29. The Leakers Countdown
The Leaker's Countdown
SLOANE
I set the phone face down on the granite countertop, the sound of it hitting the stone feeling disproportionately loud in the hollow quiet.
I was a person who categorized things. I dealt in data, in verifiable facts, in the cold comfort of a well-researched script.
But there was no script for this. There was no research that could tell me how to explain to a six-year-old why his mother’s face was being pulled apart by strangers on the internet.
I walked to the window, looking out at the streetlights of the city.
Usually, the lights felt like a map, a grid of order I could navigate.
Tonight, they looked like eyes. I could still feel the phantom heat of Cooper’s hand on my shoulder from earlier that evening, a steady weight that had been the only thing keeping me from vibrating right out of my skin.
He was sleeping in the guest room, a presence that should have felt like an intrusion but instead felt like a bulkhead.
He was the only person who had looked at the countdown and didn't ask what we were going to do for the brand. He had just asked if I was breathing.
The floorboards creaked behind me, a familiar, light sound that didn't belong to a man of Cooper’s size.
I turned to see Milo standing in the doorway, his hair a chaotic nest and his eyes heavy with sleep.
He was dragging his threadbare blue blanket, the one with the frayed edges that he refused to let me mend.
He looked small. He looked like the only thing in the world that mattered, and the realization hit me with a sharpness that made my throat tighten until it hurt to swallow.
"Mom?" he whispered, his voice small and scratchy. "Is the bad man from the phone still there?"
I sank to my knees, not caring about the cold tile pressing into my skin, and opened my arms. He stumbled into them, smelling of laundry detergent and sleep, a scent that had always been my North Star.
I tucked his head under my chin, my fingers tangling in his curls.
I had spent six years building a fortress around him, brick by painstaking brick, and now I could hear the mortar cracking.
"The bad people are just being loud, Milo," I said, my voice steady only because I was a professional at lying to myself. "They're like the thunder from the retreat, remember? Lots of noise, but we're safe inside."
He pulled back, looking at me with that terrifyingly perceptive gaze that he’d inherited from a mother who spent her life looking for cracks in stories. "But you're sad. Your eyes are doing the leaky thing."
I wiped a stray tear with the back of my hand, a quick, jerky motion. "I'm not sad, honey. I'm just tired. Grown-up work is sometimes like a playground where someone isn't sharing the toys, and it makes things a little messy."
"Cooper says we're a team," Milo said, his jaw setting in a way that was so much like mine it made my chest ache. "Teams don't let people be mean. He told me he's the shield and I'm the scout. Scouts find the trouble so the shield can stop it."
The image of Cooper Ellis—the man I had spent months trying to categorize as a shallow, corporate-mandated golden retriever—sitting on the floor and teaching my son about protective metaphors was almost too much to bear.
It was a swoon moment I didn't have the energy to fight.
It was the quiet, devastating evidence that he wasn't just here for the show.
He was here for us. He was making space for my son's fear and turning it into a game, while I was busy trying to build a bunker.
"He's right," I whispered, kissing the top of his head. "We're a team. And tomorrow, we're going to fix the toys. I promise."
I led him back to his room, tucking him in with a precision that felt like a prayer.
I stayed until his breathing leveled out into the heavy, rhythmic cadence of deep sleep.
When I stepped back into the hallway, I found Cooper leaning against the wall outside the guest room.
He was wearing a plain grey t-shirt and flannel lounge pants, looking rumpled and solid and entirely too real for the digital nightmare happening on my phone.
"He's back down?" Cooper asked, his voice low and raspy with sleep. He didn't move toward me, giving me the space he knew I needed to keep my armor from crumbling completely. He was a careful person. He noticed things. He documented the shifts in my posture like I documented metadata.
"He asked if the bad people were still there," I said, leaning my head back against the wall. "He’s six, Cooper. He shouldn't even know there are bad people in my world yet. He should be worried about whether we have enough milk for cereal and if his LEGO Batman has both his ears."
Cooper finally moved, crossing the small distance between us until he was close enough that I could feel the radiant heat of him.
He didn't touch me, but he hovered in my orbit, a physical constant in a world that was suddenly made of variables.
"They're coming for you, Sloane. They're using the countdown to build the 'event' metrics.
They aren't just leaking; they're producing. "
"I know," I said, a bitter laugh bubbling up in my chest. "Graham always loved a good cliffhanger. He’s turning my life into a Season One finale. He wants me to crawl back and beg Rhea to kill the story, and then he’ll own me for the next ten years. He’ll have the Receipts, and I’ll be the puppet."
"You aren't going to crawl," Cooper said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact, as if he knew my internal architecture better than I did. "We have the drive. We have the IP logs. We have Derek’s little recording. We have everything we need to burn NovaWave to the ground."
I looked up at him, my eyes tracing the sharp line of his jaw and the steady, unwavering light in his eyes.
"If we do this, if we go rogue and release the receipts ourselves, there’s no going back.
They'll sue us into the stone age. They'll blacklist us.
Your shiny new career will be over before the first commercial break. "
Cooper reached out then, his thumb grazing the side of my face, a touch so light it was almost a suggestion.
"My shiny new career doesn't mean a damn thing if I have to watch them do to you what Marcus did. I’m not a lifestyle influencer anymore, Sloane. I’m the co-host of the biggest 'No-Bull' brand in the country. It’s time we acted like it. "
The silence that followed was charged, the kind of stillness that felt like a wire about to snap.
I looked at his mouth—the mouth that had told my son he was a scout, the mouth that had kissed me in a dark cabin until I forgot my own name.
I realized then that I wasn't just afraid of the leak.
I was afraid of the fact that for the first time in my life, I didn't want to handle a crisis alone.
The independence I had worn like a badge of honor felt less like a shield and more like a cage.
"Why are you doing this?" I whispered, my voice breaking. "You could walk away. You could tell Graham I’m the one who went rogue. You could have your solo show. You could have everything you wanted when you walked into my studio."
"I have everything I want right here," he said, his hand sliding to the back of my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair. "I'm a fixer, Sloane. It’s my core flaw, remember? But I don't want to fix you. I just want to stand in front of you while you fix the world. Let me be the shield."
The admission was the final crack in the wall.
I didn't have a witty redirect. I didn't have a cynical observation about the pheromones of crisis.
I just had the bone-deep realization that I was in love with a man who thought protecting me was a privilege.
I reached up, fisting my hands in his shirt, and pulled him down.
The kiss was desperate, a collision of teeth and tongue and all the things we couldn't say.
It tasted like adrenaline and salt and the kind of truth that doesn't need a microphone.
He pushed me back against the wall, his body a heavy, solid weight against mine. His hands were everywhere—mapping the curves of my waist, the line of my throat, the frantic beat of my pulse. "We're going to burn it down," he groaned against my lips. "Every single floor of that glass tower."
"Starting with Graham," I gasped, my head falling back as his mouth found the sensitive skin of my neck. "I want him to watch the stock price drop in real time."
"Whatever you want," Cooper whispered, his hand sliding under the hem of my shirt, his palm hot against my skin. "I’m yours, Sloane. Professional, personal, whatever. I’m on your team."
We moved toward my bedroom, a tangled mess of limbs and urgency.
The countdown was still ticking on the kitchen counter, the numbers dropping toward zero, but for the first time since the first file leaked, I wasn't counting the seconds until my ruin.
I was counting the ways a heart could feel safe in the middle of a storm.
The truth wasn't a comfort food—it was a jagged bone.
But if I had to swallow it, I was glad I wasn't doing it alone.
Inside the bedroom, the moonlight filtered through the sheer curtains, casting long, silver stripes across the duvet.
Cooper didn't waste time. He pulled my shirt over my head, his eyes dark as they swept over me, a visual inventory that made my skin flush.
"You're beautiful," he said, and he said it like a confession, like a secret he’d been keeping since the day he walked into Studio B.
I fumbled with the buttons of his pants, my fingers clumsy with a need that felt like it was vibrating in my marrow.
When he finally stripped out of them, his cock was already hard, a thick, pulsing weight that looked like a promise of a different kind of relief.
He wasn't gentle as he pushed me onto the bed, and I didn't want him to be.
I wanted the intensity. I wanted the rough, honest friction of two people who had nothing left to hide.
He moved between my legs, his fingers sliding into me, finding me soaked and clenching with a hunger that was almost painful.
"So wet for me," he murmured, his thumb circling my clit with a precision that made my back arch off the mattress.
"You like this, don't you? Knowing I’m the only thing you can't control? "
"Shut up," I gasped, pulling his head down for another bruising kiss. "Just... fuck me, Cooper. Fuck me until the countdown doesn't matter."
He entered me in one slow, punishing thrust, his cock filling me so completely it felt like he was claiming the space where my fear used to live.
I locked my legs around his waist, dragging him deeper, my nails carving twin tracks down the broad muscles of his back.
We moved in a rhythm that was frantic and raw, a conversation held in gasps and the sound of skin slamming against skin.
He pounded into me, each thrust a declaration of war against everything trying to tear us apart.
When the climax hit, it was a total systemic failure.
I screamed as my pussy clamped down on him in tight, rhythmic pulses, wave after wave of heat tearing through me until I was boneless.
Cooper followed a heartbeat later, his body turning to iron as he exploded inside me, filling me with his hot release while his forehead crashed against mine.
We stayed like that for a long time, locked together in the silver light, two people who had finally stopped pretending they didn't need each other.
The countdown was still running. The final revelation was coming.
But as I watched the rise and fall of Cooper’s chest, I realized that the leaker had already lost. They wanted to expose my secrets, but they had accidentally given me the only truth that mattered: I wasn't a witness to an erasure.
I was the architect of a new map. And this time, I wasn't drawing it alone.
I did not sleep well, but for the first time in a decade, I didn't wake up reaching for a shield. I woke up reaching for him.