Page 34 of Hostile

A beat of silence. “So this was never about the company.”

“The company is the mechanism,” I said. “It was always about the name.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression—not hurt, not exactly. Something older than hurt. Something that had been sitting in him for a long time and had only just been confirmed rather than revealed. “I know I owe you an explanation⁠—”

“You don’t owe me anything.” My voice came out exactly the way I needed it to. Level. Cool. The voice of a woman who had made her peace with the past and was here only to conduct business. “This isn’t personal, Wyatt. It’s a transaction. A very long, very carefully planned transaction.”

“You moved to Cambridge at eighteen with nothing,” he said quietly. “Then you moved to New York and built a company from scratch. You spent six years buying pieces of my business through shell companies no one could trace.” He paused. “And you’re trying to tell me it’s not personal.”

“I’m telling you it doesn’t have to be anything other than what it is.”

“What is it?”

Justice, I thought. Ten years of it, arriving on schedule.

“A business matter,” I said. “One I suggest you take seriously before Thursday.”

He studied me for another long moment. The city moved behind him through the floor-to-ceiling glass, indifferent and relentless, as it always was. I held his gaze, kept my face exactly as I’d set it, and tried very hard not to think about how we were alone in a room together for the first time in ten years, and how the distance between us was about four feet of conference table and about ten years of everything else.

“You know what I think?” he said finally.

“I don’t particularly need to.”

“I think you came here today because part of you wanted to see whether what you felt at the gala was real.” He said it without ego, without the smug certainty of a man making a play. Just quietly. Just honestly. The way he’d always said what he meant. “Because I felt it too, Megan. Whatever you think of me—I felt it too.”

The room was very quiet. My pulse was doing something completely unacceptable.

“I’ll see you at the board meeting, Wyatt.” I picked up my bag from the chair beside me and walked toward the door with the unhurried stride I’d been practicing since I was eighteen, when I needed something to protect me. “Have your attorneys review the Charleston partnership agreement before then, specifically page forty-seven.”

I walked out without looking back.

In the elevator, I pressed the lobby button and stood with my spine straight and my face composed and my heart behaving like an absolute traitor behind my ribs.

Part of you wanted to see if what you felt at the gala was real.

I stared at the elevator doors.

Damn him, I thought. Damn him for still being able to do that.

The lobby arrived. I walked out into the Midtown morning, hailed a cab, and sat back against the seat as the city streamed past the windows.

Twenty-two percent. Twelve percent. Board meeting on Thursday.

Work to do.

I looked out the window and tried to mean it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

It happened on a Tuesday, which felt appropriately undramatic for the kind of thing that changes everything.

I arrived early at the Aldridge offices for a follow-up meeting with Marcus about the Meridian subsidiary structure—deliberately early, as I was always deliberately early to working sessions on their turf, because arriving first meant reading the room before the room read me. Early was for rooms where I needed information. Late was for rooms where I needed altitude. Thursday would be a late room.

The forty-fifth-floor reception area was empty except for a junior analyst at the far end of the corridor who was on the phone, and the conference room door ahead of me was slightly ajar. I could hear voices inside—low, male, one of them Wyatt’s.

I stopped.