CHAPTER 9
POV: Sienna
I was not finished.
The board had hummed and hesitated and ultimately chosen continuity over courage, but Cassian’s public dismissal still stung in the precise place I kept every other slight. I sat in the temporary office I had taken three floors down and opened a new document. Clean. Blank. Waiting.
The story wrote itself in under twenty minutes.
I kept the language careful. No outright accusations.
Only the shape of a narrative the tech press would recognize and amplify.
The reclusive Mrs. Reed had chosen the worst possible moment to abandon her husband.
Reed Dynamics was still climbing out of the data-center fire.
The markets were watching. And the wife who had spent years in the background had suddenly decided her personal feelings mattered more than the company that had given her everything.
I added one more layer, soft enough to look like speculation.
Sources close to the family suggested the sudden interest in “art” might be less about creative expression and more about optics. A calculated attempt to seize the narrative. To paint herself as the injured party while the real work of saving the company continued without her.
I read it twice. Then I sent it through the same quiet channels I had used for years—two reporters who owed me, one blogger who lived for blood in the water, and a single anonymous tip line that always found its way to the larger outlets by morning.
By the time I closed the laptop, the first version was already live.
I did not smile. Satisfaction had a different temperature now. Colder. Sharper.
The second move required less finesse.
I took out the secondary phone, the one that never touched a network connected to my name, and typed a single message.
Same terms as before. New location. I want it done cleanly.
The reply came in under a minute. The man did not ask questions. He never did. That was why I used him.
I transferred the first half of the payment through the same layered accounts.
Then I leaned back and watched the rain track down the glass.
Somewhere north of here Vivienne Reed was shaping clay into accusations and calling it art.
She thought distance made her safe. She thought a half-collapsed warehouse in a town no one could pronounce was enough to put her beyond reach.
She had always underestimated the length of my memory.
Cassian had underestimated it too.
I opened the tracking folder I still kept on every piece in play. The press story would land first. It would force him into another round of damage control. It would paint her as emotional, unstable, opportunistic. By the time the second blow came, the ground would already be soft.
My phone—the clean one—buzzed once.
A photo.
I opened it.
The image was slightly grainy, taken from across a narrow street at night. A warehouse door, salt-stained and heavy, one high window glowing behind it. No face. No movement. Just the target, confirmed.
Under the photo, a single line of text.
Ready when you are.
I stared at the image long enough to memorize the grain of the wood and the exact angle of the light.
Then I typed back.
Wait for my signal.
I set the phone face down and returned to the window. The city lights blurred in the rain. Somewhere out there Cassian was still trying to decide how much of his life he was willing to burn to get her back. Somewhere farther north she was still pretending that clay and silence could protect her.
They were both wrong.
I had spent twelve years learning the exact pressure required to break things that looked unbreakable. I had already proven it once, in a studio full of careful, quiet work.
I would prove it again.
The fury in my chest stayed cold and perfectly level. It did not need to rise to be effective. It only needed to wait.
And I was very good at waiting.