29. Thalassa
THALASSA
I have officially been kidnapped by billionaires.
Okay, fine, not kidnapped. More like gently escorted. I didn’t even get a chance to argue before I was in Colin’s car with a bottle of water in one hand and a seat warmer doing wonders for my lower back.
“What’s this all about?”
“We’ve got some unfinished business.” That was all he said.
So now I’m sitting in a leather chair in Colin’s corner office on the top floor of Copeland headquarters, sipping a decaf coffee that costs more than my weekly grocery budget and trying not to look like I don’t belong here.
Spoiler: I absolutely do not belong here.
Not in my day-old hoodie and leggings, not with my hair in every direction from the sex on his couch. I’m still processing everything that’s happened in the past few days, and now, I’m in a monument to corporate life.
The office is ridiculous. There’s a whole wall of glass looking out over the city, a conference table that could seat the entire UN Security Council, and some kind of kinetic sculpture thing on his desk that keeps flipping metal pieces in endless motion.
The couch I’m on costs more than my parents’ cottage.
Colin lounges behind his desk like he owns the place—which, I guess, he kind of does.
He changed before we left his server hovel.
Apparently, he keeps decent clothes there for just such an emergency.
He’s wearing black slacks, an open-collar shirt, and a barely there grin that tells me something’s up.
He looks good. A little too good. And I’m still not totally sure how I feel about that.
The truth is, I’m still weird about all of this.
The stalking thing? Not great. Like, romantically charged or not, I don’t think “I watched you from the second floor and ghosted before you saw me” is going to win any relationship health awards.
The prosthetic thing? Complicated. I’m grateful—obviously I’m grateful.
My dad’s quality of life is better now, and that means everything to me.
But also?
It’s weird knowing these men have been reaching into the most private corners of my life before I even knew them. They do it because they care. I know that. But sometimes it feels like they don’t trust me to handle my own problems.
So I’m making my peace with it. Or at least…working on it. They like to fix things. They’re used to power. I get it. We’re fine as long as they keep their tracking software off my phone and stop showing up uninvited.
Mostly.
I glance at Tic, who’s standing near the window in full black as always, arms crossed, face unreadable. He hasn’t stalked me or done things behind the scenes. At least one of them understands how to have boundaries.
Dean’s seated in one of the chairs across from me, flipping through something on a tablet. Every now and then, he glances up at me like he wants to say something but hasn’t decided how. Probably still brooding about our conversation.
Which is fair. I’m still brooding about it too.
“You good?” Colin asks, kicking his feet up on the corner of the desk.
“Sure. Just contemplating the absurdity of my life.”
“Be more specific.”
“Not long ago, I was living on boxed soup and scraping together money for the bus. Now I’m here. With you guys. Drinking coffee that tastes like roasted unicorn.”
“You’re welcome.”
I roll my eyes, but I smile. Then there’s a knock.
A young woman in business casual peeks in. “The board is on their way up.”
Dean sits straighter. Tic’s head tilts just slightly. Colin’s grin sharpens.
“Oh boy,” I mutter.
The door barely clicks shut before the room explodes.
Not literally, but it feels like it. Fifteen—no, sixteen—men barrel in, all at once, like someone tipped over a can of grumpy board members. They talk over each other, shake hands with no one, and take seats without waiting to be offered them. Tension whips through the room like a live wire.
One of them glares at Colin. “What is this? We weren’t told there’d be an audience.”
I glance down at my coffee and pretend not to exist.
“She’s not the audience,” Colin says mildly. “She’s a witness.”
That gets a few huffs and mutters.
An old man walks in last. Marcus. Has to be.
He’s got the fake grandfatherly smile thing going again, the one that probably convinced a million-dollar donor to trust him back in the eighties.
Today, it looks brittle. He straightens his tie and takes the seat at the head of the table like nothing’s wrong.
“Gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s begin.”
Colin doesn’t sit. He stays standing behind his desk, which makes him look taller, more in control. He taps a button on a console I didn’t know was there, and the screen on the far wall lights up.
“We have some things to discuss,” he says. “And I’d like to skip the part where we pretend we’re still confused.”
The board quiets.
Colin clicks something, and the screen splits into several windows. Bank statements, emails, transfer logs, and a familiar-looking line graph that dips sharply—presumably the moment the servers crashed.
“Over the last six months, several accounts tied to Copeland’s operational budgets have been quietly siphoning money overseas,” Colin says. “Specifically, into accounts under shell corporations based in the Cayman Islands and Belize. All of them trace back to one name.”
He clicks again. A single line of text appears: Marcus Burgh.
Gasps. Real ones. Like we’re in a telenovela and someone just confessed to being the evil twin.
Marcus’s smile falters for the briefest second. “Now, I know this looks dramatic?—”
Tic cuts in. “That’s because it is.”
Colin continues, calm and clinical. “We also discovered traces of those same accounts interacting with the dark web just days before the breach. Payment trails. Encrypted messages. A payout to a known leak broker.”
Dean steps in now, finally rising from his seat.
“In layman’s terms, Marcus leaked our customer data to generate panic—then used that panic to manipulate internal decisions, push us out of leadership, and redirect financial control to syphon more money into his offshore accounts.
Also, because he’s wanted the CEO chair since he came here. ”
Marcus laughs, sharp and humorless. “That’s outrageous. You expect us to believe I would compromise this company for a power grab?”
“Yes,” Tic says simply.
And then, like a magician revealing the final card, Colin clicks one last file.
A video begins to play.
It’s security footage—low-res, timestamped—of Marcus standing in a locked server room, swiping a keycard, tapping on a laptop. There’s no sound, but the visuals say enough.
The room is dead silent when the video ends.
Marcus clears his throat. “This doesn’t prove anything. That’s circumstantial?—”
He’s interrupted by another knock. This one’s sharper. More official. The door opens, and two people walk in.
FBI.
They don’t say much. Just flash badges and ask Marcus to come with them. He sputters. Demands answers. Protests. Accuses.
Nobody moves.
Nobody speaks.
And then he’s escorted out, still ranting. The silence that follows is deafening.
I exhale slowly, only realizing now that I’d been holding my breath.
Holy shit. That just happened.
Colin straightens his cuffs. Tic smooths his lapel. Dean presses a palm to the table like he’s grounding himself.
The board looks shell-shocked. One of the older guys, red-faced and sweaty, finally speaks. “We—we owe you an apology. To all of you.”
“No kidding,” I mutter, too low for most of them to hear. I think Dean does, though. His lips twitch.
Another board member clears his throat. “We understand now that you were targeted. That this wasn’t mismanagement, but sabotage. We need your leadership to recover from this. Please. Whatever capacity you’re willing to return in—we’ll make it work.”
Colin leans back against his desk and smiles like a man who just ate a five-course meal made entirely of poetic justice.
Dean is the first to answer. “I’ll return. But only temporarily. Limited oversight. My priority is elsewhere now.”
His eyes flick to me for a half second. My heart skips.
Tic nods next. “Same. Consultant capacity only.”
Colin shrugs. “I’m in. But I won’t be killing myself over it again. You want brilliance, you give me breathing room.”
They nod like they’ll agree to anything. And they probably will. Because the Copeland brothers just played them like a fiddle.
Hands are shaken. Promises are made. Gratitude is gushed a little too quickly from a lot of men who were ready to feed Colin to the wolves twenty minutes ago.
The three brothers take it all in stride.
They don’t gloat. They don’t smirk. Well, Colin kind of smirks, but that’s just his face.
Tic and Dean handle it with the kind of cold, contained professionalism that makes you remember these men were born into power and have learned how to wield it with surgical precision.
And me? I just sit in the corner and try to make sense of what I just watched. It was like a heist movie. Or a courtroom drama. Or one of those Netflix limited series with too much soft lighting and British accents. Except it was real. And I was in the room. And no British accents.
I look at Colin and remember the version of him I met that first night—the one who made jokes and smiled like he had nothing to prove.
Then I look at Tic, standing tall and still near the window, and Dean, slipping his tablet back into his briefcase with practiced grace, and it hits me all over again.
These men are dangerous. Not in the violent sense. In the they get things done and everyone else just gets out of the way sense. And they care about me.
Not as an accessory. Not as a shiny distraction.
As something they want to protect. Build with. Belong to. It should be more terrifying than it is. And maybe it is terrifying. But it’s also comforting in a way I don’t know how to articulate.
Even with the weirdness. Even with the stalking and the unsolicited life upgrades and the larger-than-life gestures—I’ve never felt more seen. Or more taken seriously.
I get it now. I get why people follow power. Why people want it. Why they cling to those who have it and know how to use it. And I also get why these men want to use it for good.
They could have destroyed Marcus in a back room. Quietly. They could’ve settled for a warning or a payout or some ugly internal memo.
But instead?
They handed him to the FBI. They chose justice. They chose honesty . They chose each other .
I sit there for a long minute, letting that settle, even as the board files out, muttering to each other, adjusting ties and murmuring apologies.
Dean looks over at me and lifts an eyebrow. “You okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. Just…watching.”
“What do you see?”
“Three very smug men.”
Colin grins. “Accurate.”
Tic almost smiles.
The board members vanish, and the door finally clicks closed. And then it hits me. A pain. Sharp and low.
I gasp.
Colin notices first. “Sweets?”
I press a hand to my stomach. “It’s—it’s fine. Just a?—”
Another cramp hits. Stronger this time.
My legs go weak. I stumble, and Dean is at my side before I even process it, one arm around my shoulders.
“Thalassa?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Something’s wrong.”