6. Weak Spots #2
"She said she loved me. Said we'd figure it out after the deal closed.
" I look down the hallway at nothing for one second, at the blank wall at the end of the corridor, because some things are easier to say without an audience.
Then back at her. "She'd been feeding information to the hostile party the entire time.
Using our conversations to tank her own father's company. "
"Jesus."
"He lost everything. Retirement, reputation. All of it. Isabelle walked away with a VP title and a seven-figure payout."
Rachel is quiet. "She destroyed her own father."
"For the right price, Isabelle would destroy anyone." I meet her eyes. "Including you. Including me. Especially both of us together, if she thought it would gain her something."
"Is that why you don't..." She doesn't finish it. She doesn't need to.
"It's safer. Cleaner. People can't use something against you if you never hand it over."
She takes a step toward me. Close enough now that I can smell her perfume, jasmine and something warm underneath it. Close enough that the low light catches the green in her eyes. Close enough that I would need to make exactly zero effort to close the remaining distance between us.
"That sounds lonely."
"It's practical."
"It's sad, Connor."
She says my name like that sometimes. Not as punctuation. As its own complete sentence. And every single time she does it, I feel it in the places I stopped guarding years ago because I stopped thinking anything could reach them.
I push off the doorframe. Put distance between us that immediately feels insufficient. "Get some sleep. Early call with legal tomorrow."
Rachel doesn't move. "Thank you. For not taking the deal."
"I told you. I don't work with people who can't be trusted." I keep my voice even, keep my eyes on hers, do all the things training and practice have made automatic. "And I don't throw my clients to sharks. Even elegant French ones."
Something moves through her expression. Gratitude shading into something more complicated, something I'm not cataloging tonight.
"Goodnight, Connor."
"Goodnight."
I make it back to the suite. Close the door. Stand against it in the dark and do something I haven't done in years, which is absolutely nothing. No calls, no strategy, no next move. Just the dark and the quiet and the particular weight of a situation I can no longer pretend is fully under control.
My phone buzzes. An email from my investigator: Moreau had a visitor last night. Corporate fixer named Thorne. Bad reputation. Specializes in making problems disappear. Thorne's client list includes three fashion conglomerates. All competitors of Rachel's brand.
So it isn't just a political scandal. Someone wants her company. Wants her reputation destroyed thoroughly enough that they can buy the wreckage for cents on the dollar, and they've hired a professional to make sure there's enough wreckage to buy.
I set the phone down and don't move for a long moment.
Then I hear it.
A sound from the bedroom. Not a cry. Something smaller and worse. The sound of someone fighting something in their sleep that they can't get their hands on.
I was already listening. I understand that now. I'd tracked the shift in her breathing pattern through the door ten minutes ago, the change in rhythm that moves from sleep to distress, and I'd filed it and stayed in my chair and told myself it wasn't my business.
I'm through the door before I finish the thought.
Rachel is tangled in the sheets, her right hand fisted in the fabric with a grip that belongs to someone who learned young to hold on to things. Her face is tight with something terrible and private.
"Rachel." I touch her shoulder, careful. "Wake up."
She jolts awake hard, her hand coming up fast and defensive.
I catch her wrist. "It's me. You're safe."
Recognition moves through her face. Then the embarrassment she shouldn't feel but does.
"God. Sorry. I was…"
"Dreaming."
"Nightmare." She pushes her hair back with unsteady hands. "Someone was in my studio. In Paris. Destroying everything. My designs, my samples, everything I've spent the last decade building, and I couldn't move, couldn't stop them, I just had to stand there and watch it all burn."
Her voice cracks on the last word. Just barely. She pulls it back almost immediately. And the fact that she pulls it back, that her first instinct is to contain herself, to not take up too much space even in her own distress, hits me somewhere I didn't prepare for.
I sit on the edge of her bed.
"It's not going to happen. I won't let it."
"You can't promise that."
"I just did."
She looks at me like I'm speaking a language she half-knows. Like she's waiting for the condition buried inside the kindness.
"Connor." Quiet, careful, the nightmare receding from her voice. "Why are you really doing this? And don't say business. I've watched you do business. This isn't that."
I should lie. The lie is right there, polished and ready, about reputation and contracts and the billable cost of failure.
"Because you deserve better than being someone else's collateral damage."
"That's still not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have right now."
We are close again. Close enough that I can see the last traces of the nightmare fading from her face.
Close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin.
Close enough that the thin silk of her sleep shirt catches the faint light from the window and I am viscerally, inconveniently aware of every inch of distance still between us.
"You should sleep."
"Stay." A breath. "Not like that. I just don't want to be alone. Not tonight. Just until I'm out."
Every professional instinct I have forms the word no.
"Okay."
I settle into the chair by the window. Rachel curls back into the pillows. Her breathing slows. That fisted grip on the sheets loosens. The fingers unfurling one by one. I sit in the dark and watch it happen and don't let myself think about what it means that I notice.
I've felt things before. I know what this is. I know the shape of it, the specific gravity, the way it starts as something manageable and becomes, with very little warning, the thing you built everything else around.
I know what it costs.
And sitting here in the quiet dark with Rachel Nguyen's breathing finally evening out across the room, I understand, with the cold clarity of a man who has been right about most things for a very long time, that I am already losing this particular fight.
The only question left is how much I'm willing to lose with it.