Hate Me Closer

Chapter 8: Fallout

Chapter 8: Fallout

The fallout took three days to become a catastrophe.

Aria watched it happen from her apartment, curtains half-drawn, phone face-down on the coffee table. She'd stopped answering it after the fortieth call. The Ledger's story had metastasized — every outlet in the city had picked it up, and Simone Park was doing victory laps on morning television, promising "more revelations to come."

The Halston Foundation was bleeding. Two major donors had "paused" their pledges. The board had called an emergency session. And somewhere in Vale Tower, Dorian was standing alone in the wreckage she'd made.

She'd won. She kept telling herself that. She'd won, and it felt like being hollowed out with a spoon.

On the third day, Nadia showed up uninvited with groceries and a laptop and the expression of a woman staging an intervention.

"You look like hell," Nadia announced, dropping bags on the counter.

"Flattery will get you everywhere."

"Eat." Nadia unpacked soup like a field medic. "And then look at this, because Park's digging into the real records now — the actual foundation books, not your creative writing — and she found something weird."

Aria's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. "Weird how?"

"Anomalies. In the old files. Seven years old." Nadia opened the laptop. "Discrepancies in the Halston and Cole acquisition records. Numbers that don't reconcile. Park thinks there's a bigger story underneath your fake one."

"My fake one worked fine."

"My fake one pointed at something real." Nadia's voice gentled. "Aria. What if the rot you invented was covering rot that was actually there?"

Aria set the spoon down. Her appetite had died sometime around the gala. "It doesn't matter. It's done."

"It matters." Nadia hesitated. "There's something else. I have a friend in the foundation's IT department. When the board demanded a name for the leak — when Ward wanted someone to burn — Dorian told them it came from a compromised vendor account. He never named you."

The room went very still.

"He what?"

"He protected you." Nadia held her gaze. "Ward wanted blood, and Dorian gave them a ghost instead. He's taking the hit for you, Aria. Publicly. The board vote on Thursday is about removing him, and he's letting it happen rather than hand them your name."

Aria stood so fast the chair tipped. "Why would he do that?"

"Because he's in love with you, you idiot." Nadia said it flatly, like a diagnosis. "God knows why. Your judgment is terrible and your apartment smells like soup."

Aria walked to the window. Forty-one floors of glass rose above the city, indifferent and gleaming. Somewhere up there — no. Not up there. He wouldn't be at the office. He'd be—

She didn't let herself finish the thought.

---

Dorian's penthouse occupied the top two floors of a building he rarely mentioned owning. That night it was dark except for one lamp and the city beyond the glass. A bottle of whiskey stood on the coffee table, two fingers gone. He hadn't bothered with a glass for the third.

His phone rang. Margot. He almost didn't answer.

"Tell me," he said.

"Thursday. Ten a.m. Ward has the votes." Margot's voice was crisp, but he'd known her six years — he could hear the strain underneath. "Dorian. If you gave them the source of the leak—"

"No."

"It's your company. Your name. She's—"

"No." He stood and walked to the window. Forty-one floors below, the city glittered, oblivious. "She's the only honest thing that's happened to me in years, Margot. I'm not feeding her to Ward."

A long silence. Then, quietly: "You love her."

He didn't answer. The whiskey burned going down, and it didn't touch the cold at his center.

"Get some sleep," Margot said gently. "Thursday will be bad enough without you walking in half-dead."

She hung up. He walked to the bar cart and stopped. Then, deliberately, he poured the whiskey back into the bottle and set it down untouched. Even now — especially now — some stubborn part of him refused to become his father: the kind of man who drowned things instead of facing them. He'd face this. Whatever Thursday brought, he'd face it standing up.

He stood at the glass with empty hands and thought about a woman in a dark red gown, standing in a ruined ballroom, looking at him like he'd invented betrayal.

He'd known who she was from the first day. He'd told himself he was managing a threat. Containing damage.

Lies. Every one of them. He'd kept her close because from the moment she'd said "frighten me" back at him in that conference room, he'd been lost — and some broken, hopeful part of him had wanted her to be the one to finally punish him for everything he hadn't stopped.

Well. She had.

---

Aria's phone rang at midnight. Unknown.

She answered. "Nadia?"

"You need to come see what I found." Nadia's voice was tight, excited, scared — all at once. "I pulled the original Halston and Cole acquisition files. Aria — it's about your father. It's about all of it. And you were wrong about everything."

The line went dead.

Aria stood in the dark of her apartment, phone in her hand, heart hammering against her ribs like it wanted out.

Wrong about everything.

She'd destroyed a man on the strength of a seven-year-old certainty. And now the ground was shifting under her feet, and she was terrified of what she'd find underneath.

---

End of Chapter 8