Chapter 40 MAYA
MAYA
The elevator hums going up and I feel the trepidation all over my body.
Forty-second floor. The numbers climb on the digital panel above the doors, pale blue against brushed steel, and I watch each one change. My reflection in the polished doors is someone I almost recognize. Straight-backed. Jaw set. Determined.
Reid is directly behind my right shoulder. I can feel him without turning. He hasn't spoken since the lobby, where he checked one last time if I’m ok with this. He doesn't need to. His silence has weight and direction, and both are pointed at whatever is on the other side of these doors.
Jace is restless with coiled energy. His hands are loose at his sides and he looks so thoroughly wrong in this sleek building with his mountain attire that it makes me smile.
Owen is on my left. His focus is on me. When I glance over, he holds my gaze for a beat, then two, and something in his expression communicates a sentence he won't say out loud. You're ready.
I'm not sure he's right. My pulse is running high and tight, a frequency I can feel in my attempt to normalize my breathing.
Three days ago I sat on my mother's sofa and told Elena Voss everything.
The words left my mouth and entered a recorder and traveled to an editor's desk and became something with a publication date and a headline, and in approximately twelve minutes that headline goes live and Daniel Hargrove's name becomes part of a story he cannot control.
This was Reid's idea. The confrontation.
He explained it at the kitchen table last night while my mother pretended not to listen from the hallway.
You don't wait for the enemy to establish position.
You don't give him time to assess, to prepare, to choose his ground.
You arrive before he knows you're coming.
I agreed because he was right and because I want to see Daniel's face when the ground shifts beneath him. I want to be there when it happens.
I want the men to see it too.
So here we are. Four people in an elevator in a building where Daniel Hargrove bills clients nine hundred dollars an hour, climbing toward a confrontation he doesn't know is coming.
The truth is I'm glad they're here. I wish I were the kind of person who could do this alone, who carried enough inside herself that she didn't need anyone beside her when the moment came.
I wish I were that finished, that complete.
But the woman I'm becoming doesn't need to be alone to be strong.
She needs to stop pretending that needing people is the same thing as being weak.
The elevator chimes.
Forty-two.
The doors slide open and the light hits first, a wash of clean white spilling from floor-to-ceiling windows across an expanse of pale flooring.
A reception area, curved desk in marble, a woman behind it with a headset and the composed posture of someone trained to intercept without appearing hostile.
Behind her, visible through glass partitions, an open office stretches back, forty or fifty desks arranged in a grid, monitors glowing, the low ambient hum of people doing expensive work.
Beyond the desks, at the far end of the floor, a row of offices.
I step out. The men follow.
The receptionist's eyes move from me to Reid to Jace to Owen and back to me. And then the polite: “Good morning, how can I help you?”
"Thanks," I say, already moving. "But I know where I'm going."
She starts to stand up. "Ma'am, You need to—"
Jace pauses beside her desk. Leans one forearm on the marble. Smiles. "I'd let her go," he says. Conversational. Friendly. "It’s better if you stay out of this one."
The receptionist looks at him. What she sees in his face must tell her that he might be right. She sits back down.
I walk.
The open floor is a grid of glass and light, heads bent over screens, the quiet industrious atmosphere of people who believe their work is important and are paid enough to sustain the belief.
A few glance up as we pass. I keep my focus on the offices at the back wall, on the corner one with the best view, because I've been there before once.
The corner office has floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides. Daniel is standing at the window with his back to the door, phone pressed to his ear. One hand in his pocket. The posture of a person who owns the room and everything visible from it.
I don't knock.
I walk in. The men come in behind me.
Daniel turns.
The expression lands in stages. Surprise first, his eyes widening before the rest of his face catches up.
Then confusion, the phone still at his ear, his gaze jumping from me to the men and back as if the scene doesn't parse.
And the irritation that replaces the confusion is the most honest thing I've seen on his face since the day I ended it.
He ends the call and sets his phone face down on his desk. Looks at me, and the mask slides into place, smooth and practiced. His mouth curves into something that is technically a smile.
"Maya." He spreads his hands. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
My heart is beating in my throat. I take a breath.
"I'm giving you a courtesy you never gave me, before turning my life into hell," I hear my voice from outside myself. "Your life is about to change. I thought you should hear it from me first."
Daniel's eyes narrow. He stays standing, the window behind him, the whole glass-and-chrome panorama of downtown LA at his back like a set piece he's been lit for.
"Is that right?" He looks past me at the men.
Daniel's mouth twitches. He pulls his chair back. Sits. Leans his elbows on the desk. Laces his fingers beneath his chin.
"Why?" he asks. "Because you found yourself some bodyguards?" He tilts his head. "Remember, Maya. I don't need to touch you to make your life miserable."
The words land where he aimed them. In the soft place under my sternum where months of fear left scar tissue.
Beside me, Jace moves. A single step forward, weight shifting, the coiled energy I've felt in him since the elevator converting into something directional. I put my hand on his shoulder.
He stops. The muscle under my palm is rigid, vibrating with the effort of staying still.
I keep my hand there for a moment. Then I let go. Turn back to Daniel.
"I took a lesson from your book," I say. "I can hurt you without touching you too." I pause because the next sentence is the one that changes everything and I want to feel the weight of it leaving me. "I'm here to tell you that today, Elena Voss is publishing my interview with the Atlantic Ledger."
The mask cracks.
Not dramatically. Daniel is too practiced for that.
But his fingers unlace beneath his chin.
His weight shifts forward in the chair. His mouth opens and closes, and for one second, his eyes lose the manufactured calm and I see the rage underneath.
He recognizes the name. He knows what a journalist of Elena Voss's caliber can do with a story.
He stands. The chair rolls backward and hits the window. He comes around the desk toward me, and the stride has the quick, sharp quality of a man whose control center has shifted from strategy to reaction.
Reid growls.
Low, guttural, rising from somewhere in his chest that has nothing to do with language. It doesn't sound human. It sounds like the wolves at his rescue center, the warning that precedes the bite.
Daniel stops. His fists are clenched at his sides, the knuckles gone pale.
"I will sue you." His voice has climbed half an octave.
The composure is gone. What's left is the man I saw in our apartment the night I told him it was over, the one who gripped my wrist and told me I was making a mistake I'd regret.
"You stupid bitch. You think your life has been hell? Wait until—"
"Go ahead," I interrupt him. "Sue me. Your lawyers will have the pleasure of meeting mine. Adrian Kade."
The name hits him like a physical thing.
His face changes. The anger doesn't disappear, but something else arrives beneath it, something colder and more calculating, because Daniel knows that name.
Everyone in LA corporate law knows that name.
Adrian Kade doesn't take cases he loses, and the fact that he's representing me tells Daniel everything he needs to know about how thoroughly the ground was prepared before I walked through this door.
"He was present for the interview," I don't know where the steadiness in my voice is coming from but it's here and I'm using it.
"So I don't think you'll find much ground for legal action.
And the optics?... What will people think when you sue me for mentioning that the photos were stolen from your phone?
Because that's what happened, right? That's your version. On the record."
Daniel opens his mouth to say something but stops when we start to hear several phones chime with notifications.
Dozens of them. A cascade of notification chimes rippling through the open floor beyond the glass walls of his office, the specific digital chorus of fifty devices receiving the same message in the same moment. Pings and buzzes and the soft percussive vibration of phones against desks.
The open floor has gone quiet. Heads bent over phones. A few people already looking up, their eyes finding the corner office, finding Daniel standing there, and the expressions on their faces are a study in the exact moment when professional neutrality collides with personal shock.
Daniel turns back to us.
"What have you done?" His voice is louder now. Rising. "What the hell did you say?"
Owen steps forward.
"The same thing you did to her," His voice is measured. "We made sure that everyone on this company's contact list received a link to the interview. With your name highlighted."
He turns to me. The corner of his mouth curves into a smile.
"I thought it would be a nice touch," he says.
I didn't knew he was going to do this. I smile back. "It was a really nice touch."
I turn to Daniel. He is standing, his face the color of old paper.
Suddenly he looks smaller than I remember.
Diminished. The office and the view and the nine-hundred-dollar-an-hour power structure he built his identity around, and all of it just became the backdrop to his exposure instead of his shield.
"We won't take any more of your time," I say. "Enjoy having your name associated with a crime." I hold his eyes. "After all, is like you said… Nothing dies on the internet."
We turn and walk out of his office.
Through the open floor, I feel the eyes. Every desk, every face, every person in this space looking at the four of us moving through their grid of glass and light. I keep my back straight. I keep my pace even. I don't rush. I don't look down.
We reach the elevator. Jace presses the button. The doors open immediately, as if the building itself wants to help us leave quickly.
We step inside. All four of us. The doors close.
The silence lasts two seconds.
I lean back against the elevator wall. My knees give first, then my spine, then my shoulders, the whole scaffolding of composure I've been holding releasing in a single controlled collapse. My head tips back against the cold steel.
Jace reaches me first, his arms wrapping around me from the side, pulling me into his chest. "You were terrifying," he says against my hair. "I mean it. That was the scariest thing I've ever seen, and I've watched Reid fight a bear."
"It wasn't a bear," Reid says from behind me. His hand finds the back of my neck. Wraps around it. Holds. The grip is warm and steady and contains more than any sentence he would know how to build. "It was a cub."
Owen steps close on my other side. He puts his hand on my waist and his forehead against my temple and breathes me in.
My eyes burn. I close them.
Reid pulls me closer. His mouth is near my ear.
I nod against his chest.
We go home.