MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Chapter Eight

Nora's stomach dropped at the look on his face, the same one she'd seen exactly once before, in the office at seven at night, right before he'd said the words old family situation like they weren't a lie by omission.

"Show me," she said.

He hesitated, and that hesitation told her everything before he even turned the phone around. The message was short. Tick tock, Sebastian. Board room. Nine a.m. Either I walk in reinstated, or I walk in with a very interesting story about your three months in Operations. Your choice.

"She's serious," Nora said.

"She's always serious. That's the problem." He pocketed the phone, jaw tight, some of the ease that had settled over him in the last two weeks draining away like it had never been there. "I need to get back upstairs."

"Sebastian."

He paused at the door of the small kitchen, already half turned toward the version of himself she'd only seen glimpses of, the CEO, the one who made decisions in boardrooms instead of hospital chairs and couches with a bad blanket. "I'll call you tonight," he said. "I promise."

He didn't call until nearly eleven, and by then Nora had gone through an entire spiral of imagining the worst version of tomorrow morning, Vanessa smiling her way into a reinstatement, Sebastian's company slipping out from under him after everything he'd built to protect it. When her phone finally lit up, she answered on the first ring.

"Tell me you have a plan," she said, by way of hello.

"I have half of one." His voice sounded tired in a way she hadn't heard from him before, worn thin at the edges. "I know Vanessa has an informant somewhere close. I've known for weeks. I just haven't been able to prove who."

"And now."

A pause, long enough that she felt it in her chest before he even answered. "I think I might have something. I pulled building access logs tonight, cross referenced them against the timeline of what Vanessa's known and when she's known it. There's a pattern. Someone in Accounting has been in the executive floor's system more than their job requires, at hours that don't match any project I've assigned."

"Who."

Another pause, shorter this time, but she caught it anyway, the same hesitation he'd carried right before old family situation, right before he'd decided what she was and wasn't ready to hear. "I don't have it confirmed yet," he said. "I don't want to say a name until I'm sure. If I'm wrong, I could ruin someone's career over a bad guess."

It was a reasonable answer. She told herself that, lying in bed with the phone warm against her ear, that a careful man being careful with someone else's reputation wasn't the same thing as a man deciding, again, what she was allowed to know. She told herself that all the way until she fell asleep, and mostly believed it.

She believed it a little less the next morning, when she came in early, hoping to catch him before the board meeting, and found Priya waiting at her desk with an expression that made her stomach drop for an entirely different reason.

"Okay, don't panic," Priya said, which was never how a sentence like that actually ended.

"That's not a good start."

"Selena from Accounting got called into HR an hour ago. Two security guys walked her out five minutes later. Nobody's saying why, but everybody's saying it's big." Priya lowered her voice, glancing toward the elevator like the walls themselves might report back. "And apparently Sebastian's been up there with legal since six a.m."

Nora sat very still, the pieces sliding into place with a speed that made her faintly sick. Selena. The quiet one in Accounting who'd always seemed a little too interested in Operations gossip, who Nora had assumed, when she thought about her at all, simply had a crush on the mysterious new hire the same way half the office had. Not a crush. A source.

And Sebastian had known enough last night to pull access logs, to build a pattern, to have a name he wasn't sure of yet, he'd said, and somehow by six this morning he'd been sure enough to walk Selena out of the building before the vote even started.

He hadn't told her. He'd had hours between that phone call and the moment security walked Selena past her own desk, and in all of them, he hadn't called, hadn't warned her, hadn't given her the chance to prepare for finding out secondhand from Priya instead of from him.

She found him twenty minutes before the board meeting, in the small corridor outside the executive conference room, straightening his cuffs with the particular tightly controlled focus of a man about to walk into the fight of his professional life.

"You knew," she said, without preamble. "Last night. You already knew it was Selena."

He looked up, and something in his face told her he'd been expecting this conversation, had maybe even rehearsed some version of it on the way down from his office, and hadn't managed to make it sound any better in his head than it was about to sound out loud. "I suspected," he said. "I didn't confirm it until four this morning."

"And you didn't call me."

"It was four in the morning, Nora. You were asleep. There wasn't time to."

"There was time to walk her out before I got to my desk," she said, and hated how steady her voice came out, how much steadier than she felt. "There was time for security, for HR, for legal. There just wasn't time for me."

He opened his mouth, and she watched him reach for something, some careful, reasonable explanation about protecting her from a professional matter that wasn't fully resolved yet, about not wanting to worry her with a name until it was certain, and she recognized the shape of it before he even said it, because it was the exact same shape as I read the file this morning and it's an old family situation and every other careful half truth he'd fed her before the accident had forced the real one out of him.

"I was protecting you," he said finally.

"You keep saying that," she said, quiet now, which somehow felt worse than if she'd raised her voice. "Like it's supposed to be the whole answer. Sebastian, I nearly died in a truck accident before you managed to tell me your actual name. I don't need protecting from information anymore. I need you to stop deciding, on your own, in the middle of the night, what parts of your life I'm allowed to be inside of."

"I don't have time for this right now," he said, and the moment the words left his mouth she watched him realize how badly they'd landed, watched some helpless, too-late regret cross his face, but it was already out there between them, sharp and true in a way neither of them could take back.

"No," she agreed, stepping back from him, the corridor suddenly feeling very cold. "I don't suppose you do. Good luck in there."

She turned and walked away before he could find whatever he might have said next, and behind her, through the closed conference room doors, she could hear the low murmur of a board already gathering, already waiting for the fight that was about to determine everything he'd spent three months protecting, and she made herself keep walking, because if she stopped now, she wasn't sure whether she'd go back to comfort him or simply to say goodbye.