Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Breaking Point
Catalina
Three coffee cups ring his desk like evidence markers at a crime scene.
The only thing more ragged than his tie, kinked, half-untied, as if he choked on it during a fitful nap, is the face above it.
There are shadows under his eyes that no algorithm could airbrush.
His glasses are clean, but the rest of him is wild, unkempt stubble darkening his jawline, hair swept back with the same hand that’s been feeding him caffeine and penning furious notes in blue Sharpie across every exposed inch of his desktop.
When I enter, he does not greet me, just watches, like I’m a disruption he’s gamed out but still resents for arriving.
“Not leaving,” I say, arms folded, “until you tell me what is actually going on.”
The only motion from him is a muscle jumping in his jaw. I stay standing. He likes his chair to tower over visitors, but I refuse to give him that inch today.
He reaches for his laptop, as if to close it, but at the last second leaves it open. “I’m in the middle of something, Cat.”
“Yeah. I noticed.” I nod at the post-apocalyptic sprawl of printouts and coffee.
“Your calendar is fucked. You canceled two meetings with the European team, moved all hands without telling HR, and you routed my last expense report to dead email. So either you’re prepping for a corporate suicide or you’ve decided to run the place with an eightball and a bottle of Jack. ”
His lips twitch, either an almost-smile or a wince. “I’m handling it.”
“You’re not.” I plant my hands on the desk, lean in until my pendant nearly taps his keyboard. “You froze me out, Aiden. Even when you ghost people, you don’t ghost me. And now I’m supposed to just fetch your coffee and wait for my pink slip? Give me some fucking credit.”
There’s a second where he just stares, like maybe he hasn’t slept in so long he’s forgotten language. Then: “This isn’t about you.”
I laugh. “Nothing is ever about me with you. That’s the problem.
But your firewalls aren’t as strong as you think.
” I lean closer, and it’s like I can smell the salt of his stress, the cold sweat behind the crisp white shirt.
“Strip everything else out. Forget the club, forget all of it. I am still your executive assistant. I have been for almost a year and you know I am damn good at my job. Whatever this is, it is my job to help you manage it, and you are actively preventing me from doing that. So tell me the truth, let me help.”
He doesn’t answer. There’s something desperate in the way he organizes his desktop, stacking three folders, squaring them, then moving them aside.
I feel a flush of panic. If I lose him now, it won’t just be this job.
It’ll be the only thing I’ve ever built from the ground up.
The only place anyone ever took my ideas and let them run.
He finally looks at me, eyes ringed with red. “You don’t want to know.”
It lands like a gut punch. “Try me,” I say, voice flat. I hold his stare until he looks away.
He turns the laptop so the screen faces me. The desktop is a chaos of spreadsheets, code editors, a Slack thread that’s a mile long. But front and center, an email. No, not an email, just a photo. JPEG, blown up so the pixels look like a dirty secret.
The image is me and him, side by side at a black-lacquered table.
We are masked, but not masked enough. My hair is wild, the heart-shaped birthmark under my left ear visible even in grayscale.
Aiden’s profile is sharp, but the tilt of his mouth makes it clear this is not a business meeting.
There are others in the background, faces blurred out, but the intent is unmistakable.
Below the photo, a caption in all-caps, courier font: TICK TOCK, ST. JAMES. CASH OR ACCESS. YOUR CHOICE. NEXT PHOTO GOES WIDER.
For a long moment, all I hear is the hum of the building’s AC, the phantom click of a mouse somewhere outside the glass. My heart doesn’t hammer, it thuds, slow and cold, like it’s bracing for news even worse than this.
Aiden slides an actual printout across the desk, the same photo but this time annotated.
The blackmail demand. A timestamp. I can see his own notes in the margin, surgical and neat.
I don’t recognize the handwriting, but I know it’s his because he’s always printed his letters with the same clipped aggression he uses for every email, every order.
I pick up the photo, study it, turn it over as if maybe the secret is on the back. It’s clean. My fingers are not.
He’s waiting for me to speak. Instead, I look up, eyes bright, and say, “Who else knows?”
“Officially? Just the sender, and me. Unofficially? If you can see this, anyone who wants to connect the dots could find you. Or me. Or both.”
I want to scream, but instead my voice comes out level, like I’m reading a script: “You think it’s an internal threat?”
“Has to be,” he says. “Every timestamp lines up with nights we were both at the club. Every access attempt on our systems came from someone who knows the building, knows the protocols. There’s more…
” He hesitates, then lays out a folder like it’s a tarot card.
“Three other PDI execs got similar threats. All of them have something to lose. Two paid. One is waiting it out.”
He flips open the folder. The paper inside is covered in highlighter and sticky notes, more photos, more demands. “I traced the message origin to an apartment block three blocks from Vantage Systems. Guess who lives there?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Brenden Hale. Systems analyst. I fired him last year for unauthorized data copying. He bounced around, landed at Vantage. Their entire business model is weaponized grudge.”
I feel sick. Not about the blackmail, not about the job, I’ve lost jobs before.
I think about my mother, who still has my confirmation photo on her fridge, and my father, who cried at my college graduation and told me he’d never been so proud.
My nieces, who call me their cool aunt. I look at the photo again.
My birthmark. My wild hair. My face, tipped toward Aiden’s like a compass finding north.
I am not ashamed of this. I am not. But I am terrified of having to explain that I’m not.
“He’s the one targeting us?” I ask. “He’s the blackmailer?”
“He’s the puppet master,” says Aiden, voice tight.
“But there’s more. He’s got a direct line to the club’s membership.
Someone’s feeding him the schedule, giving him access to moments when we’re most exposed.
I’m ninety percent sure he was at the last event.
Masked, but the gait, the body language. It matches.”
I let this settle. The entire time I’ve been fighting for air, the water’s been rising around my ankles. “You were going to handle this alone?”
“Not anymore.” He closes the file, looks at me with a kind of exhausted relief. “I can’t close the loop without you.”
“Why?” I ask, genuinely curious. “What’s left?”
He pulls up a file on his screen. “The last step is proving he was in the club on the same nights as the breach attempts. But the club’s internal event calendar isn’t digitized. The only copy is in their admin archive, which you…” he stops, corrects himself, “which we scanned last audit cycle.”
“Eight months ago,” I say slowly. “The Voss project.” The irony lands on me like a delayed slap.
I spent three weeks indexing and encrypting that archive, setting every access code, never once knowing I was building a vault around my own secrets.
“I had no idea what I was actually securing.” I almost laugh.
“I thought it was a private events company.”
“No one else knows the structure well enough to get in and out without triggering alarms,” says Aiden. “If I try, it flags security. If you do it, you can move invisibly.”
I roll the blackmail photo between my fingers. There’s my birthmark. There’s his jaw. I want to be furious at him, I was furious two minutes ago, but the anger keeps slipping sideways into something that feels uncomfortably like relief. I set the photo face-down on the desk.
“Fine,” I say, and uncross my arms. I sit down without waiting for him to invite me, drag the laptop toward myself and start typing.
He hovers, a presence behind me that’s both distracting and oddly steadying.
I pull up the internal comms archive and set to work. It’s so easy to slip back into old habits, my fingers finding shortcuts, bypasses, kill commands. In twenty seconds, I’m inside the vault.
“Tell me what to look for,” I say, and he does, precise, clipped instructions, like always. But this time, every word is a lifeline.
He sits on the edge of the desk, legs braced, head bent to watch my hands fly. I feel the anger in me cool, replaced by something like anticipation.
“You know what I kept thinking about?” I ask, still typing. “The Hendricks audit. March. You made me redo the entire index because one timestamp was off by four minutes.”
He’s quiet.
“Four minutes,” I say. “Out of six hundred hours of records.”
“It mattered.”
“It did.” I hit enter, watch the directory populate. “That’s the thing. It always mattered to you. Every detail. Every variable.” I pause, fingers hovering. “Except apparently this one.”
He doesn’t answer. I can hear him breathing behind me.
“I would have helped you,” I say. “From the beginning.”
“I know,” he says. Just that.
I go back to typing. So does the silence.
The archive yields faster than I expect, as if the system remembers me with something like gratitude. Each passcode rolls off my knuckles, no hesitation. I built this crypt, and if anyone can rob it clean, it’s me.
Aiden stands so close behind that when I hit the right folder, I hear him exhale. His hands are braced on either side of the desk, caging me in, not on purpose, but because his need to see is physical. His eyes flick from screen to keyboard and back, never once straying to my face.