6. Eve
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Eve
The photos go up overnight.
I’m across the street from Valentine and Associates with a coffee going cold in my hands, watching through the glass as the building loses its mind.
Every floor. Every department. Plastered with glossy eleven-by-seventeen prints.
Simon and Kiara in assorted states of undress, timestamped and damning.
The screenshots. The love notes he wrote her while lying next to me.
My hands should be shaking. They’re steady as a surgeon’s. I take a sip of bad coffee and I watch a man’s carefully built life come apart through floor-to-ceiling windows, and I feel something I haven’t felt since Kiara walked through those church doors.
I feel good.
Simon is visible on the third floor, ripping prints off the walls two at a time, screaming at security guards who look far more entertained than helpful.
His face is the color of a stress aneurysm.
An intern walks past him holding a stack of the photos like she doesn’t know what to do with them, and honestly, same.
Kiara’s nowhere in sight, presumably hiding in whatever hole she crawled out of for the wedding.
The photos weren’t technically hacked. Dean arranged for a sympathetic IT employee, a man Simon passed over for promotion three times, to discover the files on the company server during a routine backup and dutifully report them to HR.
Plausible deniability, gift-wrapped, with a bow.
Dean is nothing if not thorough, and the more I learn about how his mind works, the more I understand why his family treated him like a threat dressed up as a disappointment.
My phone buzzes.
Word’s gotten to the right people. Simon’s being asked some very pointed questions about where the company’s money has been going. You should come inside.
Why?
Because I thought you might want a front-row seat. I’m in the lobby. I’ll even buy you a worse coffee than the one you’re holding.
I look down at my cup. Look up at the building. Look back at my phone.
How did you know I was holding coffee?
Because you’ve staked out the building, Heart. I’d expect nothing less. Front-left planter, by the way. You’re not as sneaky as you think.
I glance left. There’s a planter. I have, in fact, been standing behind it like a woman in a spy movie who has never seen a spy movie.
Going in is unprofessional. Petty. A possibly terrible idea with a dozen ways to backfire and exactly one upside, which is that I get to watch his face when he realizes the woman he humiliated at an altar is standing in his lobby in a dress that cost less than his tie and looks like a war crime.
The front doors are already swinging shut behind me before the thought finishes.
The lobby is chaos. Employees cluster in whispering knots, holding photos like exhibits at a trial.
A few recognize me, and I watch the recognition move across their faces, the slow dawning of who I am and what this means, but nobody comes near me.
Nobody knows what you’d even say to the woman standing in the eye of this particular storm.
I walk through them with my chin up, and the dress I chose this morning with great and petty care, blood red, silk, an obscenity in fabric form, moves around my legs with every step.
It’s armor. I have never felt less breakable.
I let a woman slap me at my own wedding and apologized for bleeding on the runner.
Today I walked into the lobby of the company that employs my humiliation and I’m not even sweating.
Dean meets me at the elevator. Suit, no tie, collar open, his sleeves shoved up his forearms, which I have firmly decided not to think about. He’s all business until he sees me, and then his eyes catch and hold and warm.
“You look.”
“Like a woman about to watch her ex-fiancé’s career implode?”
“I was going to say incredible.” A beat. “But yes. That too. Mostly that, honestly. I lost the thread of the sentence.”
“Focus, Valentine.”
“Trying.”
The elevator chimes. We step in. Alone. The doors close, and the chaos of the lobby drops away, replaced by soft music and the hum of cables and the sudden, total awareness of how small a box this is and how much of it he takes up.
“How did your IT guy get the files without it tracing back to us?” I ask, mostly to give my mouth something to do that isn’t staring at his.
“Simon keeps everything on the company server. He’s paranoid about cloud security, which is the funniest part of all of this.
” Dean’s mouth tilts. “He put the evidence there himself, behind a password he uses for his fantasy football account. My guy found it during a backup he was already scheduled to run. Completely legitimate discovery. The man documented his own crimes and filed them next to his W-2s.”
“And the prints in the office? The wallpapering?”
“Anonymous delivery service. The lobby cameras had a convenient glitch around two in the morning.” He shrugs, easy as anything, like he didn’t choreograph a man’s downfall between dinner and dawn. “Technology fails at the worst times. Tragic, really.”
“You’re a little frightening. You know that.”
“You like it.” He says it lightly, but his eyes flick to me when he does, checking, and the elevator suddenly feels about half its previous size.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I lie.
Gratitude uncurls in my chest, and for once it isn’t the revenge.
It’s the way he says we. It’s that he built me a clean exit before I knew I’d need one, that he thought about the cameras and the timestamps and the trace, that somewhere in the middle of his own family imploding he made absolutely sure none of this could ever touch me.
The doors open on the executive floor.
And there, at the end of the hall, is Simon.
Red-faced. Tie hanging loose around his neck. Screaming at an assistant who is not Kiara, just a terrified kid clutching a tablet who looks like he’d very much like the floor to open up and accept him.
“FIND OUT WHO DID THIS. I WANT NAMES. I WANT THEM IN MY OFFICE IN TEN MINUTES, I WANT.”
He sees me.
The silence is immediate and total. Every head in the hallway turns. Every eye lands on the woman in red standing beside the brother of the man whose affair just got broadcast to his entire payroll.
“You.” His voice drops to a register I’ve never heard from him before, the polish gone, the real thing underneath showing through. He stalks toward me. “You did this. You vindictive little.”
“Careful.” Dean steps in, smooth, and whatever’s in his stance makes Simon stop short three feet away. “Lot of witnesses up here, Simon. Lot of phones.”
“This is a crime.” Simon’s vibrating, finger jabbing toward my face. “This is harassment, this is defamation, I’ll have you both arrested, I’ll.”
“I’m just here to visit Dean.” I shrug, and the shrug feels like power, like stepping into a version of myself I should have been all along.
“We’re getting lunch. You look stressed, Simon.
You should eat something. Or maybe don’t.
Stress is great for the figure, and you’ll want to look your best for the photos. ”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“Mr. Valentine.”
A new voice. We all turn.
Geronimo Juarez emerges from the corner office, silver-haired and granite-faced, a man who built a fortune on discipline and treats a scandal like a personal insult delivered to his front door.
“I believe we have a meeting. Now.”
“This isn’t over,” Simon hisses at me, low enough that only Dean and I catch it. “You’ll pay for every bit of this. I promise you.”
“Given what I’ve just learned about where this company’s money has been going,” Juarez says, and his voice carries decades of authority without rising even slightly, “I rather think you’ll be the one paying. Several people, in fact. My office, Mr. Valentine. I won’t ask again.”
The color drains out of Simon’s face. Every ounce of swagger goes with it, all at once, like someone pulled a plug. He shoots me one last poisonous look and follows Juarez down the hall like a man walking somewhere he very much does not want to go and will not be walking back from.
Dean’s hand finds the small of my back. Warm. Sure. It has no business feeling as good as it does.
“There’s a glass conference room one floor up,” he says, low, just for me. “We can watch the whole thing without being seen. I’ll even narrate.”
“You planned this.”
“I plan everything. It’s my one redeeming quality.”
The stairwell is quiet and close, our footsteps the only sound.
The conference room has glass walls all the way around, and from the hallway above we can see everything.
Juarez at the head of the long table. Simon in the hot seat.
Two others from the company I half-recognize.
Papers fanning out across the wood, fingers pointing, voices climbing past the glass into a register we can almost make out.
“That’s everything he hid,” Dean says, and his breath is warm against my ear, close enough that the shiver it puts down my spine has nothing to do with the air conditioning and everything to do with the six inches between his mouth and my neck.
“Those red folders, see them? Every dinner, every hotel room, every gift he stuck the company with while he was taking her to bed. He put her birthday necklace on the company’s tab and wrote it down as office supplies, Eve. Office supplies.”
“That’s almost impressive.”
“It’s almost a crime. Which it also is.”
Through the glass, Simon is sweating through his shirt.
The confident mask cracks and keeps cracking, fissures running through the face I once thought I’d wake up next to for the rest of my life.
Even silenced by the walls, the floundering reads clear, the excuses dying on the table, the others at the table trading the look of people watching a man they used to respect become a man they’re going to have to fire.
“He’s done,” I breathe. “He’s actually.”