Chapter 6 #2
The man who’d stopped me was unfamiliar — mid-fifties, silver hair swept back from a face that had probably been handsome before time and stress carved it into something harder. His suit was expensive but worn wrong, sitting on his frame like borrowed authority.
“I’m sorry, have we met?”
“Not formally.” He released my elbow but didn’t step back, positioning himself between me and the rest of the room with practiced ease. “I represent certain interests that have been following your work. With great admiration.”
Something cold moved down my spine. “What interests?”
“Parties who share your concerns about the Lakefront development. Who would prefer to see the truth come to light.” He smiled, but the expression stopped well short of his eyes. “You’re making powerful enemies, Ms. Rivera. It might benefit you to make some friends.”
“I’m not looking for friends.”
“Everyone needs allies.” He pressed something into my hand — an envelope, plain white, unmarked.
My instincts flared immediately. Anonymous information could be gold.
It could also be the thing that ended a career if handled wrong.
“Consider this a gesture of good faith. Information that might prove illuminating regarding Mr. Laurent’s project and the people protecting it. ”
“Who are you?”
“Someone who believes in accountability.” He was already moving, dissolving into the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this before. “Be careful, Ms. Rivera. The people you’re investigating don’t appreciate scrutiny. They tend to respond definitively.”
And then he was gone.
I stood holding the envelope, my champagne glass suddenly forgotten, that cold feeling spreading from my spine into my chest. I found a quiet corner near a potted fern and opened it with fingers I refused to let tremble.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded precisely in thirds.
The contents made my blood run cold.
Project documentation. Financial records.
Names I recognized from Marco’s files and others I’d never encountered — evidence of systematic fraud that went far deeper than substandard concrete.
Kickbacks. Shell companies. Money laundering through construction contracts.
A web of corruption connecting the Lakefront development to some of the most powerful figures in Chicago’s business community.
And at the center of it, like a spider in the middle of an intricate web, was a name I hadn’t expected.
Not Sebastian Laurent.
Someone within his organization. Someone close enough to authorize decisions in his name. Someone who’d been using the Lakefront project as a front for activities that had nothing to do with real estate development.
I turned to the final page.
It wasn’t documentation at all.
It was a photograph.
My photograph. Grainy, taken from a distance, showing me entering the Laurent Enterprises building three days ago. Time-stamped. Annotated with my home address, my phone number, my most recent byline.
Beneath it, handwritten in neat block letters:
STOP DIGGING. FINAL WARNING.
My hands shook badly enough that the paper crinkled.
I looked up, scanning the ballroom for the silver-haired man, but he’d dissolved completely into the crowd. Sebastian was nowhere visible either, though whether that registered as relief or something else, I couldn’t honestly have said.
This was more than corporate corruption. More than code violations and bribed inspectors. Someone had been watching me. Someone knew where I lived, where I worked, what I was building.
Someone wanted me scared.
The hell of it was, they were succeeding.
I shoved the envelope into my clutch and headed for the exit, the evening’s appetite for networking completely destroyed.
Whatever I’d walked in here carrying — professional ambition, careful strategy, the complicated weight of an almost that refused to resolve itself — I was walking out carrying something heavier.
Fear. The real kind. The kind that settles in your bones and makes you check the shadows.
But underneath it, threading through it like wire through muscle, was something else entirely.
The thing that had gotten me into this career in the first place.
The thing that had survived betrayal and professional setbacks and every person who’d ever told me I was too stubborn, too reckless, too unwilling to recognize my limits.
Anger.
Whoever had sent that photograph thought they could frighten me into silence. They’d miscalculated.
I took out my phone and pulled up Sebastian’s number, fingers steady despite everything.
Tomorrow. Your office. 9 AM. I’m ready to discuss terms.
The response came before I’d made it to the street.
I’ll be waiting.
Three words. No signature. But I could hear his voice in them anyway — that low, controlled certainty that had been making my spine straighten since a service corridor at a gala that felt like a lifetime ago.
Whatever came next, I was done circling the edges of this.
Time to find out what we were both really made of.