10. Tyler #2
"Put her contracts in writing before the board session. Signed and countersigned. That's my condition, Charles. Everything else is negotiable. That isn't."
He studies me for a long time. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. I've sat across from enough predators to know what he's calculating: whether my willingness to fall means there's a trap he can't see, or whether I've simply lost my mind.
"You're falling on your sword for this girl."
"I'm protecting a generational asset. Draft the contracts."
The doorman at Shayla's building doesn't recognize me without the town car and driver.
I'm standing on the sidewalk in a white undershirt and the suit trousers I couldn't be bothered to change, my jacket balled in one hand, tie stripped off somewhere between Hargrove's office and the parking garage where I left the Aston Martin with its hazards on because I couldn't find the ticket for the valet.
"Sir, I need to call up first."
"Tell her it's Tyler Cox."
He eyes the undershirt. The wrinkled trousers. The fact that my shoes are more expensive than his monthly rent but my hair looks like I've been dragging my hands through it for the past forty minutes, which I have.
He brings the intercom phone to his head. Murmurs something. Waits. His eyebrows climb.
"Fourteenth floor. 14C."
The elevator is small and smells like pine cleaner.
A scuff mark on the mirrored wall. A notice taped next to the buttons about a package theft in the lobby.
Normal-building things. Human-scale things.
The kind of details that disappeared from my world around the time I started owning the buildings instead of living in them.
I catch my reflection. Gray at the temples. Lines carved deep around the mouth. A man who looks like he hasn't slept in three days, which is accurate.
The elevator opens. The hallway is narrow, warm, lit by overhead fluorescents that buzz at a frequency I can feel in my back teeth. I find 14C and stand in front of the door like an idiot for ten full seconds before I knock.
Locks disengage. Two of them.
Shayla opens the door in a silk bonnet and an oversized Howard University sweatshirt that hangs past her thighs. No makeup. Reading glasses perched low on her nose. She looks younger without the armor. She looks real.
My throat closes.
"It's eleven-thirty," she says. Flat.
"I know."
Her eyes move down my body. Register the missing jacket, the missing tie, the untucked undershirt.
"You look terrible."
"Yeah."
She leans against the doorframe. Crosses her arms. The sweatshirt sleeves swallow her hands.
"Did you drive here yourself?"
"Badly."
Her mouth twitches. She kills it. "What do you want, Tyler?"
Everything I rehearsed in the car evaporates.
The practiced explanation about Hargrove.
The logical case for why the restructure email was a decoy.
The measured, strategic framing that would make her understand I've been bleeding money for months to keep her division alive.
All of it, gone, because she's standing in front of me in a bonnet and bare feet on linoleum and I have never wanted anyone's trust more than I want hers right now.
"I negotiated my exit tonight."
Her arms uncross.
"Hargrove is taking the company. The board votes in sixteen days.
I'm not fighting it." I swallow. "But before I signed anything, I locked in five-year contracts for your entire team.
Full creative autonomy. Your earn-out vests immediately, paid from the corporate trust. No performance benchmarks. No strings."
"I didn't come here to explain the email. I didn't come here to convince you I'm not the man you think I am. I came here because you deserve to hear it from me, not from Hargrove's PR team in the morning. You won. Your work won. And your people are safe."
A muscle works in her jaw. She takes her glasses off. Folds them. Sets them on the small table just inside the door, next to a bowl of keys and a half-burned candle.
"You gave up the company."
"Yes."
"For contracts."
"For your contracts. Yes."
She searches my face. I don't know what she's looking for.
I stand still and let her look, exposed under the fluorescent buzz in my wrinkled undershirt, no office, no title, no leverage.
Just the body she's commanded and the man inside it, who is terrified and present and not hiding behind a single goddamn thing for the first time in two decades.
"Come in," she says. Steps aside.
The apartment is small. Warm. A couch buried under throw blankets.
Textbooks stacked on the coffee table next to an open laptop trailing code across its screen.
The kitchen counter holds a mug of something that's stopped steaming.
Real life. Her life. The one that existed before I bought her company and tried to reduce it to a line item on a spreadsheet.
She closes the door behind me. Both locks.
I turn to face her. She's leaning against the door now, arms crossed again, chin up. The defiance is back but it's different. Colder. Measured.
"I'm taking the CEO position."
My stomach drops.
"Hargrove offered it to me after the presentation. I've been on the phone with my attorney for the past four hours." She holds my gaze without blinking. "I'm seriously considering saying yes."