Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The silence in my office was deafening.
I sat behind my desk, staring at the Chicago skyline through floor-to-ceiling windows, my phone face-down on the mahogany beside me.
Twenty-four hours since Emilia’s exposé went live.
Twenty-six since I’d last touched her. And somewhere in between, the world I’d spent two decades building had started crumbling around my ears with the specific, irreversible momentum of something that had been waiting to fall.
My phone buzzed for what felt like the hundredth time. I didn’t look at it.
Daniel appeared in the doorway, his expression the carefully neutral mask he wore when delivering news he knew I wouldn’t want to hear. “The board’s called an emergency session for tomorrow morning. Eight shareholders have already requested your resignation.”
“Let them request.” I turned my signet ring between my fingers, the metal warm from constant friction. “What else?”
“Legal team wants to discuss liability exposure. PR is fielding calls from every major outlet in the country.” He hesitated. “And Marcus Chen from the Tribune called. Wants a comment on Ms. Rivera’s piece. He implied there might be more coming.”
More coming.
I should have been furious. Should have felt betrayed that Emilia had published without consulting me, that she’d exposed the rot inside my company to the entire world without warning. Instead, all I felt was a hollow, unfamiliar admiration that sat in my chest like something new.
She’d done exactly what she’d said she would. No compromises. No hesitation. No asking permission.
The woman had more integrity than most of my board members had ever aspired to.
“Cancel everything for the rest of the day,” I said.
Daniel blinked. “Sir, the Singapore investors are expecting—”
“Cancel it.” I stood, moving to the window. The city sprawled below — millions of people going about their lives completely unaware that Sebastian Laurent’s empire was hemorrhaging credibility by the minute. “I need to think.”
After Daniel retreated, I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and let my thoughts go where they’d been circling all morning.
To her.
Emilia hadn’t answered my calls. Hadn’t responded to my texts. The last I’d heard, she’d left her apartment early this morning, and my security team had lost track of her somewhere near the Tribune’s offices.
Which meant she was either avoiding me deliberately, or she was in trouble.
Given recent events, I couldn’t rule out either option.
My phone buzzed again. This time I looked.
Ms. Rivera just walked into the building. —Daniel
Something loosened in my chest that I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Send her up.
I was still standing at the window when I heard the elevator open. I didn’t turn around. Part of me was afraid of what I’d see in her face — triumph, maybe. Or worse, pity.
“You look like hell.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “Thanks. You always know just what to say.”
Emilia moved into my peripheral vision, stopping a few feet away. Close enough that I could smell coffee and ink and the faint floral scent of her shampoo. Far enough to maintain the professional distance she clearly felt was necessary.
“I’m not going to apologize,” she said. “For the article.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“Good. Because I’m not.” A pause. “But I probably should have warned you.”
I turned. She looked exhausted — dark circles under her eyes, hair in that messy bun she wore when she was working too hard to care about appearances. But her chin was lifted, her gaze steady.
Defiant, even now. Of course.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Because you would have tried to manage it. Spin the narrative. Control the fallout.” She shrugged one shoulder, but her eyes were watching me carefully. “I needed the story to land exactly as it was, without Laurent Enterprises’ fingerprints anywhere near it.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
“I trusted you to be you.” She stepped closer, and I caught her fully now — the whole specific scent of her, coffee and newsprint and something floral I’d been cataloging since the first night.
“You’re a fixer, Sebastian. It’s what you do.
But some things shouldn’t be fixed. Some things need to break before they can be rebuilt properly. ”
The words landed harder than she probably intended. Because she wasn’t just talking about my company.
“The board wants my head,” I admitted.
“I know. I saw the preliminary reports.” Her expression softened slightly. “What are you going to do?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
“Liar.”
A surprised laugh escaped me. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve already decided. You decided the second you saw my article go live.” She crossed her arms. “The question is whether you’re going to tell me, or if I have to figure it out myself.”
“You think you know me that well?”
“I think I know you better than you’d like anyone to.” She held my gaze, unflinching. “You’re going to burn it down yourself, aren’t you? Before they can take it from you. Because that way you stay in control of the narrative.”
My silence was answer enough.
Emilia let out a long breath. “Jesus, Sebastian.”
“It’s the smart play. If I get ahead of this — release my own internal investigation findings, acknowledge the corruption, announce restructuring — the board loses its leverage. Shareholders calm down. Victor Corsetti loses his best weapon against me.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
She stepped closer still, close enough now that I could see the individual flecks of gold in her hazel eyes. “When you burn it all down, what’s left?”
The question hit me like a physical blow, and I let it. I didn’t deflect or reframe or reach for the practiced answer I’d given in a hundred boardrooms.
For a long moment I just stood with it.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. The words felt foreign in my mouth — two syllables I hadn’t said aloud in so long I’d forgotten their shape.
“For twenty years, Laurent Enterprises has been my identity. My proof. The evidence that I’d clawed my way out of that house and built something that couldn’t be touched.
” I looked at her. “Without it, I genuinely don’t know who Sebastian Laurent is. ”
The silence that followed was different from the others. Not charged — something more careful. Like we were both handling something fragile.
“Good,” Emilia said softly.
“Good?”
“It means you’re finally asking the right questions.
” She reached out, and her fingers brushed my wrist — just a touch, barely a contact, but it grounded me more completely than anything else could have.
“My mentor told me something once, when I was just starting out. He said the best stories aren’t about what people do. They’re about who they become.”
“That’s very philosophical.”
“He was a pretentious bastard.” A ghost of a smile. “But he wasn’t wrong.”
I looked down at her hand on my wrist. Such a small point of contact. Such a disproportionate effect on my ability to think clearly.
“What would you have me become, Emilia?”
“That’s not my call to make.”
“Humor me.”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer than I’d heard it — not careful, just honest. “Someone who doesn’t treat relationships like acquisitions.
Who doesn’t protect people by controlling them.
” Her thumb traced a small circle against my pulse point.
“Someone who can actually let another person in, instead of just letting them close.”
The distinction landed with precision. In. Not close. There was a difference, and she’d just named it in a way I would spend weeks unpacking.
“That’s asking a lot,” I said.
“I know.” She met my gaze. “I’m also asking you to earn it. Not just tell me you’ve changed. Show me.”
My phone buzzed on the desk. Then again. The world outside this moment still demanding its due.
But for right now, I let it wait.
“I watched your press conference,” Emilia said. “The one where you announced the investigation.”
“And?”
“You didn’t defend yourself. Didn’t try to spin it or deflect. You just let the facts stand.” She tilted her head, studying me with the focused attention she brought to everything worth understanding. “That’s not the Sebastian Laurent I started investigating.”
“Maybe not.”
“So what changed?”
You, I almost said. You walked into my world and refused to play by its rules, and somewhere along the way I started wondering if maybe my rules were the problem.
Instead, I turned my hand over beneath hers and laced our fingers together.
“I’m still figuring that out,” I said. “But I think it starts with admitting I don’t have all the answers. Which, as it turns out, is not something I’m naturally gifted at.”
She squeezed once, then let go. Stepped back. The professional distance returning like a familiar armor, but something different in her eyes now.
“I should go. Howard’s expecting a debrief, and I have a follow-up piece to file by morning.”
“More exposés? Should I be worried?”
“Not about you.” Her mouth quirked. “This one’s about Victor Corsetti’s shell company network. Turns out Richard Hartley wasn’t his only investment in Chicago’s corporate landscape.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“I don’t sleep much these days.” A flash of something in her eyes — exhaustion, maybe. Or something more complicated. “Neither do you, I’d guess.”
“Not since you.” The admission came out before I could stop it.
“That’s the honest answer. I spend my nights thinking about you instead of acquisition targets.
Wondering if you’re safe. If you’re eating.
If you’re sitting in that apartment of yours surrounded by documents, pushing yourself too hard because you don’t know any other way to operate. ”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I know. You’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself. You’ve made that abundantly clear.” I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep from reaching for her. “But I worry anyway. That’s the problem. I can’t seem to stop.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then, very softly: “I worry about you too.”
“I know.”
“It’s annoying.”
“Extremely.”
That earned me a real smile — brief and genuine, the kind that reached her eyes and made the armor drop for exactly one second. And something in my chest unknotted just enough to breathe.
She started toward the elevator, then stopped. Turned back.
“The board meeting tomorrow. What time?”
“Eight AM. Why?”
“Because I’m going to need you available by ten for a follow-up interview.” Her professional mask was back, but her eyes were warm. “Whatever you decide to do, I want to be there to document it.”
“On the record?”
“Always.”
I watched her walk away. The elevator doors closed, and the office settled into the particular silence that followed her — larger than usual, emptier than it had any right to be for a room that had never held her long.
I turned back to the window.
My phone buzzed. Shareholders. Board members. Legal team. All the pieces of a carefully constructed life, demanding attention.
For the first time in twenty years, I didn’t reach for it immediately.
Instead, I stood with the question she’d left me. Who is Sebastian Laurent without his empire?
I’d built Laurent Enterprises to prove I was not my father’s son.
Not the boy from the kitchen floor. Not the kid who couldn’t stop what was happening to his mother and had spent two decades overcompensating for that failure with money and control and walls so high he’d forgotten there was anything behind them worth seeing.
But Emilia had seen it anyway. She’d walked into my service corridor with ink on her thumb and looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving rather than a man worth fearing.
And she’d just told me the solution wasn’t more control.
It was something I’d never tried.
My phone rang. Daniel’s extension.
“Sir? The Singapore call has been rescheduled for—”
“Push it to next week.”
Silence. I could practically hear him recalibrating. “Sir, they’ve been waiting for months. If we delay again—”
“Then they’ll wait a little longer.” I settled into my chair, the city gold and sprawling beyond the glass. “Right now, I need to focus on what matters.”
“And what’s that, sir?”
A week ago I would have said the Singapore deal. The board’s confidence. Stock price. The machinery of an empire that ran on my ability to stay three moves ahead of everyone else.
Now?
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I said. “But I think it involves becoming someone I haven’t tried being yet.”
I ended the call and sat with the quiet.
Outside, the sun was setting over Chicago — the skyline going amber and then rose and then the particular deep blue of a city settling into evening. Somewhere out there, Emilia was filing her story. Building something that mattered. Being exactly who she was without asking anyone’s permission.
I’d spent thirty-nine years building walls.
She’d spent her career tearing them down.
It seemed only fair that she’d eventually get to mine.