Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Emilia “Em” Rivera
Iwoke up to an empty bed and the low murmur of Sebastian’s voice somewhere in the penthouse.
For a moment I lay still, orienting myself — the unfamiliar ceiling, the city light coming through glass that stretched floor to floor, the particular quality of silence that belonged to spaces that cost more per square foot than my entire building.
Sebastian’s bedroom. His sheets, which did in fact smell like expensive decisions and fresh linen, exactly as I’d imagined in my less professional moments.
Then his voice sharpened in the other room — clipped, controlled, the voice he used when he was issuing instructions rather than having a conversation — and the warmth of waking up here dissolved into something cooler.
I found my clothes, dressed, and followed the sound.
He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows with his phone pressed to his ear, his back to me, the city spread out behind him like a campaign map.
He hadn’t heard me come in. I stood in the doorway and watched him pace — three steps left, three steps right, the contained movement of a man who needed to be doing something physical but had confined himself to a room.
The tension in his shoulders told me everything his words didn’t.
He’d been at this a while. He hadn’t woken me.
I waited until he ended the call before I spoke.
“How long have you been up?”
He turned. The mask was back — the boardroom version, the one that processed problems and issued solutions and didn’t leave room for anything messier than strategy.
I’d learned to read what lived underneath it.
Right now, underneath it, was a man who’d seen a photograph of me with a red circle around my face and had spent the predawn hours trying to build a wall between me and whoever had taken it.
“A few hours,” he said.
“And you didn’t wake me because?”
“Because you needed sleep.”
“Because you wanted to handle it before I could argue with you about it.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. Not a denial.
“I’ve arranged additional security at your apartment,” he said, his tone shifting into the register he used for board presentations. “Two men, rotating shifts. Discreet. You won’t notice them.”
“You arranged.” The words came out flat. “Without asking me.”
“The situation required immediate action.”
“The situation required a conversation.” I crossed my arms, aware that I was standing in his penthouse in yesterday’s clothes with my hair in a disaster and no shoes, and choosing to be entirely unbothered by that. “What else did you arrange while I was sleeping?”
Something flickered across his face. “My legal team is working on suppression for the article.”
I stared at him. “Suppress it.”
“We have a narrow window before—”
“Sebastian.” I laughed, but there was nothing in it that resembled humor. “You cannot suppress a news article. That is not how journalism works. That is not how any of this works.”
“I can try.”
“And in trying, you prove every accusation they’re making.
” I took a step toward him, because standing across a room from him while we had this argument felt like exactly the wrong geography.
“Every move you make to protect me just confirms the narrative that I’m compromised.
That I’m an asset you’re managing. That the story I’ve been building for months is just pillow talk dressed up as investigation. ”
His jaw tightened. “So I should do nothing.”
“You should talk to me before you do something.”
“There wasn’t time—”
“There was time to make four calls before six AM but not to wake me up for thirty seconds?” I held his gaze. “That’s not about time, Sebastian. That’s about control.”
The word landed the way I’d known it would. I watched him absorb it — the slight stillness, the recalibration behind his eyes.
“You don’t understand what these people are capable of,” he said finally.
His voice had dropped, lost the boardroom quality.
Something rawer underneath. “Hartley is just the piece you can see. The people above him have been moving money and influence through this city for years. If your investigation keeps pulling threads, you’re going to expose something far larger than one development deal gone wrong. ”
I held his gaze. “Then explain it to me. Stop managing the situation and actually talk to me. Who’s above Hartley? How high does this go?”
Something moved across his expression — and I recognized it now, this specific flicker, because I’d seen it in the kitchen when he’d talked about his mother and in the car when he’d catalogued my habits. It was the expression of a man who was about to say something true.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “And that’s what terrifies me.
Because whoever they are, they’re organized enough to have been watching you for weeks.
They’re connected enough to place people at two separate events.
And they’re ruthless enough to put your home address on a photograph and slide it under your door.
” His voice dropped further. “They knew that would reach me. They did it because they knew.”
“Knew what?”
He looked at me across the charged space between us.
The morning light was coming through the glass now, gray and early, catching the exhaustion in his face — the hours of calls, the weight of whatever he’d been sitting with since the text from Daniel had lit up his phone while I was nearly asleep on his chest.
“That you matter to me,” he said simply.
The words settled in the room quietly, the way true things sometimes did.
I moved toward him. “Then stop making decisions that treat me like something to be protected instead of someone to fight alongside.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“In practice they are, for you.” I stopped close enough to see the tension still living in his jaw, the controlled breathing.
“Every time things get complicated, you retreat into this version of yourself that thinks protection means isolation. That thinks—” I stopped.
The next word arrived without permission, without planning, without any of the careful management I’d been applying to this situation for a month.
“That thinks love means control.”
The word dropped into the silence between us like a stone into still water.
Neither of us moved.
I didn’t walk it back. He didn’t reach for it. It sat there, acknowledged in the specific way of things that are too large to be addressed directly and too real to be ignored — the word and everything it meant spreading outward in the quiet like rings on water.
After a moment, Sebastian exhaled slowly.
“If they see what you mean to me,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “they’ll use you to destroy me.
And I can’t—” He stopped. The mask had gone entirely now.
Just him, standing in the morning light with the city behind him, looking at me like I was something he hadn’t known how to want and was still learning.
“I watched my mother get used as leverage. I watched someone who loved her use that love as a weapon against her. And I spent twenty years making sure there was nothing in my life that could be used that way.”
“And then I walked into your service corridor.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “And then you walked into my service corridor.”
I closed the remaining distance between us, my hands finding his lapels — the same grip as the night before, anchoring myself to him.
Beneath my palms I could feel his heart, faster than the controlled exterior suggested.
“You don’t get to shut me out. Not after everything.
Not after last night, and the car, and the balcony, and every late night this past month when we were supposed to be working and ended up being honest instead. ”
“Em—”
“I’m asking you to trust me.” I met his gaze without flinching. “Not to protect me. Not to manage the situation. To trust me with the actual weight of it. The parts you can’t control. The parts that scare you.” I held on. “Let me stay through the ugly parts.”
Something cracked in his expression — not the dramatic fracture of the confession the night before, but something quieter. The giving way of a decision that had been made long before this moment and was only now being admitted to.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. The same words as last night, but different now — less confession, more honest assessment. “I’ve been running the same equation my whole life. Control equals safety. Distance equals protection. And every time I try to run it with you, the numbers don’t work.”
“Because it’s the wrong equation.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then his hands came up to cover mine where they gripped his lapels, warm and certain.
“You’re impossible,” he said.
“You’re infuriating.”
“We make quite the pair.”
The tension shifted — the way it always did between us, that specific pivot from argument to something that had been running underneath the argument the whole time. His thumb traced a circle on my hand. I felt the familiar heat move through my chest, lower.
“Sebastian.”
“Hmm.”
“Stop thinking.”
He kissed me — not the careful deliberate kiss of the bedroom or the desperate relief of the car, but something that fell between them.
Hard and honest and a little rough at the edges, the kiss of two people who had just fought about something real and come out the other side of it still choosing each other.
I kissed him back the same way.
His hands moved to my waist, then up my spine, then into my hair — unhurried despite the urgency underneath, like he was refusing to rush this particular thing.
I worked at his shirt buttons, pushed the fabric from his shoulders, ran my palms down the planes of his chest and felt the muscles tense beneath my hands.
“Kitchen,” I said against his mouth.