Chapter 22 Tessa #2
“Slave driver.” Harper throws a pepperoni at Ethan. He catches it. “But seriously, Tess. You need to get out more. You’re going to wither away in that office.”
“I’m happy,” I say softly.
I look up. I catch Ethan watching me. His expression is unguarded for just a second—a look of such raw, possessive hunger that my stomach flips.
“I bet you are,” Harper says, oblivious. “Working with these three? It’s a miracle you haven’t killed them. Or slept with them.”
She laughs.
The room falls completely silent.
Asher stops chewing. Owen goes rigid. Ethan’s hand tightens around his beer bottle until the glass groans, threatening to shatter.
Harper looks around. “That was a joke. You guys know that was a joke, right? Ew. Incest vibes. Gross.”
“Very gross,” Owen forces a laugh. “Tessa is… like a sister.”
“A sister,” Ethan repeats. His voice is flat.
“Exactly,” I say. My voice sounds high and tinny. “Sister.”
I stand up.
“I need more napkins,” I say.
I flee to the kitchen. I grip the counter, breathing hard.
Sister.
The word tastes like ash.
A hand touches my back.
It’s Asher.
I’ve finally grown used to his silent approach. He’s standing close. Too close. He’s blocking the view from the living room with his body.
“Your pulse is racing,” he whispers.
“She knows,” I whisper back. “She has to know.”
“She doesn’t know,” Asher says calmly. “She’s projecting her own narrative. There’s a four percent chance she guesses the truth.”
“It feels like a hundred,” I hiss.
Asher looks down at me. His blue eyes are intense. He reaches out, his fingers brushing the back of my hand. A forbidden touch.
“Endure,” he whispers. “Twenty-four hours. Then we launch. Then she leaves.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“Then,” Asher says, his voice dropping, “we stop pretending.”
“Hey!” Harper calls from the living room. “Where are the napkins? And why is Asher cornering you? Is he reciting digits of Pi again?”
Asher pulls back instantly.
“Yes,” Asher calls back. “I’m explaining why paper napkins are inefficient.”
He walks back out.
I close my eyes. I count to ten.
Twenty-four hours. Just twenty-four hours.
The office is a hive.
Normally, the office is completely dead on a Saturday. Today, the floor is vibrating. Fifty developers, ten marketing interns, and a nervous PR team are running on caffeine and adrenaline.
The countdown clock on the wall reads: 14 Hours: 00 Minutes.
We’re in the final sprint.
I’m standing at the whiteboard in the main conference room—now dubbed the War Room—mapping out the social media rollout.
“Okay,” I say to the team. “At ten, the influencers post the ‘I Found My Tribe’ videos. At eleven, we drop the founder profiles. And at midnight, the app goes live globally.”
“Are we sure about the profiles?” Sarah from PR asks. “The Phantom Trio reveal? It’s risky.”
“It’s time,” Ethan says from the head of the table.
He’s wearing a black hoodie, sleeves pushed up. He looks tired but electric. “People trust faces. They don’t trust shadows.”
“Speaking of faces,” Owen says, walking in with a tray of coffees. “Guess who’s here?”
The elevator doors open.
Harper walks out. She’s wearing a Mosaic t-shirt she must have cut and styled herself, paired with a leather skirt. She looks like a mascot.
“Morning, team!” she yells. “I brought donuts! And moral support! And chaos!”
“Great,” Ethan mutters. “Just what we need.”
Harper waltzes into the War Room. She drops a box of donuts on the table.
“Tess!” she comes over to me. “You look exhausted. Did you sleep?”
“Not really,” I admit.
“Nerves?”
“Something like that.”
I didn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes, my body ached for them. Lying rigidly awake while Harper slept peacefully beside me—in the exact bed where her brothers completely wrecked me earlier—was torture.
“Well, you look hot anyway,” Harper says. She looks at the whiteboard. “This is genius. ‘Find Your Tribe’. I love it. Hey, where’s Asher?”
“Server room,” I point. “Don’t disturb him. He’s in God mode.”
“I’m going to go poke him,” she grins.
“Harper, no,” Ethan warns. “If you break his concentration, he’ll bite you.”
“Kinky,” she winks.
She walks off toward the server room.
Ethan stands up. He walks over to me.
“Status?” he asks.
We’re standing in front of ten employees. We’re professional. We’re safe.
“Influencers are locked,” I say, pointing at the board. “Press releases are embargoed until midnight. We’re green.”
“Good,” Ethan says.
He lowers his voice. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, staring at the whiteboard marker in my hand.
“You’re a terrible liar,” he murmurs. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m shaking because your sister is twenty feet away, and I want to kiss you,” I whisper furiously.
Ethan’s eyes darken. He takes a half-step closer. His body heat radiates against my arm.
“Tonight,” he promises. “Midnight. When the party ends. When she goes to the hotel.”
“She’s staying at my apartment, Ethan.”
“Then we go to mine,” he says. “All of us. I don’t care. I can’t do another night of this.”
“Mr. Branson?” Sarah calls out. “TechCrunch is blowing up the PR inbox for a quote.”
Ethan steps back. The mask slams down.
“I’ll take it in my office,” he says.
He walks away without looking back.
I uncap the marker. The smell of ink and chemicals burns my nose. I start writing tasks I’ve already finished, just to keep my hands moving.
The countdown clock reads: 00:00:10.
“TEN! NINE! EIGHT!”
The chant fills the room. The entire office is transformed into a nightclub. Blue lights wash over the crowd. Champagne towers glitter.
I’m standing by the window. My feet are killing me in my stilettos.
“THREE! TWO! ONE!”
00:00:00.
“WE ARE LIVE!”
A roar erupts, shaking the glass walls. Confetti cannons—which I explicitly told Owen were a fire hazard—explode, raining silver and blue paper over the crowd.
I watch the monitors.
Downloads: 1,042... 5,300... 10,000...
The graph is a vertical line.
“Holy shit,” I breathe.
“Language, Miss Hartley,” a voice says in my ear.
I turn. Ethan.
He’s holding two flutes of champagne. He looks magnificent. He’s wearing a tuxedo—no tie, top button undone. He looks like James Bond if James Bond ran a Fortune 500 company.
He hands me a glass.
“We did it,” he says.
“Ten thousand in ten minutes,” I say, pointing at the screen.
“I don’t care about the numbers,” he says.
He looks at me. The room is chaotic. Harper is dancing on a table somewhere. The investors are swarming the bar. But Ethan’s only looking at me.
“You did this,” he says. “The voice. The soul of it. That was you.”
“The code is yours,” I deflect, my heart hammering.
“The code is just a structure,” he says. “You gave it a heartbeat.”
He clinks his glass against mine.
“To us,” he says.
“To Mosaic,” I correct.
“To. Us.” he repeats, intense and unyielding.
My phone buzzes.
I look down.
New Group Created: SYSTEM OVERRIDE (Members: Ethan, Owen, Asher, Tessa)
Asher: Server load stabilized at 150k concurrent users. We’re operational.
Asher: Also, I’m hiding behind the server rack. Harper is looking for me. Please extract.
Owen: I see you guys by the window. Ethan, stop undressing her with your eyes. You’re scaring the investors.
Ethan: Shut up and get Harper away from us. I need five minutes with Tessa.
Owen: Negative. Ghost protocol is active. No contact. Suffer in silence, boss.
I look up. Across the room, Owen’s leaning against a pillar, winking at me. He taps his phone.
Me: I hate you all.
Ethan: Liar.
Owen: Liar.
Asher: Bullshit.
I smile at my screen.
“Hey!”
Harper appears. She’s flushed, sweaty, and holding a bottle of champagne. She throws an arm around Ethan’s neck and grabs my hand.
“Look at you two!” she yells over the music. “So serious! Smile! We’re rich!”
She holds up her phone. “Selfie!”
She snaps it.
In the photo, Harper’s beaming in the middle. Ethan’s looking at the camera with a tight, forced smile. And I’m looking at Ethan.
I see the photo on her screen. My expression is… naked. It’s the look of a woman who is hopelessly, desperately in love.
“Send that to me,” I say quickly. “I need to… approve it for social.”
“Done!” Harper laughs. “I’m posting it. Caption: The Brains and the Beauty.”
She kisses Ethan’s cheek. “I’m so proud of you, big brother. You finally built something that connects people.”
Ethan flinches slightly. “Thanks, Harp.”
“And you!” She squeezes my hand. “My genius best friend. You guys make a hell of a team.”
“We do,” Ethan says. He looks at me over Harper’s head. The heat in his eyes is enough to melt the glass in my hand. “We really do.”
The sun is brutal on Sunday morning. My head hurts from the champagne.
The Uber is waiting on the curb.
Harper hugs me on the sidewalk outside my apartment.
“I can’t believe I have to leave,” she pouts. “It was too short.”
“You have fashion week prep,” I remind her. “Go finish your internship. Then come back and be a rich heiress.”
“I will,” she promises. “And you… take care of them, okay? They’re terrible at taking care of themselves.”
She gestures to the three men on the porch. They look like a lineup of hungover models. Ethan in sunglasses. Owen leaning on the railing. Asher checking his watch.
“I will,” I promise.
She hugs me tight. “Love you, T.”
“Love you too.”
She gets in the car. She waves. The car drives off.
We stand there on the sidewalk. We watch the car turn the corner. We watch it disappear down 6th Street.
The street falls quiet.
Then, slowly, the tension breaks. It’s a physical snap.
Ethan lets out a long, heavy breath. He loosens his tie.
“Is she gone?” Owen asks.
“She’s gone,” I confirm.
“Is the tracker active?” Ethan asks.
“She’s two blocks away,” Asher confirms. “Moving at thirty miles per hour away from the apartment.”
“Good,” Ethan says.
He turns to me.
We’re on a public street. It’s Sunday morning. People are walking dogs.
He grabs my face. He kisses me.
It’s a desperate, starving kiss. It tastes like stale coffee and mint. I melt into him, my hands finding the lapels of his jacket, pulling him closer, anchoring myself.
“God,” he groans against my mouth. “I hated that. I hated every second of pretending I didn’t want you.”
“Me too,” I whisper.
“Group hug!” Owen yells.
He crashes into us, wrapping his arms around both of us. Asher steps in, completing the circle, resting his forehead against the back of my head.
We stand there, huddled together on the sidewalk.
“We did it,” Owen says into my hair. “We launched. We survived Harper. We’re invincible.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Asher mutters.
“We’ve got a company to run,” Ethan says, pulling back, though his hand stays firmly on my waist. “And we’ve got a celebration to finish.”
He looks at me. The Best Friend mask is gone. The CEO mask is gone.
“Back inside,” he commands. “Lock the door. No one leaves until Monday.”
I smile. A real smile.
“Yes, sir.”
We walk back inside. The door clicks shut. The lock turns.