Torn Contract, Claimed by the Billionaire

Two Can Play

Damian had never lost gracefully in either of my lives, and he wasn't about to start now.

By Thursday morning, a story appeared in a gossip column with more readers than it deserved: *Sterling Heiress's Sudden Engagement Raises Eyebrows — Insiders Say She's "Always Had an Eye on the Exit."* No named sources. No facts that would survive a lawyer's phone call. Just enough poison to make people wonder, which was all Damian had ever needed poison to do.

Nora forwarded it to me with one line: *This has Ivy's fingerprints on it, not his. Too personal.*

She was right. Damian's cruelty was financial, transactional, easy to trace through numbers. Ivy's was smaller and meaner and aimed directly at a woman's reputation, because that was the only weapon she'd ever needed to survive in rooms she hadn't earned her way into.

I pictured them together — in the apartment Damian kept for exactly this kind of planning, the one with the view he liked to stand in front of when he felt powerful — deciding which story would hurt me most.

"She's not stupid," Ivy would be saying, meaning me, in the version of that conversation I imagined without effort. "We need something personal. Numbers don't scare people. Shame does."

"Do it quietly," Damian would answer, pouring a drink he hadn't earned the calm to enjoy. "I'm not having my name on another headline this week."

I didn't need to be in the room to know the shape of it. I'd loved that shape once, mistaken it for intimacy. Now I only recognized it as a pattern, and patterns, unlike people, don't get to surprise you twice.

There had been a version of me who would have called Ivy first, given her the chance to explain, to apologize, to be talked back into the fiction that we were still friends. That version had died believing in second chances. I found I didn't miss her nearly as much as I'd expected to.

The second story ran Friday: an "anonymous former assistant" claiming I'd once threatened to ruin a rival's career over a parking spot. It was almost funny, how small the lie was. Almost.

By noon, three more outlets had picked it up, each one adding a detail that hadn't been in the original — a raised voice, a slammed door, a security guard who'd supposedly had to intervene. Lies grow the way rumors always do, by consensus rather than evidence. Nobody checks the first brick once the wall looks finished.

I read every version anyway, because knowing exactly how a lie was built told me exactly how to take it apart.

Dean Foster brought it to Liam's office himself, printed, like evidence for a trial no one had asked him to prepare.

"I'm not accusing you of anything," Dean said to me, which is what people say right before they do. "But someone should ask why the timing lines up so cleanly with the deal you're brokering."

"Ask," I said.

He looked surprised I hadn't flinched.

"Ivy Larkin worked as an unpaid intern for Kane Holdings' PR team for two years before she and Damian got involved," I said. "She learned exactly one skill there — how to plant a story that can't be sued because it's too vague to be false. I'd bet the parking spot detail came from her own life, not mine. People always accuse you of what they've actually done."

Dean didn't answer right away. Liam, at his desk, hadn't looked up from his laptop the entire time, which I'd already learned meant he was listening harder than either of us.

"Dean," Liam said finally, still not looking up, "pull Kingsley's latest filing instead of running my fiancée's old parking tickets."

Dean's jaw tightened, but he left.

He paused at the door, though, and looked back at me — not an apology, not quite, but something closer to a man recalculating an assumption he'd been carrying since I walked into this building.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I hope you're right about her."

"I usually am," I said. "It's a small comfort and an enormous liability, in roughly equal measure."

He almost smiled. Almost. It was becoming something of a theme in this office.

"You don't have to defend me," I said, once the door closed.

"I wasn't defending you." Liam finally looked up. "I was redirecting a man who's about to waste a week chasing a lie instead of the fraud that's actually sinking this company."

"Efficient of you."

"I'm a businessman, Ms. Sterling. Efficiency is the only compliment I know how to give."

"Then I'll treasure it accordingly."

He returned to his laptop, and I let the silence between us sit for a moment, comfortable in a way I hadn't expected a business arrangement to become this quickly. It was, I thought, the particular quiet of two people who had each stopped waiting for the other to prove themselves untrustworthy.

The moment lasted exactly as long as it took my phone to buzz with a message from an address I didn't recognize.

*You should be more careful about who you trust with your secrets,* it read. *Some of us remember things you'd rather stayed buried.*

I read it three times. Then a fourth.

No signature. No number I could trace back with the tools I currently had.

Someone remembers things I'd rather stayed buried.

I had assumed, until that exact second, that I was the only person in this city carrying memories that belonged to a life no one else had lived.

I was wrong.