to leave. Until the next time he needs leverage. This doesn’t end, Willa. Men like him don’t just win once and walk away.”
She looked up at me then, and I saw something in her eyes that terrified me more than all of Dex’s threats combined. Acceptance. Resolution. The look of someone who’d already made up her mind.
“Maybe not,” she said quietly. “But at least other people won’t pay the price for my choices.”
