Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The Chicago skyline stretched behind me, indifferent and glass-bright, and I couldn’t focus on a single thing it represented.
The quarterly reports sat untouched. Three acquisition proposals waited for signatures that weren’t coming today. Daniel had knocked twice in the past hour and twice I’d sent him away with a wave that probably landed harder than I intended.
I rolled my signet ring against the mahogany desk and tried to remember the last time a single person had occupied this much real estate in my head.
I came up empty.
Emilia Rivera had walked out of my office yesterday with her spine straight and her notebook tucked under her arm and the ghost of what almost happened still hanging in the air between us, and I hadn’t been able to think about a single thing since.
Not the investigation. Not the legal exposure.
Not the three thousand employees whose livelihoods depended on my ability to stay focused.
Just her.
The way she’d stepped back. The deliberate, costly way she’d put distance between us when every signal in the room had been pulling the other direction.
I’d watched her do it — watched her remember something, watched it land on her face, watched her choose her work over whatever was building between us with the quiet, devastating conviction of a woman who knew exactly what she was sacrificing.
I respected it. I hated it. Both at once, with an intensity that had no place in a rational mind.
I can’t think clearly around you and I need to think clearly.
She’d said it like an apology. Like she was sorry the pull existed. Like if she could have engineered it out of the situation she would have, and the fact that she couldn’t was a problem she was managing rather than a feeling she was having.
I understood that impulse better than she knew. I’d been managing feelings like engineering problems my entire adult life. The difference was that watching her do it hadn’t made me feel relieved.
It had made me want to be the reason she stopped.
Which was exactly the kind of thinking that would get us both into trouble, and precisely the kind I couldn’t seem to stop.
My phone lit up with a news alert. Emilia’s byline flashed across the screen — a teaser piece about the Lakefront development that said nothing actionable but implied everything damning.
She was building her case brick by careful brick, and any rational man in my position would be marshaling lawyers and crafting responses.
Instead I enlarged her photo.
A press event from last year — she stood slightly apart from a group of colleagues, her attention focused somewhere beyond the frame. Not posed. Not performing. Just watchful in the way she always was, cataloging a room full of people who probably hadn’t noticed her noticing them.
I closed the app before I did something pathetic.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Laurent—”
“Cancel the Singapore call.”
A beat of silence. Daniel had been with me long enough to know that I didn’t cancel calls. I had taken calls through food poisoning, a building evacuation, and one memorable board meeting during which I was fairly certain I had a broken rib from a gym accident I’d refused to acknowledge.
“Sir?”
“Family emergency. Whatever sounds convincing.” I loosened my tie, suddenly unable to tolerate the pressure. “Hold all calls for an hour.”
“Of course.”
The intercom clicked off.
I stood and moved to the window, needing the lake the way I always did when my thoughts outran my control. The water stretched gray and enormous toward the horizon — the same view I’d been chasing since I was seventeen years old and desperate for any horizon that wasn’t the one I’d grown up under.
The Lakefront investigation was a problem I could solve.
Someone in my organization had authorized substandard materials on Building C — I was increasingly certain of that, increasingly certain it hadn’t been sanctioned from my desk, and increasingly aware that finding out who had done it mattered for reasons that went beyond legal exposure.
Someone had used my name. My project. My reputation for doing things right.
And they’d done it badly enough that a journalist with a recorder in her clutch had walked into my gala and started dismantling it.
I should be grateful for that, in a strictly practical sense.
The thought of Emilia made my chest do the complicated thing it had been doing since yesterday.
She’d said for now when I’d said it. I’d said I didn’t know what I was going to do about it either. Both of us speaking around the edges of something we weren’t naming, and neither of us pushing through to the center of it.
That wasn’t me. I pushed through. I named things. I made decisions and executed them with the kind of clarity that had built a billion-dollar company from a neighborhood that didn’t produce billionaires.
Emilia Rivera was the first problem in fifteen years that I genuinely didn’t know how to solve. And the fact that I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve it — wasn’t sure solve was even the right word for what I wanted — was information I was still processing.
The intercom buzzed again. “Mr. Laurent. There’s an industry event tonight. The Chicago Media Association’s annual dinner.” Daniel paused with the weighted precision of a man who had already looked up the guest list. “Ms. Rivera is attending.”
I stared at the lake and let the information settle.
Neutral ground. Professional context. She’d be surrounded by colleagues, which meant nothing I did would be private, which meant nothing I did would be reckless.
In theory.
“What time?”
“Seven. The Drake Hotel.”
I thought about the teaser article. The brick-by-careful-brick case she was building.
The mysterious efficiency of her reporting, the way she assembled facts until the shape of the truth became impossible to ignore.
She was good. She was also, based on everything Daniel had pulled together over the past week, working without the institutional backing that would normally protect a journalist going after someone with my resources.
She was exposed. More than she probably knew.
“Confirm my attendance.” I turned from the window. “And Daniel — no plus-one.”
“Understood, sir.”
The call disconnected.
Eight hours. I had eight hours to construct something resembling a strategy, and I was already aware that strategy wasn’t entirely the point.
The point was a woman in a service corridor who’d looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving, and the fact that I’d spent the better part of two days thinking about the moment she’d stepped back instead of the moment she’d almost stepped forward.
I crossed to the bar cart — a concession to the expectations of wealth that I rarely used for its intended purpose — and poured two fingers of whiskey into a crystal glass.
Then I set it on the table beside me and didn’t drink it, because some lessons carved themselves into bone early enough that they never needed revisiting.
My father had used alcohol as both weapon and excuse until the night everything shattered. I’d decided at fifteen that I would never give anything that kind of power over me.
I was starting to wonder if I’d been wrong.
The afternoon crawled past in a blur of avoided work and persistent anticipation.
By six I’d reviewed exactly nothing, signed exactly nothing, and accomplished nothing beyond wearing a path in the carpet and cataloging everything I knew about Emilia Rivera — her bylines, her methods, the three criminal indictments that had followed her two biggest stories, the editor dispute that had pushed her freelance four years ago.
She’d been right. She’d been right and someone powerful enough to matter had decided being right was less important than being manageable, and she’d walked away from the institution rather than become manageable.
I understood that too.
I changed at the office, trading black for charcoal, leaving the tie in the drawer, the top button of my shirt open in a concession to the evening’s theoretical casualness.
Then I looked at my reflection for a moment longer than necessary and acknowledged, privately, that I was not going to the Drake Hotel for strategic reasons.
I was going because she would be there.
And because the last thing she’d said to me — that doesn’t change anything — had sounded like something she was trying to convince herself of.
I intended to find out if it had worked.
The ballroom gleamed with chandeliers and the particular energy of rooms where everyone was performing for everyone else. I took a position near the back wall where I could observe without being absorbed into conversation and waited with the patience I’d spent two decades cultivating.
Then she walked in.
Deep burgundy — a dress that moved with her rather than announcing her, professional enough for the room but soft enough to make my hands remember things I was supposed to be setting aside.
Her hair was down, which I hadn’t seen before, dark waves over her shoulders that made her look less guarded than the woman who’d walked into my office with a notebook, a blazer, and the specific posture of someone prepared for a fight.
She scanned the room the way she always did — cataloging, filing, always working.
Her gaze found mine.
Three heartbeats of absolute stillness.
The room did what rooms did around her — continued, indifferent, full of its own noise — and neither of us moved. I watched her process it, watched the professional composure she was so good at performing assemble itself over whatever had flashed across her face in that first unguarded second.
She looked away. Turned to a colleague. Smiled with her mouth and not her eyes.
But she’d looked.
She’d felt it too, and she’d looked, and that was enough for now.
I stayed where I was and watched her move through the crowd — easy confidence with peers, barely-touched wine, the slight tension in her shoulders that told me she always knew exactly where I was standing even when she was pointedly not looking at me.
The game was far from over.
For the first time in years, I found myself genuinely uncertain of the outcome — and more interested in the game than in anything else my empire had to offer.