Chapter 24
* * *
Emma
Jennifer stared at me, eyes wide across the conference table. “What just happened?”
The question hung there—heavy, vibrating through the Elion conference room like someone had struck a fault line. The silence afterward made the walls feel closer, the glass too thin.
David shook his head, wearing the expression of a man who’d just watched gravity stop working. “I… I honestly have no idea.”
I sank into my chair, the last threads of adrenaline slipping out of my body, leaving something hollow in their wake. “Bell is an ass.”
Kevin—who had leaned so far back in his chair he looked half-exiled from the table—nodded once. “On that, we can all agree.”
No one added anything. The static from Falkirk followed us like fog, clinging to the corners of the room, humming against the glass and the faint city noise beyond.
My pen rolled across the table, and I watched it go—mind skipping through every frame of the meeting. Nathan’s interruptions. Damien’s jaw locked hard enough to crack teeth. And the quiet, electric pull when our gazes met seconds before the whole thing detonated.
Tense didn’t begin to cover it.
“Did Holt seem… off to anyone else?” Jennifer asked carefully. “He looked tense.”
“I think Holt’s just sick of Bell’s shit,” Kevin said, tone dry enough to flake.
I nodded, small and controlled, even as my fingers twitched toward my phone. Every part of me wanted to hear his voice—right now—to ask what was going on beneath the surface. But instead, I inhaled through my nose and forced the CEO back into place.
“It doesn’t matter.” I steadied my voice. “We couldn’t control it. And we weren’t the ones making fools of ourselves.”
The team nodded along, some of the tension bleeding from the room.
“So where do we go from here?” Kevin asked, scanning each of us like the answer might be written on our foreheads.
Jennifer gathered her notes with brisk purpose. “We move forward.”
David opened his laptop, already typing. “I’ll start cleaning up the numbers from today’s draft. Something ready for review by morning.”
“Good.” The word felt far away. Automatic. The muscle memory of leadership firing even as the rest of me was stuck miles behind.
My mind stayed fixed on Damien—on the storm tightening around him when Nathan pushed too far, the clipped edge in his voice when he came back into the room, something feral burning in his expression.
When the meeting wrapped, people filed out one by one until the door clicked shut behind Kevin, leaving only silence and the steady hum of the city on the other side of the windows.
I stared down at my phone, then inhaled before hitting call.
“Hey.” The line connected, rough, slightly breathless.
“Hey yourself,” I said, keeping it light. “Mind telling me what the hell that was?”
He groaned. “I’d love nothing more than to do just that, but I can’t right now.”
The disappointment landed fast and hot, hollowing me out. “Okay…” I dragged the word, letting the question sit inside it.
“It’s… layered. Too much to unpack right now.”
Layered.
Jennifer had used the same word.
“Fine,” I said. “But Friday, I want to know everything.” A date set only minutes after the last had ended.
“Agreed,” he replied instantly. “Seven p.m. at my place?”
Butterflies flared hard in my chest—reckless, inconvenient—but they slammed straight into the confusion still storming through me.
“I’ll be there.” Before I could overthink it.
Something in his tone curved—a smile I felt more than heard. “Looking forward to it, Ms. Sinclair.”
The call ended, leaving the room too quiet.
And that’s when my screen lit again—this time not with Damien’s name.
Margaret Nguyen—Incoming Call
My stomach dipped. Hard.
The calm I’d been clinging to evaporated. Investors did not call at four-thirty unless something was wrong. Very wrong.
I straightened my spine, smoothed my expression, and answered.
I wasn’t ready, but I had no time to prepare.
The line connected, and Margaret didn’t waste a second.
“Emma,” she said, her tone clipped, too formal. “We have a situation.”
My pulse thudded once—hard, jarring. “What kind of situation?”
A pause. Just long enough for dread to slide under my ribs.
“It’s Davidson,” she said. “He’s pushed a motion to initiate a preliminary audit of Elion’s financial and operational stability.”
The floor tilted.
“Audit?” The word barely left me. “On what grounds?”
Margaret exhaled. “He’s citing structural volatility. Leadership strain. Understaffing. And he’s arguing that the merger discussions are proof we’ve overextended.”
Heat flared across my skin—shame, humiliation, fury.
An audit meant they’d peel back every number I’d spent months holding together with tape and polish—every ugly figure I’d reorganized, rephrased, reframed to stop the board from panicking.
All the numbers I’d massaged into something presentable. Something survivable.
“Missed deliverables?” I snapped. “We haven’t missed a single one.”
“I know,” she said. “But Davidson isn’t aiming for accuracy. He’s aiming for optics.”
My chest constricted.
“Emma…” Margaret hesitated—a rare thing. “I need to tell you something you’re not going to like.”
I closed my eyes. “Just tell me.”
“There have been whispers.” Her tone dropped. “Not about Elion. About Davidson.”
I stilled.
“His father,” she continued, “funded his investment into Elion. You know that. But what you don’t know is that the money behind that investment is… drying up. His father’s estate is tied up. There’s litigation over asset distribution. Nothing’s been finalized. Davidson’s under pressure.”
I froze.
Pressure.
A word that had hovered around him for months without shape. Without explanation.
Margaret went on, “He needs liquidity, Emma. He needs to pull out of Elion. But if he does that after the merger? After Falkirk validates us? He’ll look like an idiot walking away from a rising company.”
“So he wants out now. Before Elion stabilizes.”
“Yes.” A razor-sharp yes.
A confirmation that rearranged every interaction he and I had ever had.
“And to justify pulling out,” Margaret added, “he needs instability. He needs a reason that won’t make him look impulsive or incompetent.”
My throat went tight. “The audit.”
“The audit,” she echoed. “If he can claim there are internal concerns—documented concerns—he can walk away unscathed. He can say he was being responsible. Protecting assets. Following fiduciary duty.”
I sank back in my chair, something catching in my chest.
“It isn’t about you,” Margaret said gently. “It isn’t even about Elion. It’s about his father’s money.”
Something hot and sick rushed through me.
So that’s why he’d been so vicious. So quick to criticize.
So eager to shift goalposts, create new demands, invent problems only he could see.
It had never been about my leadership. It had always been about his exit.
This wasn’t sabotage for sport. It was self-preservation. Ugly, selfish self-preservation.
And I was collateral damage.
“Emma,” Margaret continued gently, “a preliminary audit is loud. It creates a record. It pulls departments in. People talk. He knows that. He wants it to look like he’s leaving a troubled company—not abandoning a thriving one.
He’s requesting the last six quarters of reporting,” she finished.
“Payroll, department spend, project logs, staffing allocations. The full picture.”
“That’s practically a full audit.”
“I know. I’m pushing back. But Davidson is maneuvering carefully. He isn’t trying to run Elion. He’s trying to flee Elion without looking like a coward.”
I pressed a hand to my forehead as the final piece clicked into place. “When do they want the documents?” I asked, the words flat.
“End of next week.”
Cold rushed through me. “Margaret—”
“I know,” she said quickly. “It’s too soon. I’m trying to buy time.”
Of course he wanted it fast. Pressure works better when no one can breathe.
“Emma,” she continued, lower now, “I need you to prepare for internal fallout. If word spreads—and it will—your people may panic. They’ll think something’s wrong. They’ll wonder if you’ve been hiding problems.”
Translation: It will make you look like you’re failing them. It would scare them. Make them doubt everything we’d worked to rebuild.
My stomach churned.
It will unravel the stability we’ve fought to rebuild. Right when we were so close.
“I’ll handle it.”
“Good. I’ll call you if anything changes.”
The line went dead.
I lowered the phone slowly, like a sudden movement might make everything crash.
A preliminary audit.
Davidson’s exit strategy.
My humiliation packaged as “due diligence.”
And everyone at Elion would see it.
The people who trusted me.
The people I was responsible for.
The people I was finally pulling back from the edge.
My vision pricked.
Nausea rolled through me.
My hands shook.
He’s not attacking Elion.
He’s attacking you.
Because you were finally winning.
I inhaled, shoved down the panic, and pulled my laptop toward me.
Work.
I needed to work.
My phone buzzed on the table, but the sound slipped past me, swallowed by the roar building behind my eyes.
Numbers blurred across my screen.
Cells. Charts. Projections.
Click. Scroll. Recalculate.
Panic ticking up with every motion.
Buzz.
I lifted a hand and waved it absently, like brushing away a gnat.
Buzz.
My eyes flicked up, searching for the source before dropping back to the page.
Keep working.
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
The vibrations sharpened, drilling through the thin veneer of focus I was clinging to.
Buzz.
“Jesus,” I hissed, forcing myself to look away from the screen.
The room lurched—edges bending like heat rising off asphalt. I blinked hard, waiting for reality to settle back into place.
When it did… everything was dark.
The hallway.
Sarah’s desk.
The office beyond the glass.
Even the sky outside had dropped fully into night.
My heartbeat faltered.
Slowly, my eyes climbed to the clock on the wall.
8:30 p.m.
My lips parted.
“How—?”
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
I turned at last, and the truth landed like impact.
The sound had been coming from my phone.
Damien’s name glowed on the screen—an incoming call.
My stomach dropped.
I answered before my brain fully caught up. “Hey.”
“Jesus Christ, Emma,” he breathed—tight, frayed, more alarmed than angry. “I’ve been calling for an hour. I was minutes away from driving to your place myself.”
Guilt twisted low in my gut. “I’m still at Elion,” I said, the reality settling in like cold water.
A beat of stunned silence. Then, softer—”Why?”
I swallowed, pressing trembling fingers to my temple.
“Margaret called this afternoon. After the meeting. She told me Davidson’s pushed for a preliminary audit,” I explained.
“He’s claiming volatility, leadership strain, missed deliverables—we both know none of that’s true—but he doesn’t care about true. ”
I exhaled shakily, staring at the mess of numbers on my screen. “Margaret said his father’s money is tied up. The estate’s in litigation. He needs liquidity, and the fastest way to justify pulling out is by manufacturing instability. The audit lets him claim he’s being ‘responsible.’”
Damien didn’t speak.
I couldn’t tell if he was absorbing it or trying not to explode.
“And if word spreads internally…” The words cracked despite my best attempt to control it. Tears welling in the inner corner of my eyes. “People will panic. They’ll think I’m hiding problems. They’ll think we’re failing. They’ll think I’m failing.”
Still nothing from his end of the line. Only the sound of his breathing—tight, uneven, like he was pacing or bracing himself against something violent.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” I answered, voice hoarse.
Another beat.
“Are you okay?”
No.
Absolutely not.
But my mouth moved before I could stop it. “I’m fine,” I heard myself say, phone shaking against my ear.
“Emma,” he said again, slow, deliberate, threaded with worry he couldn’t hide, “stay on the phone with me.”