Chapter 26 Ethan #2
I spend the next four hours actively drowning myself in spreadsheets and compliance reports. It’s numbing work, which is exactly what I need to keep the demons at bay.
Until two o’clock.
I need coffee. Real coffee, not the sludge from the personal machine in my office.
I head out to the communal kitchen, keeping my face perfectly neutral and my terrifying CEO mask firmly in place so absolutely no one stops me for a quick chat.
I turn the corner into the kitchen and stop dead in my tracks.
Tessa is there.
She’s standing by the counter, gripping the edge of the marble hard enough to drain the blood from her fingers.
She’s wearing a loose, cream-colored blouse—highly unusual for her, since she usually favors tailored fits that drive us all insane—and she’s staring at the microwave like it’s an active bomb.
I should immediately turn around. I should follow my own direct order to give her space.
But then she sways.
It’s incredibly subtle, just a slight tilt off her axis, but I’m moving before my brain even registers the decision. I cross the distance, my hand shooting out to firmly grip her elbow and steady her.
“Easy,” I murmur, my voice dropping low.
She jumps with a violently sharp intake of breath, jerking away from my touch like I’ve physically burned her. She spins around, her back hitting the counter. Her hazel eyes are wide and completely panicked.
And Owen was absolutely right—she’s a wreck. Her skin, usually glowing with that natural vitality that draws everyone to her, is waxy and pale. There are deep, dark smudges under her eyes, and a visible sheen of sweat coats her forehead despite the aggressive office AC.
“Ethan,” she breathes, her hand immediately going to her throat. “You… you startled me.”
“You almost hit the floor,” I say, keeping my hands raised slightly to show I’m not going to grab her again. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she stammers. “Just… lightheaded. I barely ate breakfast. Bad idea.”
“Tessa.” I step closer, lowering my voice so the two interns by the vending machine won’t hear us. “You’ve been an absolute ghost for forty-eight hours. You’re canceling meetings. You clearly haven’t slept. Talk to me.”
Her eyes snap back to mine, and for a split second, I see genuine terror there. Pure, unadulterated fear.
“It’s everything,” she whispers. “The contract. The scaling. The… ” She swallows hard. “The intense pressure. I just need to focus, Ethan. I can’t… I can’t do this right now.”
She gestures vaguely between us, right in the space where the electricity usually crackles. Now, the air just feels cold and dead.
“Do what?” I ask, my own deeply buried insecurity rising up to choke me. “Us? You can’t do us?”
“Not here,” she hisses, glancing nervously at the interns. “Please. Just… let me work. I need to handle this on my own.”
I need to handle this on my own.
The rejection is a hard hit. We handle things together. That is the entire fundamental point of Mosaic—taking the broken pieces and making a unified whole. If she is trying to handle things alone, it means she doesn’t see herself as part of our picture anymore.
I stiffen, the harsh sting instantly hardening into a thick, protective shell.
“Fine,” I say, my voice dropping to that cold, professional timbre I use to terrify hostile boardrooms. “If you need space, absolutely take it. But you’re the Lead Brand Strategist. If you aren’t fit to perform your duties, you need to tell me. The company has to come first.”
It’s the exact wrong thing to say. I know it the second the words leave my mouth. It’s Ethan the CEO, Ethan the Protector, desperately trying to regain control of a terrifying situation by forcefully creating distance.
Tessa physically flinches. The hurt in her eyes is immediate, followed quickly by a cold, impenetrable wall of resolve. She forcibly straightens her spine, completely masking the dizziness I know she is actively fighting.
“I’m perfectly capable of performing my duties, Mr. Branson,” she says, her voice turning to ice. “I’ll have the strategy brief in your inbox by five o’clock.”
She pushes past me, incredibly careful not to let her body brush against my suit, and walks straight out of the kitchen.
I stand there in the silence, staring blankly at the empty doorway.
I gave her space, exactly like I planned. I prioritized the company, exactly like I always do. So why does it feel like I just lost the most important war of my life?
I grab a black coffee, downing it despite the scalding heat, and march straight back to my office. If she wants professionalism, I’ll gladly give it to her. If she wants to do this completely alone, I’ll let her see just how incredibly cold it is outside the Unit.
Sitting down at my desk, I aggressively pull up the system diagnostics Asher has been reviewing. I need a problem I can actually solve—logic, clean code, something that definitively does what it’s told.
My phone buzzes with a text from Harper.
Harper: Hey big bro! Saw the article about the $50M funding! That is INSANE! I am so freaking proud of you guys. Also, tell Tessa to pick up her damn phone, she’s ignoring me. Is she okay?
I stare down at the illuminated screen. She’s ignoring Harper, too?
That doesn’t fit the regret theory. If she were regretting us, she’d be running straight to Harper, tearfully confessing and looking for an immediate escape route. Isolating from her best friend is entirely different. It’s highly protective.
She’s actively hiding something.
Ethan: She’s just swamped with the scaling strategy. We all are. I’ll tell her you checked in.
I toss the phone down and glance back up at my main diagnostic screen.
WARNING: Abnormal traffic detected in Sector 4 (Confessions DB). Origin: Unknown.
“Asher,” I mutter, instantly tapping my earpiece. “Are you seeing this traffic spike on the Confessions server?”
“I see it,” Asher’s voice comes through the comms immediately. “I’m trying to trace the packet origin. It looks exactly like a localized stress test, but I definitely didn’t authorize one.”
“Shut it down,” I order, welcoming the sharp distraction. “We can’t have any latency while Sterling’s auditors are actively watching our uptime.”
“Working on it… That’s incredibly odd,” Asher murmurs, the frantic clicking of his mechanical keyboard echoes over the line. “It’s bypassing the firewall using a legacy admin credential.”
“Whose credential?”
There is a heavy pause. “Mine.”
A sharp, icy prickle of dread that has absolutely nothing to do with Tessa shoots straight down my spine.
“Asher. Is that you or not?”
“Negative,” Asher replies, his voice tightening with stress. “I’m actively locked out of the node. Someone is mirroring my admin access.”
“Kill the port,” I order, jumping up from my chair. “Hard reset.”
“If I initiate a hard reset, we permanently lose the cache for the last hour. The user data—”
“Do it,” I bark. “Right now.”
I watch my screen flicker aggressively as Asher kills the connection. The red warning banner instantly blinks out, replaced by a wall of black.
“Status?” I demand.
“Containment achieved,” Asher says, sounding slightly breathless. “But Ethan… that wasn’t a system glitch. That was a highly sophisticated probe. Someone was actively testing the door handle to see if it was unlocked.”
“Sterling?” I ask, my mind racing. “Auditing us without warning?”
“Maybe,” Asher says hesitantly. “But usually, auditors announce themselves or leave a digital footprint. This felt predatory.”
I stare blindly at the black screen, the deep unease in my gut rapidly doubling.
Tessa is falling apart. The secure servers are being probed. Harper is asking questions.
“Keep a strict twenty-four-hour watch on the logs,” I command. “And Asher?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell Tessa. She looked incredibly fragile today. She absolutely doesn’t need this on her plate.”
“Copy that,” Asher says.
I cut the line.
I walk back over to the glass window, staring down at the sprawling city. The oppressive heat of the afternoon is breaking, the atmosphere growing heavy and suffocating.
I have a terrible feeling the silence is officially over. The ambush is about to begin.