Chapter 17 Asher
ASHER
She was still asleep when I left the bed.
I stood there for approximately four seconds, like an adolescent, then went downstairs and made coffee and tried to be a functioning person.
The coffee helped. The eggs did not. I was starting to suspect the eggs were a lost cause, but the routine of making them had become something I didn’t want to give up—the cracking, the pan, the spatula, the pretending I might get it right this time.
Charlie ate them without complaint. That might have been the thing that undid me most.
She came down in my Henley and my socks again and sat on her stool and ate the terrible eggs and said “Morning” like it was the simplest word in the English language. I said “Morning” back like I hadn’t been standing at the stove for twenty minutes thinking about the sound she’d made when—
I flipped the eggs. Badly.
She went to her room to work after breakfast. Set up her laptop on the desk by the window, spread her SEAS files across the desk in the particular organized chaos that meant she was thinking, and disappeared into the project with the focus of someone who’d been doing deep-concentration work her entire adult life.
I watched her from the hallway for a moment—the way she leaned forward, chewed her thumbnail, typed in fast bursts—and thought: she doesn’t know.
She didn’t know that while she’d been at the bar last night with Mia and Shane and Sloane, I’d spent four hours on the phone.
She didn’t know that Jax Shaw had sent me a preliminary threat assessment that ran eleven pages.
She didn’t know that Richard Sterling had contacted a member of her SEAS team directly—an email to Dr. Kessler, her lead researcher, requesting “preliminary data sharing” under the guise of a collaboration inquiry that had no authorization from anyone at SEAS or Pierce Industries.
She didn’t know that Richard’s email had been sent at 2:47 a.m., which meant he was either working through the night or not sleeping—neither of which was a good sign.
She didn’t know that Kessler, to his credit, had flagged it immediately to Mike Armitage, who’d flagged it to me, and who’d spent the next three hours constructing a legal and operational response that would seal every crack Richard might try to slip through.
I had it handled.
That was what I told myself as I walked into my study and closed the door halfway—not all the way, because all the way felt like hiding, and I wasn’t hiding. I was managing. There was a difference.
The call with legal started at ten.
Cheryl had drafted a cease-and-desist for the unauthorized contact with Kessler. Standard. Clean. The kind of document that would make Richard’s lawyers advise him to stand down. But Cheryl also raised a point I’d been turning over since three in the morning: the SEAS project timeline was exposed.
“He’s not reaching out to Kessler because he’s curious,” Cheryl said, her voice flat with the professional calm of a woman who’d been cleaning up my messes for six years.
“He’s mapping your deliverables. If he knows when the Phase Two data drops, he can position a competing grant application to undercut SEAS before the results are public. He’s done it before.”
“I know.”
“The timeline is public-facing. Filed with the grant commission. Anyone can pull it.”
“So we change the timeline.”
Silence on the line. The kind of silence that Cheryl used when she was choosing between telling me I was right and telling me I was being reckless and had decided on a third option, which was waiting for me to hear myself.
“We accelerate Phase Two,” I said. “Pull the deliverable window forward by six weeks. Restructure the milestone schedule so the data drops before Richard can position against it. We file an amended timeline with the commission, reroute the lab resources—”
“Asher. That’s Charlie’s project.”
“It’s a Pierce Industries project.”
“That Charlie runs.”
“And I’m protecting—” I stopped. “That’s what this is.
Protection. If Richard gets ahead of the Phase Two data, the entire SEAS initiative is compromised.
Everything she’s built.” I heard the edge in my own voice and pulled it back.
“I’m not taking anything from her. I’m making sure she has something to come back to. ”
Another silence. Longer.
“I’ll draft the amended filing,” Cheryl said. Not agreement. Compliance. There was a difference, and I heard it, and I chose not to let it move me.
After I hung up, I sat at the desk with the legal pad and the scattered papers and the half-empty water glass from last night and made a list. Amended timeline.
Resource reallocation memo. Updated security protocols for the SEAS lab.
NDA review for all team members. A second call to Jax about expanding the monitoring scope.
Each item was a wall. Each wall was necessary.
I was building a fortress around her work and her safety and the thing between us that I didn’t have a name for yet.
If the fortress looked a little like a cage from certain angles .
. . well, it wasn’t. Cages were built to keep things in. This was built to keep things out.
Jax picked up on the first ring. He always did.
There was a reason I paid him what I paid him, and responsiveness was only part of it—the larger part was that Jax Shaw understood threat assessment the way I understood structural engineering: as a system of forces, a calculation of load and tolerance and the precise point at which something gives.
“The Kessler email,” he said, before I could speak. “We flagged it. I was going to call you at noon.”
“I’m calling you now.”
“Yeah, I gathered.” A pause. Background noise—a dog, maybe.
Life happening around a conversation about surveillance.
“So here’s what I’ve got. The email originated from a personal account, not Sterling Corp.
No VPN, which is either sloppy or deliberate.
It was sent from a Denver IP address. He’s in state. ”
My hand tightened on the phone.
“How long?”
“Can’t confirm yet. But the browsing pattern on the SEAS public portal—someone’s been pulling Charlie’s published work, her conference schedule, her co-author list. Systematic. Started about ten days ago.”
“One more thing. Someone queried the Pierce Construction fleet management system three days ago. The Range Rover you gave her—it’s a company vehicle, GPS standard. Whoever pulled the query had internal-level credentials, or paid someone who did. They would have had her location down to the block.”
Ten days. We’d been in Roatan ten days ago. I’d been standing on a veranda watching Charlie work in golden light and making calls to this same man about this same threat, and in the time since, Richard hadn’t slowed down. He’d gotten more focused.
“I want someone on the Aspen property,” I said.
“Already there. Pulled a guy from the Denver rotation this morning. He’s parked at the access road. Quiet. Nobody sees him.”
“Charlie doesn’t know.”
It wasn’t a question. Jax heard it anyway.
“She doesn’t know,” he confirmed. Then, carefully: “You planning to tell her?”
“When there’s something definitive. Right now it’s just emails and browsing history. I’m not going to scare her with a pattern that might not be anything.”
“It’s something,” Jax said. Quietly. Without emphasis. The way people deliver information they think you already know but need to hear out loud.
“I know it’s something. That’s why I’m calling you at nine in the morning instead of eating breakfast with—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “Expand the monitoring. I want to know if he books travel, rents a car, buys a goddamn sandwich in a hundred-mile radius. And I want daily reports, not weekly.”
“Copy. Standard protocol would also be to get her off her regular cards. Cash only, or a new account he can’t trace. You want me to set that up?” I looked toward the study door. She was out there with Mia and Shane, reading. Not worried. Not watchful. “I’ll handle it,” I said. I didn’t handle it.
“Copy.” A beat. “Asher. Sloane mentioned she met Charlie last night. Said she was great.”
I didn’t know what to do with that—the collision of the two conversations, the surveillance and the warmth, the threat assessment and the fact that his wife had liked my—that his wife had liked Charlie. So I said “She is,” and meant it in a way that went far past the sentence.
We hung up. I added three items to the legal pad. The list was getting longer. The fortress was getting taller. Everything was under control.
Shane found me at two in the afternoon.
I was on my third call—this one with Mike Armitage, walking through the resource reallocation for the accelerated SEAS timeline—when Shane appeared in the study doorway with two beers and the expression he’d been wearing since he was fourteen, the one that meant he’d figured something out and was deciding whether to be kind about it.
I held up one finger. Mike was mid-sentence about lab scheduling.
Shane sat down in the leather chair across from my desk, set both beers on the side table, crossed an ankle over his knee, and waited. Patiently. Shane was never patient. The patience was the first warning sign.
I finished with Mike. Hung up and picked up the beer Shane slid across the desk.
“You’ve been in here all day,” Shane said.
“I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been working since six a.m. It’s two. You skipped lunch. Mia made pasta and you weren’t there. Charlie ate with us. She asked where you were.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you were on calls. Because you were. You’re always on calls.” He took a drink, watching me over the bottle. “What are you doing, Ash?”
“Protecting the SEAS project. Richard contacted one of Charlie’s team members directly. Unauthorized. I’m locking it down.”
“OK. That sounds like a thing you should do. Does Charlie know?”
“She doesn’t need to worry about it right now.”