Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The Obsidian had never felt this quiet.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of the private lounge, watching Chicago sprawl beneath me in a grid of amber lights and distant sirens.
Behind me, the room’s gold accents caught the low lamplight, reflecting off mahogany panels that had witnessed deals worth billions.
Tonight, they’d witness something far more costly.
My confession.
I rolled the signet ring on my finger — a Laurent heirloom my grandfather had worn back when the family name meant nothing more than a struggling contractor’s license and a promise to build something better.
It was the only piece of the old world I’d kept when the empire finally came together.
A reminder of where power started for us, and how easily it could disappear.
The habit had followed me into every boardroom since, the weight of it grounding me when everything else threatened to spin out of control.
Right now, with Emilia on her way up, control felt like something I’d never quite had the grip on I’d believed.
Daniel’s text from earlier burned in my memory: She’s confirmed. Twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes had passed seventeen minutes ago.
The elevator chimed.
I didn’t turn around. Couldn’t. If I saw her face before I was ready, I’d lose whatever carefully constructed script I’d prepared.
And I needed that script. Needed the words arranged in precise order, because what I was about to reveal had the power to destroy everything we’d built — however fragile, however complicated that everything was.
Her footsteps crossed the marble. Deliberate. Measured. The sound of a woman who’d walked into rooms far more hostile than this one and walked out with the story everyone else had missed.
“You’re staring at the city like it owes you money.”
Her voice landed exactly where it always did. I turned.
Emilia stood near the leather seating arrangement, arms crossed, skepticism carved into every line of her posture.
Up close I noticed what the distance had hidden — the faint shadows beneath her eyes, the tight set of her shoulders, the way she held herself a little too rigidly.
The smear campaign and the threats had gotten under her skin, even if she’d never admit it.
She wore dark jeans and a fitted blazer over a silk top. Professional armor. Ready for battle.
“Most of it does, actually.” I moved toward the bar, giving my hands something to do. “Drink?”
“I didn’t come here for cocktails, Sebastian.”
“No.” I poured myself a whiskey I wouldn’t drink. Set it down. “You came for the truth.”
“The whole truth.” Her eyes tracked my movements, cataloging, assessing. The journalist never stopped working, even when the woman underneath was clearly exhausted. “You promised me that last night.”
“I remember what happened last night.”
Heat flickered between us — unwanted and unavoidable. The memory of her body against mine, the sounds she’d made, the way she’d looked at me afterward like she couldn’t decide whether to run or stay.
She was still deciding. I could see it.
“Sit down.” I gestured toward the curved leather sofa. “Please.”
“I’ll stand.”
Of course she would. I almost smiled.
“Fine.” I moved to the window again, putting distance between us. Easier to excavate old wounds without her scent distracting me. “What do you want to know first?”
“Why the threats against me lead back to someone who clearly knows you. Someone with resources. Someone who wants to use me to hurt you.” She stepped closer, and I felt the shift in the room’s pressure.
“Who are they, Sebastian? And why does your past matter so much that they’d burn my reputation to protect whatever secrets you’re hiding? ”
I exhaled slowly. My reflection stared back at me from the glass — a man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit who’d clawed his way out of violence and poverty, only to find both waiting at his door again.
“I wasn’t always this.” I touched the window, the glass cold against my fingertips. “The suits. The empire. The control everyone assumes I was born with.”
“I know you came from nothing. Logan Square, before it gentrified. Your mother worked two jobs. Your father—”
“My father was a monster.” I turned from the window. “You know that now. What you don’t know is who’s been waiting to use it.”
She already knew the rest. I watched her eyes confirm it — she’d held it carefully since the night I’d handed it to her, and she was holding it carefully still.
“Victor Corsetti,” I said.
Emilia’s journalist instincts flared. I watched her file the name away, already connecting dots I hadn’t given her yet.
“After my father’s jaw healed, he went back to drinking.
Back to hitting. But I was gone by then — working three jobs, putting myself through community college, building something that didn’t smell like blood and bourbon.
By the time I started making real money, my father had drunk himself into a grave and Victor had inherited what remained of their operation. ”
“He wanted a piece of your success.”
“He wanted everything. When I refused, he started looking for leverage.” I moved to the bar, gripped the edge until my knuckles whitened.
“He’s been waiting fifteen years for an opportunity to hurt me.
When your investigation started connecting Laurent Enterprises to the Lakefront corruption, he saw his chance. ”
“Richard Hartley.”
“Victor’s nephew. Planted inside my organization a decade ago, rising through the ranks, biding his time until he could inflict maximum damage.
” The betrayal still burned, even now. “The substandard materials, the bribes, the cover-ups — all of it was Victor’s operation, running through my company without my knowledge. ”
Emilia’s expression hardened. “And you expect me to believe you had no idea your CFO was corrupt?”
“I expect you to investigate.” I met her gaze steadily.
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? Follow the evidence.
I’ll give you complete access to my records — everything, even knowing that access could destroy me, and that withholding it would destroy your trust. If you find proof that I knew about Hartley’s activities, print it. I won’t stop you.”
Silence stretched between us. I could hear my own heartbeat, could feel the weight of everything I’d just revealed pressing against my chest like a physical force.
“Why tell me this now?” Her voice was softer than I’d expected. “You could have buried it. Paid people off. Done what men like you always do.”
“Men like me.” I stepped toward her, close enough to catch her scent — something floral beneath the sharpness of her determination. “You still think you know what kind of man I am.”
“I’m starting to.” Her hand rose, hesitated, then pressed against my chest. Right over my heart. “You’re terrified. Not of Victor, not of the investigation — of being seen. Really seen. The broken parts along with the polished surface.”
I covered her hand with mine. “And what do you see?”
“A man who built walls so high he forgot there was anything behind them.” Her fingers curled into my shirt. “A man who thinks vulnerability equals weakness, when it actually requires more strength than anything else.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“I rarely am.”
Despite everything — the threats, the revelations, the impossibility of whatever this was between us — I laughed. A real laugh, rusty from disuse but genuine.
“There’s something else.” I pulled back slightly, needing the space to say what came next.
“When I was building my empire, I made compromises. Not illegal ones, but ethical gray areas. Deals that prioritized profit over people. Communities displaced because I decided their neighborhood was worth more as condos than as homes.”
“The Logan Square development.”
She knew. Of course she knew.
“Three years ago. I bought four square blocks — back when the streets still held the faded grocery signs and corner bakeries I remembered from childhood, before the moving trucks started lining the curbs. Eighty-seven families displaced. Most of them couldn’t afford to stay in the area.
” I forced myself to hold her gaze. “I told myself it was business. Just business. But I knew those streets. I knew what it meant to lose the only place that felt like yours.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you deserve to know who you’re defending.
If you’re going to stand beside me against Victor — against everyone who wants to destroy both of us — you need to understand what kind of man I really am.
” I exhaled. “Not the billionaire in the tailored suits. Not the cold strategist everyone fears. Just this. The kid who broke his father’s jaw.
The man who bulldozed his own history for profit.
The same man who looks at you and sees something worth protecting, even when you don’t want protecting. ”
Emilia was quiet for a long moment. The city glittered behind me, indifferent to the confession unfolding in this room.
“You’re a complication,” she finally said.
“So are you.”
“I came here expecting to find another angle for my story. Another piece of evidence to use against you.” She shook her head, something like wonder in her expression. “Instead, you gave me the truth. All of it.”
“Not all of it.”
Her eyebrow arched.
“I haven’t told you that I think about you constantly.
That you’ve gotten under my skin in a way no one else has managed.
That watching you fight for the truth, watching you refuse to back down even when powerful men try to break you—” I stopped, the words tangled in my throat. “It undoes me, Emilia. You undo me.”
She moved before I could register the intention, closing the distance between us with a deliberateness that made my breath catch. Her hands found my lapels, gripping the expensive fabric like an anchor.
“You infuriate me.” Her voice was low, rough. “You make decisions for me without asking. You throw money at problems and expect them to disappear. You look at me like I’m something precious when I’ve spent my entire career proving I don’t need to be handled.”
“I know.”
“And despite all of that—” She pulled me down until our foreheads touched, her breath warm against my lips. “Despite all of that, I’m still here. What does that say about me?”
“That you see things other people miss.” I held her gaze. “And that you don’t walk away from them.”
My phone buzzed.
The sound cut through the tension like a blade. I pulled back, already knowing from the specific pattern of the vibration — Daniel’s emergency signal — that it was nothing good.
The message on the screen made my blood run cold.
Transparency has consequences. She’s not the only target anymore. Your mother’s nursing home — lovely facility. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Victor.
Emilia must have seen my expression change, because her hand found my wrist, her grip tight enough to bruise.
“What is it?”
I showed her the screen. Watched her face harden into something dangerous and clear — the expression of a woman who had just been handed confirmation of everything she’d suspected.
“He’s threatening your mother.”
“He’s threatening everyone I care about.” I was already pulling back, my mind shifting into the cold operational mode I’d developed for exactly these moments — triage, prioritize, act. “I need to make calls. Security needs to be tripled at her facility tonight. She needs to be moved by morning.”
“Sebastian—”
“I know.” I took her face in my hands — briefly, carefully, the way you hold something you know you’re about to have to put down. “I know. But I need to do this now, and I need to do it alone, and I need you to go home and lock your door and let me handle the immediate threat.”
“That’s not—”
“Not forever.” I pressed my lips to her forehead. “For tonight. One night. Let me do what I know how to do.”
She looked at me for a long moment, those hazel eyes calculating, weighing. Then something softened — not surrender, never that, but the specific grace of someone choosing to trust a process they didn’t fully agree with.
“One night,” she said. “Tomorrow morning we do this together.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I agreed.
She held my gaze for one more beat — long enough to tell me she meant it, long enough to tell me she expected me to mean it too.
Then she picked up her bag, straightened her blazer, and walked to the elevator with the steady unhurried steps of a woman who had decided something and was at peace with the decision.
The doors closed.
I stood alone in the lounge with Victor’s threat glowing on my screen, the city spread out below me, and the weight of everything I’d just handed her — every secret, every wound, every carefully buried truth — pressing against my chest like something newly alive.
Everything I’d built was about to be tested.
This time, I wouldn’t be facing it alone.
I made the first call.