Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Emilia “Em” Rivera
The lobby of Laurent Enterprises smelled like money — sterile and vaguely intimidating, which was almost certainly the point.
I sat in one of those modern leather chairs that looked more like sculpture than furniture, my notebook clutched against my chest, and gave myself the same talk I gave myself before every difficult interview.
You’ve done this before. You’ve sat across from aldermen and CEOs and a state senator who’d cried actual tears trying to get you to kill a story. You know how to do this.
What I had not done before was sit across from a man whose hands I knew. Whose voice I’d heard come apart in the November air. Who had pressed his lips to my temple afterward like it meant something, and then walked away before I could ask his name.
Four days. It had been four days since the gala, and I still hadn’t figured out how to file that night into any category that made sense.
The balcony existed in its own separate folder in my brain, unlabeled, which was a problem because every time I opened any other folder it was somehow in there too.
Get your head in the game, Rivera.
My phone buzzed. Jenna.
You alive? You’ve been weird since that café thing.
I typed back: Heading into the lion’s den. Wish me luck.
Get the story. Don’t get seduced. You’ve got this.
Easy for her to say. She hadn’t sat across a café table from him and watched him look at her like he was trying to solve something he’d already decided he wanted to understand.
She hadn’t felt the specific, charged current that ran beneath every exchange, the thing that had been there since a service corridor and hadn’t dissipated with knowing his name — had gotten worse, actually, with knowing his name.
I shoved my phone into my bag.
“Ms. Rivera?”
Daniel Mercer stood before me, tablet in hand, expression professionally neutral in the way of a man who had seen everything and filed it somewhere you’d never find.
“Mr. Laurent is ready for you.”
I stood, smoothing my blazer. The good one — court appearances and serious-source meetings. The one that meant I am a legitimate professional and not a woman who made a spectacularly inadvisable decision on a balcony four days ago.
“Lead the way.”
The elevator rose in silence. Floor after floor, the city falling away beneath us.
When the doors opened, I stepped out into a space that felt less like an office floor and more like an argument for a certain kind of power — floor-to-ceiling windows, Lake Michigan sprawling silver and vast beyond the glass, afternoon light flooding everything.
Daniel led me down a hallway lined with abstract art and stopped before a set of heavy wooden doors.
“He’s expecting you.” He opened one door, gestured me through, and disappeared.
The office was unexpected. I’d prepared myself for cold minimalism — chrome and glass and sharp edges designed to establish dominance before a word was spoken.
Instead I found warmth. Rich wood paneling.
Bookshelves lined with books that looked read rather than decorative.
A massive antique desk covered in papers that suggested he actually worked here rather than simply posing for magazine covers.
Sebastian stood at the window with his back to me, silhouetted against the skyline.
I had approximately three seconds before he turned, and I used them to do something I was not proud of — I looked.
The breadth of his shoulders. The white shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, jacket draped over his chair.
The posture of a man completely at ease in his own space, which was the same posture he’d had on a balcony above the city, when ease had meant something different.
He turned.
The afternoon light caught the angles of his face, the dark scruff along his jaw, those storm-gray eyes moving to me with the focused attention I remembered from the corridor, from the café, from every moment he’d decided I was worth looking at directly.
I kept my expression neutral. It cost more than it should have.
“Ms. Rivera.” His voice rolled through the space, unhurried. “Right on time.”
“I’m always on time. It’s one of my few virtues.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I doubt that’s true. The few virtues part.”
He moved toward his desk and I tracked him the way you track something that has already proven capable of surprising you — with the specific awareness of a person who has learned, too late, that their usual defenses have a gap in them.
He gestured to the chair across from him.
“Please. Sit.”
“I’d rather stand.”
Something moved through his eyes — interest, amusement, recognition. He sat behind the desk with the ease of a man who owned every room he entered, and I positioned myself across from him with the desk between us like the professional boundary it was supposed to be.
“Your investigation is crossing lines, Ms. Rivera.”
So. Right to it. No preamble, no performance. I pulled my notebook from my bag and flipped it open.
“Which lines would those be?” I said. “The ones where your Lakefront Development used substandard concrete in the foundation? Or the ones where a city inspector mysteriously bought a new boat right after signing off on code violations?”
“You have evidence for these accusations?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“No.” He leaned forward, fingers steepled. “You’d be here regardless. Because you’re exactly the kind of journalist who runs toward fire instead of away from it.”
“Is that supposed to be flattering?”
“It’s supposed to be accurate.”
I moved closer to the desk without meaning to — pulled by the same gravity that had been working on me since a service corridor, since a balcony, since a café table where he’d said lunch like it was the most reasonable thing in the world and I’d said yes like I’d already known I would.
“I have recordings. Documents. Witness statements. Your people signed off on that foundation work knowing it didn’t meet code.”
“My people.” He said it flatly. “Do you have any idea how many people work for Laurent Enterprises? How many layers exist between my desk and a construction site?”
“Enough layers to provide plausible deniability?”
“Enough layers for things to happen without my knowledge. Or my approval.”
I stepped closer still. The desk was still between us but the distance had collapsed to something that made the cedar-and-leather scent of him reach me, and I hated my nervous system for the specific, cellular way it recognized it. Not just as attraction. As memory.
“Then who approved it?” I said. “If not you, who?”
Sebastian rose from his chair in one fluid motion, and suddenly we were separated by nothing but the desk and a few feet of air that felt considerably less than that.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Bullshit.”
The word landed hard. Something shifted behind his eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“You expect me to believe that Sebastian Laurent — the man who controls every detail of his empire — had no idea what was happening on his flagship development project?”
“And you expect me to believe,” he said, moving around the desk with the slow, deliberate patience I remembered from a balcony railing, “that Emilia Rivera would sit across a café table from her investigation target and then walk into his office alone if she truly thought he was guilty of everything she suspects?”
He was close now. Too close. Close enough that I could see the individual threads of gray in his eyes, the faint scar on his knuckle, the careful control in the set of his jaw.
The balcony was in the room with us. It had been since I walked through the door. Neither of us had said it and both of us knew it and the knowing was louder than anything either of us had actually said.
“Maybe I’m here to get a confession,” I said.
“Maybe.” His voice had dropped. “Or maybe you’re here because you can’t stop thinking about it either.”
He didn’t say me. He said it. And we both knew exactly what it was.
The response that moved through me was immediate and unwelcome and completely unsurprising by now. I held my ground.
“That’s incredibly presumptuous.”
“Is it wrong?”
I should have said yes. I should have stepped back, re-established the professional distance, remembered every reason this man was dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with corruption scandals and everything to do with the fact that he was looking at me exactly the way he’d looked at me on a balcony before the city disappeared.
Instead the space between us contracted, degree by degree, the way it had in a corridor, on a balcony, across a café table — like proximity to him was something my body had decided to pursue regardless of what my better judgment had to say about it.
His hand came up slowly, telegraphed, giving me every opportunity to step back.
I didn’t step back.
His fingers brushed my jaw — barely a touch, the same barely-a-touch as a strand of hair tucked behind an ear in November wind — and I felt it in my spine.
“Emilia.” My full name this time. Not Em — the only name he’d known me by on the balcony. Emilia. Like he’d been waiting to say it since the moment he’d learned it.
The distance between us had become almost nothing.
And then I remembered.
Not the investigation — though that was there too, the weight of it, the months of work and the source I had to protect and the story that mattered. What I remembered was simpler and more devastating than any of that.
I remembered standing at the back of a ballroom with my champagne glass nearly slipping from my fingers.
I remembered the careful, deliberate unreadability of his expression — the expression of a man who had known exactly who I was the entire time.
On the balcony. In the corridor. Every moment he’d looked at me like I was something worth figuring out, he had already known.
He’d left before I could ask his name. On purpose.
And now here he was, saying my name like he’d earned the right to.
I stepped back.
Not far. Not dramatically. Just enough to let the air back in, to let the space between us mean something again.
His hand dropped.
“I can’t.” The words came out quieter than I intended, stripped of the professional armor I’d walked in here wearing. “I won’t.”
Sebastian went very still. Something moved across his face — not surprise exactly, something more complicated. Respect, maybe. The real kind.
“The investigation,” he said. Not a question.
“The investigation.” I held his gaze, because looking away felt like a different kind of surrender. “And everything else. I can’t think clearly around you, and I need to think clearly. Too much depends on it.”
The silence between us was different from the charged silences we’d been trading all afternoon. This one had weight to it. Texture.
“All right,” he said finally. His voice was even. Controlled. But something underneath it wasn’t. “I understand.”
I picked up my notebook from where I’d set it on the edge of his desk, tucking it back into my bag with hands that were steadier than I had any right to expect.
“The investigation stands,” I said. “Whatever this is —” I gestured at the space between us, at the inadequate word for everything that had been in this room — “it doesn’t change what I found.”
“I know.” He hadn’t moved. Still standing in the same spot, watching me with those gray eyes that never missed anything. “I’m not asking it to.”
I made it to the door.
“For what it’s worth,” he said behind me, and something in his voice made me stop with my hand on the frame, “I didn’t know what I was going to do about it either. On the balcony. After.”
I didn’t turn around. If I turned around, I wouldn’t leave, and I needed to leave.
“That doesn’t change anything,” I said.
“No,” he agreed quietly. “It doesn’t.”
I walked out.
In the elevator, descending, alone with nothing but my reflection and the soft hum of machinery, I pressed my back against the cold metal wall and stared at the ceiling.
I’d done the right thing. I knew I’d done the right thing.
The investigation was real and the stakes were real and Sebastian Laurent was many things, but what he was most was the man at the center of a story I’d been building for months, a story that mattered, a story that people needed someone to be willing to tell.
And I was that person. I had always been that person.
It was just that I’d never had to be that person while also being the woman who’d stood on a balcony in November and felt, for a few reckless minutes, like for now was enough.
My phone buzzed. Jenna.
Well? Did you get what you needed?
I looked at the screen for a long moment, watching the lobby rise up through the glass elevator walls, the marble floor growing larger below me.
I got out, I typed back. That has to count for something.
Three dots appeared immediately. Then: Did you want to?
The elevator doors opened.
I walked out without answering, because some questions deserved more honesty than I was capable of at the moment, and Jenna had always been able to tell the difference.
Outside, the Chicago air hit me like it always did — cold and direct and completely indifferent to whatever I was feeling. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, letting it do its work.
The story was still real. The corruption was still real. Everything I’d walked in there with, I was walking out with.
I’d done the right thing.
I just needed to keep telling myself that until it stopped feeling like a loss.