Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The morning after the gala, I couldn’t focus worth a damn.
I’d been staring at the same quarterly report for twenty minutes, the numbers blurring into meaningless shapes while my mind kept circling back to her.
Dark hair twisted into something that looked held together by sheer force of will.
Hazel eyes that sparked with challenge every time she parried one of my questions.
The way she’d stood in that service corridor like she owned it, completely unintimidated by a room full of people who would have tried, if they’d noticed her.
And then the balcony.
The city spread out below us, her hands gripping the iron railing, the November wind doing to her hair what it had done to everything I’d been telling myself about the evening — stripping away the careful arrangement and leaving something I hadn’t planned for.
I’d left deliberately. That was the part I kept returning to, the part that sat wrong no matter how many times I examined it from different angles.
The assistant had come. The speeches needed me.
Both things were true. But I’d also known, in the three seconds between the door opening and my decision to leave, that she was about to ask my name — and that once she knew it, something would shift irrevocably.
So I’d made the shift happen first. On my terms. The way I made everything happen.
The problem was that it hadn’t worked.
I’d walked back into that ballroom and delivered a keynote address to three hundred people while some part of my mind stayed on that balcony, cataloging details with the obsessive precision I usually reserved for acquisition targets.
The specific way she’d laughed when I pushed back.
The sound she’d made when the last of her resistance finally gave — breathless and surprised, like she hadn’t expected to come undone quite so completely.
The moment afterward when she’d turned her cheek against the cold railing and opened her mouth to ask, and I’d been saved by a door swinging open at exactly the wrong moment.
Or the right moment. I still couldn’t decide which.
And then she’d been standing at the back of the ballroom with her champagne glass nearly slipping from her fingers, and our eyes had met across the crowd, and I’d seen the exact moment she understood.
The fury that replaced the shock. The way she’d set her glass down with that precise, controlled motion and reached for her pen like it was a weapon.
Game on, her expression had said.
I hadn’t been able to look away.
My fingers found the signet ring on my right hand — rolling the heavy gold band, I realized, for twenty minutes without noticing. A tell Daniel would notice. I stilled my hand.
The smart move would have been to bury her.
Not literally — I wasn’t a monster — but professionally.
I had resources. Contacts. The kind of influence that could make an investigative journalist’s sources dry up overnight and her editor suddenly discover budget constraints that required restructuring her position.
I’d done it before. Not often, but when necessary.
The thought lasted approximately four seconds before I recognized it for what it was — and rejected it with a force that surprised me.
She called it refreshing. No — I had called her refreshing.
Standing in that corridor, watching her refuse to be intimidated, I’d thought the word before I could stop it and recognized it for the rare thing it was.
People did not surprise me anymore. I had spent fifteen years building a life in which surprises were engineered out of every equation, in which I knew the angle of every approach before it arrived.
Emilia Rivera had surprised me three times before she’d told me her name.
I wasn’t going to bury her. I was going to meet her.
A knock at my office door pulled me from the spiral.
“Come in.”
Daniel Mercer had been my executive assistant for seven years — the only employee in my company who regularly told me things I didn’t want to hear. He stepped inside with a tablet tucked under his arm and an expression I recognized. He’d found something I wouldn’t like.
“Good morning, Mr. Laurent.” He crossed to my desk, setting the tablet in front of me. “I thought you’d want to see this before it gained traction.”
The headline glowed on the screen: LAKEFRONT DEVELOPMENT: FOUNDATION FOR FRAUD?
No byline yet. Just a preview piece from the Tribune’s online platform, clearly a teaser for something larger. But I recognized the precision of it — the way each sentence built on the last, methodical and controlled, leaving no exit routes for the subject.
“Emilia Rivera,” I said. Not a question.
Daniel nodded. “Freelance investigative journalist. She’s broken three major corruption stories in the past two years. Two resulted in criminal indictments.”
“Tell me everything.”
He pulled up a file, rattling off details with the efficiency I paid him handsomely for.
“Thirty-one years old. Northwestern Medill graduate. Staff positions at the Tribune and Sun-Times before going freelance after a dispute with an editor about four years ago. Sources describe her as tenacious, thorough, and —” he paused, scrolling — “‘annoyingly unwilling to accept no for an answer.’”
A smile found my mouth before I could stop it.
Daniel’s eyebrows rose a fraction. He’d worked for me long enough to notice when something was off.
“She was at the gala last night,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “We spoke.”
“You spoke to an investigative journalist who’s actively building a case against your development project.”
“I didn’t know that’s what she was doing at the time.
” The lie rolled off my tongue with the ease of long practice.
It tasted worse than usual. I’d known exactly what she was doing the moment I caught her in that hallway.
I’d seen the notebook, the recorder-shaped outline in her clutch, the ink on her thumb.
I’d cataloged all of it and chosen to stay anyway — chosen the balcony, chosen for now, chosen to leave before she could ask the question I didn’t yet know how to answer.
None of that was something I was prepared to explain to Daniel.
“What’s her angle?” I said.
“From what we can gather, she’s looking into the foundation work on Building C. There are implications that inspections were...” he paused, “expedited.”
Expedited. A polite word for bribed.
The thing was, I hadn’t ordered any bribes.
I ran a multi-billion-dollar empire built on the principle that shortcuts were expensive mistakes in disguise.
But I employed thousands of people and couldn’t personally oversee every handshake on every job site.
If someone in my organization had paid off a city inspector, I needed to know about it.
And apparently, Emilia Rivera had already found out.
There was something almost clarifying about that.
She’d walked into my gala with evidence I didn’t have about my own company, and instead of briefing me from a distance like any reasonable source would, she’d stood in a service corridor and told me — in her oblique, combative, entirely infuriating way — exactly what she had.
She’d given me the shape of the problem before I’d even known to look for it.
I wasn’t sure if that made her reckless or generous. Possibly both.
“Get me everything you can on her sources,” I said. “And have Legal prepare for potential scrutiny. I want us audit-ready within the week.”
Daniel made a note. “Should I also have PR draft a response strategy?”
“Not yet.” I moved to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan, the same view I’d been chasing since I was seventeen years old and desperate to escape a house that had nothing to do with home.
The water stretched gray and endless toward the horizon. “I want to know what she has first.”
“And how do you propose to find that out?”
I turned back to face him. The plan had been forming since the moment I’d watched her set down her champagne glass in that ballroom — since I’d seen the fury in her eyes and recognized it for what it was underneath. Not just professional. Personal. She felt deceived. She had every right to.
The least I could do was face that directly.
“Set up a meeting.”
Daniel’s stylus paused. “Sir?”
“A meeting. With Ms. Rivera.” I returned to my desk. “Offer it through official channels. Tell her I want to discuss her findings before they go to print. Standard opportunity-to-respond courtesy.”
“You want to meet with the journalist who’s trying to expose corruption in your company.”
“I want to understand what she knows.” True, and approximately forty percent of my actual motivation. “And I want her to pick the location.”
Now Daniel’s carefully neutral expression cracked entirely. “You want her to choose the meeting place.”
“Is there an echo in here?” I kept my voice mild. “Yes. Her choice. Wherever she feels comfortable.”
Daniel stared at me for a long moment — the look he reserved for the rare occasions when I did something he couldn’t categorize. Then he nodded, professional neutrality reassembling itself.
“I’ll reach out to her editor this morning.”
“Do that.”
After he left, I turned back to the window, but I wasn’t seeing the lake. I was seeing a ballroom, and a woman at the back of it reaching for her pen with the steady hands of someone who had just decided something irrevocable.
She was coming for my empire. She had every tool and every right and every reason. And I had sat in my office all morning turning a gold ring around my finger and thinking about the way she’d laughed on a balcony in November like it was something I was entitled to hear again.
I’d left to think. I’d thought. The thinking had made it worse.