Wednesday was one of the longest days I had spent inside my own head.
I went to work. I answered emails. I sat in a meeting about the gala and contributed things that were apparently useful because Diane nodded at me twice. None of it reached me fully. Underneath all of it, running on a quiet loop, was the thing I had woken up knowing at three in the morning.
Marcus had been near me on purpose. For two years. Someone had placed him there because of my father and what my father knew. Which meant whoever was running this had been planning it long before the debt was called in. Long before Alexander's lawyers ever knocked on my aunt's door. Long before I ever sat at a kitchen table and picked up a pen.
This had been building around me for years while I lived my ordinary life and had no idea.
That thought sat in my chest all day like something with weight.
I did not tell Alexander when I got home. Not yet. I needed to think about what it meant before I handed it to him because once I said it out loud, it became part of the case, and I wanted to be certain first. I had learned from him that certainty before action was the thing that kept everything from collapsing.
I made dinner. We ate. He told me the lawyers had a development they were following up on and would know more by the end of the week. I nodded and asked if he needed anything from me. He said not yet. We cleaned up side by side the way we had started doing without discussing it, and he said goodnight and went to his room.
I went to mine and lay in the dark and waited for sleep that did not come quickly.
I knew I was in trouble on Thursday morning when I woke up, and my first thought was not about the case or the threat or Marcus or any of it.
It was about the way he had looked at me across the desk two nights ago when I found the pattern in the transfers. That specific look. Like I was something he had not calculated for and was still in the middle of deciding what to do about.
I lay there with the ceiling above me and had a very direct conversation with myself.
I had feelings for Alexander Kane.
Not the kind that comes from gratitude or from spending weeks in close quarters with someone decent. Not the warmth of not being afraid of a person. Real feelings. The kind that notices when someone comes into a room before you hear them. The kind that replay a look or a sentence or a hand briefly at your back for longer than they have any right to.
This was a problem.
I pressed both hands over my face and breathed, and said it plainly to the ceiling because saying things plainly is the only way I know to deal with them. You are here for one year. This is a contract. Whatever you are feeling is something you arrived at inside a situation that was never designed for this, and you need to be very careful.
I got up. Went to the kitchen.
He was already there.
He looked up when I came in and said good morning, and I felt it anyway. The ceiling speech had done absolutely nothing.
"Morning," I said. Went straight for the coffee machine and kept my back to him a beat longer than I needed to.
"Did you sleep?" he asked.
"Yes. You?"
"Some."
We settled into the quiet that had become its own kind of comfort. I made toast. He refilled his coffee. We both stood at the counter with our separate things and the morning light coming through the windows, and it was so ordinary that it hurt a little. The ordinary of it. The ease. The way we had learned each other's rhythms without trying to.
I looked up at some point and found him not reading his screen. Just sitting. Looking at nothing with a particular expression, I had started to recognise as something working itself out inside him.
"Hey," I said.
He looked at me.
"What is it?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then he set his phone down.
"I called my lawyers this morning. Victor Hale. We have enough to move on to him now. The pattern you found closed the last gap in the case."
I put my toast down.
After eighteen months. After my father's name on folders in locked rooms and fabricated debts, and a man who had carried this alone through two years of grief and one year of me.
After all of it.
"When?" I asked.
"End of the week. Once everything is filed formally with the DA." He held my gaze. "Your father's name will be cleared. On record. In print. Publicly."
My eyes went hot. I looked down at the counter and pressed my lips together and breathed through my nose the way my father taught me because some feelings are too large to let out in stages, and they need a moment to be contained first.
When I looked up, he was still watching me. That careful, steady attention he gave to things that mattered to him.
"Thank you," I said. My voice was not entirely level, and I did not try to make it level.
"You found the piece that finished it," he said. "That credit belongs to you. And to your father."
I looked at him for a long moment. Things were sitting in my chest that I did not have the right to say yet. Things that had no good home in a twelve-month contract. I moved them aside.
"When this is over," I said, "what does it cost you? The company. Your position. All of it."
He thought about it honestly. I appreciated that he did not reach for an easy answer.
"It will be public, and it will be difficult," he said. "There will be restructuring. There will be scrutiny. I should have moved on this four years ago when your father first came to me, and I did not move fast enough, and a man I was supposed to protect got destroyed." He set his mug down. "I cannot undo that. What I can do is make sure the record reflects the truth. That matters to me more than what it costs."
I looked at this man across the kitchen counter. Complicated in all the ways that mattered. Carrying things he had never once asked anyone to help him carry. And something in me shifted fully and finally into a place I had been trying to keep it from.
Not convenient. Not safe. Not something I had planned for.
Real.
"I hope it goes the way it should," I said.
"So do I."
I went to work. I finished the gala plan. I called the florist and confirmed the centrepieces, answered seventeen emails and did every ordinary thing the day required. And underneath all of it, constant and quiet, was the question I had been circling for weeks and was finally ready to ask myself directly.
When the contract ended, and I walked out of that penthouse in twelve months or eight months, or however many were left, what exactly was I going to be leaving behind?
Not the penthouse. Not the view or the wardrobe or any of it.
Him.
I was going to be walking away from him.
I sat at my desk after everyone else had gone home and the office was quiet around me, and I looked at that fact properly for the first time.
Then my phone rang.
It was Liam.
"I need to see you," he said. No hello. No preamble. Just that. "Today. Now, if you can."
His voice had a quality to it I had not heard in a long time. Something tight underneath the words.
"What happened?" I asked.
A pause.
"Someone came to my door this morning, Soso. Asking questions about you. About your father. About what you know."
I stood up from my desk so fast my chair rolled back and hit the wall.
"Liam. What did this person look like?"
"Liam. What did this person look like?"
"Big guy. Well dressed. Said he was doing a background check for an insurance company. But nobody does that at seven in the morning at a friend's front door." His voice dropped. "He asked if I knew what your father had been working on before he died."
My stomach went completely cold.
They had gone to Liam.
The one person who was not inside the penthouse, not protected by Ethan, not covered by Alexander's name. Just out there. Ordinary and reachable, and completely unaware of what was moving around him.
"Stay inside," I said. "Lock your door. I am on my way to you right now."
I was already grabbing my bag.