2. Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
The conference room at Mercer Grant smelled like leather. It had to be the chairs.
I’d been sitting in one of those chairs for two hours.
Across the table, my lead attorney, a senior partner named Gavin Pryce, had a stack of depositions flagged with yellow tabs and a legal pad covered in notes I couldn’t read from this angle.
Beside him, a junior associate whose name I’d already forgotten was pulling exhibits from a banker’s box and arranging them in a timeline across the table.
“He’s claiming joint authorship of the Aegis framework,” Gavin said. “The core encryption architecture. His attorneys filed the amended complaint last Thursday.”
I knew what the amended complaint said. I’d read it three times. Once at midnight, once at four a.m., and once more in the car on the way here, as if repetition might make it feel less like getting robbed in broad daylight.
Nate Carpenter. My former business partner.
The man I’d trusted with the back end of Solstice Shield’s infrastructure for four years.
We’d built the company from a two-room office with bad Wi-Fi and a shared coffeemaker that neither of us ever cleaned.
I’d written the Aegis framework in that office—nights, weekends, the dead hours between two and five a.m. when the ideas came cleaner because no one else was awake to interrupt them.
Nate had contributed to the front-end integration. Good work, solid engineering. But Aegis was mine. Every line of code, every encryption layer, every decision about how the architecture would scale. Mine.
He’d known that. For four years, he’d known it. And then the company hit a valuation that made the difference between credit and co-credit worth tens of millions of dollars, and the thing that had been settled between us stopped being settled.
It didn’t explode. That would’ve been easier. Explosions were loud and fast, and you could point at the wreckage and say that’s where it happened.
What Nate did was slower. Quieter. He started mentioning Aegis in interviews as “our framework.” Changed his bio to say “co-architect.” Slid into conversations at industry events and let people assume things he never corrected.
By the time I confronted him, the narrative had been smoldering for over a year—and he’d built enough ambiguity that a lawsuit wasn’t just possible. It was inevitable.
“His deposition is scheduled for the nineteenth,” Gavin continued. “We’ll need you prepped by the fifteenth at the latest. I want to walk through every technical claim line by line.”
“Fine.”
“Sebastian.” Gavin set his pen down. “I need you present for this. Not just in the room.”
He was right. My attention had been drifting since we’d started—past the case, past the exhibits, toward the glass-walled hallway beyond the conference room door, where the rest of Mercer Grant went about its Tuesday morning.
I’d been here three times in the past month. Met with Gavin, reviewed documents, signed authorizations. Walked through the lobby, past the reception desk, down the hall lined with closed office doors and open workstations. Standard routine for a client in active litigation.
I’d never once looked for anyone.
The rooftop was four days ago. Friday night.
Beckett had dragged me to his building—Pixel Lofts, the mid-rise he’d bought on impulse because he’d remembered being broke at twenty-three.
A happy hour on the roof, string lights, wine on a folding table.
The kind of casual, low-stakes social event that should’ve been easy and wasn’t.
My buddy lasted about four minutes before someone grabbed him about a broken fireplace. I’d stood there with a glass of bourbon and no one to talk to, scanning the rooftop for an exit, and found her instead.
She’d been invisible. Tucked behind a cluster of oversized planters near the railing, dressed in a button-down blouse and dress pants that said I came here from work and didn’t bother changing.
A bottle of water in her hand. Earbuds looped around her neck.
Dark hair, steady eyes, and a stillness that didn’t match anyone else on that roof.
Margeaux. With an E-A-U-X, because her mother was feeling ambitious.
She’d told me who she was. Where she worked. That her firm represented me. No angle, no performance, no careful positioning—just the truth, handed over without ceremony.
I’d spent the last eighteen months surrounded by people who played angles.
Lawyers who measured every word. PR consultants who coached me on optics.
Board members who smiled at me across conference tables and then called Gavin to ask if the lawsuit might affect quarterly earnings.
A man who’d called himself my co-founder and spent a year building a lie so gradually that by the time I noticed, the fire was already burning.
And then a twenty-three-year-old paralegal in a corner with a water bottle had looked me in the eye and said I don’t see the point of pretending.
We’d talked for forty-five minutes, and it still wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
“Sebastian?”
“I heard you. The fifteenth. Line by line.” I pulled my attention back to the table. “What else?”
Gavin walked me through the remaining timeline—Nate’s deposition, document production deadlines, a potential motion to compel.
The junior associate took notes. I answered questions about the Aegis architecture and tried not to think about the fact that I was explaining my own work to a room full of people who needed convincing that it was mine.
When we finished, Gavin walked me to the door. Handshake, reassurance, the standard exit routine. The junior associate disappeared with the banker’s box. The conference room emptied, and I was standing in the hallway of Mercer Grant with no reason to still be there.
I should’ve gone left. Left was the lobby, the elevator, the car waiting downstairs to take me back to Solstice Shield.
I went right.
The hall opened into a wider floor—rows of workstations separated by low dividers, paralegals and support staff at their desks, the hum of a functioning law office on a Tuesday morning. Fluorescent light, the muted click of keyboards, the occasional phone ringing from an office with a closed door.
She was at a desk near the window.
Earbuds in. Head down. A stack of documents in front of her, a highlighter in her right hand, her left hand holding the page flat with two fingers.
Her blouse was the same kind she’d worn on the rooftop—buttoned, professional, nothing designed to attract attention.
The morning sun came through the window behind her and caught the edge of her dark hair, and my feet stopped moving before my brain gave the order.
She didn’t look up. The earbuds were in and her focus was absolute—the same contained stillness I’d seen on the rooftop, but without the water bottle, without the railing, without the escape route.
Here, the stillness was just how she worked.
How she existed. A woman who’d turned concentration into a fortress.
I should’ve kept walking. I had no business on this floor. Nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound like a man inventing an excuse to be somewhere he didn’t belong.
“Margeaux.”
She looked up. The earbuds stayed in for one beat—long enough that I knew it was habit, not rudeness—and then her hand came up and pulled the left one free.
Her eyes found mine, and something moved across her face. Surprise, maybe. Or the quiet acknowledgment that she’d been expecting this without admitting it to herself.
“Mr. Locke.”
“Sebastian. We covered this Friday.”
“You were on my roof Friday. This is my office.”
“Your firm’s office.”
“My desk.”
She held my gaze. The highlighter was still in her hand, uncapped, hovering over a sentence she’d been about to mark.
Her expression gave nothing away, and yet I could read every word of it—the same way I’d read her on the rooftop.
Composed. Alert. Quietly measuring whether I was worth the interruption.
“Case prep ran long,” I said.
“Your case prep is in the west conference room. This is the east side of the floor.”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“Past two clearly marked signs.”
“Faulty sense of direction.”
Her mouth moved. Not a smile—something before a smile, the shift in pressure that happens right before the weather changes. She caught it, pressed her lips together, and looked back down at her documents.
“Is there something you need, Sebastian?”
Yes. I needed plenty. I needed her.
Four days ago, I’d stood in a hidden corner of a rooftop with a woman who didn’t pretend, and the silence between us had felt like the first honest thing I’d experienced in months.
Now, she was sitting at a desk with an uncapped highlighter and earbuds she’d only half-removed, and every trained instinct I had was telling me to walk away from this.
Every trained instinct had also told me to trust Nate.
“Friday,” I said. “You said you stayed forty-five minutes. You’d planned on twenty.”
“I remember.”
“I was the reason.”
She looked up again. The highlighter came down to the desk. Her left earbud dangled against her collarbone.
“That’s not a question,” she said.
“No. It’s not.”
Silence. The office hummed around us—keyboards, phones, the soft shuffle of paper. None of it touched the two feet of air between her desk and where I stood.
“The coffee shop downstairs,” I said. “Tomorrow. Seven a.m.”
She studied me. The same careful, unhurried assessment she’d given me on the rooftop—the one that said I’ll decide what you’re worth after I’ve finished looking.
“That’s not a question either,” she said.
“I can make it one.”
“Don’t.” She picked up the highlighter. Looked back at her page. Put the earbud back in her left ear. “Seven is fine.”
I turned before she could see what my face did with that answer. The hallway stretched ahead of me. I took the elevator to the lobby and walked past the reception desk and through the glass doors into the Pleasure Valley heat.
My phone buzzed. Gavin, confirming the prep schedule.
I typed a one-line reply and pocketed the phone. The car was waiting at the curb. I got in, closed the door, and sat in the back seat with the AC running and the city moving past the tinted windows.
Nate had spent a year letting a lie smolder until it caught fire, and I’d missed it.
Every security protocol I’d ever designed was built on one principle.
Verify before you trust. I’d built an entire company on that principle.
Protected other people’s information with it.
Let it become the architecture of my entire life.
And then a woman behind a planter had handed me the truth without being asked, and I’d walked five floors in the wrong direction just to see her again.
Verify before you trust.
I already trusted her. That was the problem.