Chapter 16 #2
I parked three blocks from the address, my hand tight around the voice recorder in my pocket. The building looked abandoned — broken windows, graffiti covering the lower walls in loops of color, a single door standing ajar and spilling dim light into the gathering dusk.
I approached carefully, every nerve awake.
Inside, the space opened into a cavernous former factory floor. Rusted equipment loomed in the shadows. Pigeons cooed somewhere in the rafters.
And there, standing beside a folding table with a briefcase, was Victor Corsetti.
He was older than I’d expected. Seventies, maybe, with silver hair swept back from a weathered face and eyes that held the flat patience of a man who had spent decades waiting for the right moment.
His suit was expensive but dated — the style of someone who’d stopped caring about appearances long ago and started caring only about outcomes.
“Ms. Rivera.” His voice echoed. “Thank you for coming.”
“I almost didn’t.” I stopped ten feet away, keeping the distance. “You threatened me. Multiple times.”
“Necessary intimidation.” He waved a hand. “You’re a talented journalist. I needed to know whether you could be frightened off.” A pause. “Clearly not.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It’s supposed to be context.” He studied me with unsettling intensity. “Sebastian Laurent destroyed my business thirty years ago. Did he tell you that?”
“He told me you were partners with his father.”
“Partners.” Victor laughed — dry and humorless. “His father was a drunk and a brute, but he understood loyalty. When Sebastian killed him—”
“Sebastian didn’t kill anyone.”
“Didn’t he?” Victor’s eyes glittered with the specific light of a man who had been carrying something for a very long time and had finally found someone to put it down in front of.
“The old man died in a house fire three weeks after Sebastian left for college. Electrical fault, they said. Very convenient.”
My stomach lurched. “That’s a serious accusation.”
“It’s the truth. Sebastian Laurent built his empire on his father’s ashes — literally. He took the insurance money, leveraged it into real estate, and spent the next two decades systematically destroying everyone who knew what he really was.”
“You have proof of this?”
Victor smiled. “I have something better. I have documentation of every crime Sebastian committed on his way to the top. Bribes paid. Inspectors bought. Regulations circumvented.” He patted the briefcase. “Everything you need to complete your story. The full picture.”
I looked at the briefcase.
The reporter in me wanted it with an urgency that was almost physical — the pull of a complete story, the final piece that would make everything I’d built bulletproof. I felt it the way I’d always felt the gravity of a good lead, a clean source, a document that said exactly what needed to be said.
I looked at it and didn’t move.
“Why would you give me this?” I asked.
“Because I’m dying.” He said it casually. “Cancer. Six months, maybe less. I’d rather see Sebastian Laurent fall than protect my own legacy at this point.”
“And what do you want in return?”
“Just your promise that you’ll use it. All of it. No holding back to protect your lover.”
The word landed like a slap. “Sebastian isn’t—”
“Please.” Victor’s lip curled. “I’ve had people watching you for weeks. I know exactly what Sebastian Laurent is to you. The question is whether your integrity matters more than your heart.”
I stood in that rusting cathedral of a factory floor, the weight of the choice pressing down on me with the specific gravity of a decision that would define everything that came after it.
Victor Corsetti was offering me everything. The complete story. The definitive takedown. Evidence that could destroy Sebastian not just professionally but personally — accusations of arson, patricide, decades of crimes buried beneath the empire.
All I had to do was reach for it.
I thought about what Victor had said. The old man died in a house fire.
The words sat in my chest with a cold weight I couldn’t yet categorize — not belief, not disbelief, but the specific unease of an accusation that needed to be examined rather than dismissed.
I was a journalist. I didn’t dismiss things. I followed them.
But not like this. Not as someone else’s weapon.
I pulled my hand back.
“No.”
The smile vanished. “Excuse me?”
“I said no.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“I don’t know what’s in that briefcase, but I know that you’ve been orchestrating a campaign of sabotage against Laurent Enterprises for years.
You planted Richard Hartley inside his company.
You fed him information to undermine Sebastian’s projects.
Everything you’re offering me is tainted by your vendetta. ”
“The evidence is real—”
“Maybe. But I won’t be your weapon.” I stepped back toward the door. “I’m a journalist, not an assassin. If there’s a story about Sebastian’s past, I’ll find it my own way. On my terms. Not yours.”
Victor’s face contorted with the specific fury of a man who had spent years arranging a moment only to watch it refuse to happen.
“You stupid girl. You think he’ll thank you for this?
Sebastian Laurent doesn’t love — he possesses.
He controls. The moment you become inconvenient, he’ll destroy you like he destroys everyone. ”
“Maybe.” I kept moving, my heart hammering in a way I refused to let reach my face. “But that’s my choice to make. Not yours.”
I was almost to the door when his voice stopped me.
“There’s a file on your editor. Howard Chen. Gambling debts he doesn’t want anyone knowing about. I could make those very public.”
I turned back.
“Touch him,” I said, “and I’ll make sure your remaining six months are spent in a prison hospital.”
Something flickered in Victor’s eyes — surprise, then something that looked almost like satisfaction, the expression of a man who had gotten the confirmation he was looking for.
“You’re more like Sebastian than you realize,” he said quietly.
I left without responding.
The cold outside hit me like a correction.
I sat in my car for a long time without starting the engine, working through the adrenaline crash in the particular silence of a street in the warehouse district at dusk — no traffic, no voices, just the distant sound of the river and the city’s low hum somewhere beyond the buildings.
Victor’s accusation sat with me.
The old man died in a house fire.
I turned it over the way I turned over everything — looking for the shape of it, the weight of it, what it would require to verify or disprove.
Sebastian had told me his father drank himself into a grave.
That was the version he lived with. Victor’s version was something else entirely, and the two couldn’t both be true.
I was a journalist. I knew what I needed to do with an unverified accusation from a dying man with a vendetta.
I also knew what I needed to do with the fact that I’d just turned down a briefcase full of evidence that might have answered the question definitively — because I hadn’t been willing to be used, even for the truth.
That choice would follow me. I understood that.
If Victor’s accusation was real and I’d walked away from the proof, I’d have to find another way to the answer.
If it wasn’t real — if it was the last desperate move of a man trying to detonate something on his way out — then I’d made exactly the right call.
I didn’t know which it was yet.
What I knew was that I wasn’t going to figure it out sitting in a car in the warehouse district.
My phone buzzed.
Sebastian: Where are you? Daniel said you left the Tribune hours ago. I’m worried.
I stared at the message. Three hours ago I’d been watching him dismantle his empire at a press conference podium. Two hours ago I’d been in a warehouse with the man who wanted to finish the job.
I typed back: Coming to you. We need to talk.
His response was immediate: I’ll be waiting.
I started the engine.
The drive back through the city gave me time to settle into what had actually happened in that warehouse — not just what I’d refused, but what Victor’s desperation had confirmed.
A dying man didn’t arrange elaborate traps for people who didn’t matter.
Victor had spent years, resources, and what remained of his life trying to destroy Sebastian Laurent.
That kind of hatred required a specific kind of wound at its source.
I didn’t know yet what that wound was. But I would find it.
On my terms.
Chicago’s skyline glittered against the darkening sky as I crossed back into the city — all those towers of glass and steel, monuments to ambition and the complicated people who built them.
Somewhere in that maze of light, Sebastian was waiting in a penthouse that smelled like expensive decisions and, now, a little like me.
I drove toward it with empty hands and a full head and the steady certainty of a woman who had just refused to be a weapon and was still figuring out what that made her.
Whatever conversation waited at the other end of this drive, I was ready for it.