Chapter 14
The first sign that something was wrong came at seven in the morning, three days after I kissed Willa in her bedroom and told her we were both too broken to fix each other.
I was drinking coffee in my kitchen, watching her make breakfast with an efficiency that reminded me of the girl who once cooked dinner for Jude and me, when Anna from Legal called.
“We have a problem,” she said without preamble. “Someone accessed the Morrison account files last night. From outside the network.”
I felt my blood turn cold. The coffee cup hovered halfway to my mouth, forgotten.
The Morrison account was one of our highest-profile clients—a federal judge who had been receiving death threats from a domestic terrorism group. His security profile contained information that could get him killed if it fell into the wrong hands.
“How much did they get?”
“Everything. Residential security codes, travel schedules, safe house locations. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for.”
I glanced at Willa, who was pretending not to listen while she scrambled eggs, and lowered my voice. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Lock down everything, and don’t let anyone access anything until I get there.”
By the time I reached the office, the scope of the breach became clear.
It wasn’t random. Someone with intimate knowledge of our systems had targeted specific files, specific clients, and specific vulnerabilities—details only someone with inside access could have known.
The realization settled over me slowly, heavy and unmistakable.
“It gets worse,” David said when I arrived, his face grim as he pulled up security logs on his computer. “Whoever did this used Sarah’s access credentials.”
Sarah Kim, my head of research, had been with Cross Security since the beginning. She was the one who tracked Willa for me the night I found her in that alley, the one who ran background checks on every major client and threat assessment we ever did. If someone had compromised her access—
“Where is she?”
“That’s the thing. She called in sick yesterday and today. Says she has food poisoning.”
I felt something cold settle in my stomach. “Get her on the phone. Now.”
But Sarah’s phone went straight to voicemail. Her apartment building’s doorman said she left two days ago with a suitcase, claiming she was visiting family. No one had seen her since. Unless she hadn’t left willingly.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, running a hand through my hair. “How long has this been going on?”
“Based on the access logs? At least two weeks. Maybe longer.”
Two weeks. Right around the time Marcus Webb first approached me about the Blackstone merger. Right around the time I started letting my guard down, focusing more on Willa’s recovery and my own confused feelings than on the business that was supposed to be my entire life.
The second shoe dropped an hour later, when James Blackstone himself called.
“Kieran,” his voice carried the kind of controlled anger that made my spine straighten automatically. “I think we need to have a conversation.”
“About the merger timeline?”
“About whether there’s going to be a merger at all.”
I closed my office door and sank into my chair, already knowing this conversation was going to destroy everything I worked toward. I stared at the far wall, as if bracing myself for impact.
“I’m listening.”
“Three of my clients received calls this morning. Anonymous tips about security breaches at Cross Security. Detailed information about your vulnerabilities, your client list, even internal communications between my team and yours.”
The room started spinning slightly. “James, I can explain—”
“Can you? Because right now it looks like your firm is either incompetent or compromised. Either way, I can’t risk my reputation by associating with you.”
“We’re handling the situation. We’ll have answers by the end of the day.”
“It’s too late for that. My board is already spooked. Marcus Webb is asking questions I can’t answer. The merger is off, Kieran. Permanently.”
The line went dead, and I sat there staring at my phone, trying to process what had just happened. Three years of building toward this moment—three years of positioning Cross Security for the kind of growth that could change everything—destroyed in a single morning.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst came during the emergency staff meeting I called an hour later, when David presented the results of his preliminary investigation.
“The breach was surgical,” he said, his face pale as he addressed the dozen remaining employees gathered in our conference room.
“Whoever did this knew our systems better than we do. They knew which clients would be most damaging to lose, which files would create the biggest security risks, and which information would be most valuable to our competitors.”
“So we’re talking about corporate espionage.” I kept my voice steady, though my pulse was anything but.
“We’re talking about someone who wanted to destroy Cross Security specifically. This wasn’t about stealing client lists or trade secrets. This was about making us look incompetent and untrustworthy. This was about making sure we lost the Blackstone deal.”
I felt the pieces clicking into place with horrible clarity—the timing, the precision, the way every move was designed to cause maximum damage to our reputation and our most important business opportunity.
“Someone knew about the merger,” I said quietly.
“More than that.” David pulled up another screen, this one showing a pattern of small system intrusions going back months. “Someone’s been planning this for a long time. Getting into position, gathering intelligence, waiting for the right moment to strike.”
“But who would—”
I stopped mid-sentence as the answer hit me like a physical blow.
Someone with access to our systems. Someone who had known about the merger discussions from the beginning. Someone who had reason to want Cross Security to fail.
Someone who had known exactly how much the Blackstone deal meant to me.
“Sir?” David looked at me with concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
But I didn’t see a ghost. I saw something worse—the shape of a betrayal I should have seen coming, the outline of an enemy I was too blind to recognize.
Because the only people who knew about the merger timeline were my inner circle. My most trusted employees. The people I counted on to help build something lasting and strong.
And one of them decided to burn it all down instead.
The meeting broke up with assignments for damage control—client calls, system audits, and security reviews that should have been done months ago. But as my team filed out, discussing contingency plans and crisis management strategies, my thoughts drifted somewhere else entirely.
I thought about Willa, making breakfast in my kitchen that morning, trusting me to keep her safe while my entire world fell apart around us.
I thought about the kiss we shared, about the walls that finally started coming down between us, about the fragile hope I carried that maybe two broken people could figure out how to be whole together.
But if Cross Security failed, if I lost everything I built, what would I have to offer her? What kind of protection could I provide if I couldn’t even protect my own company from sabotage?
The phone on my desk rang again—another client demanding explanations I didn’t have, another business relationship turning to ash in my hands. As I answered it, putting on the calm, professional voice that was becoming harder to maintain, I realized the truth that would keep me awake for weeks.
I spent so much time building walls to protect myself from being hurt that I never considered the possibility that the real threat might already be inside them.
And now, just when I had finally found something worth protecting more than my own carefully constructed defenses, I was about to lose everything I thought made me worthy of protecting it.