Torn Contract, Claimed by the Billionaire

Cracks

Victory, it turned out, made Dean Foster more suspicious of me, not less.

He caught me alone in the Thorne Dynamics conference room two days after Damian's suspension, while Liam was in a call I wasn't invited to.

"You've had this planned for a while," Dean said. It wasn't a question.

"I plan most things."

"You froze a federal account in one day. Recorded a confession at a gala like it was nothing. Timed a board vote to the hour." He crossed his arms. "That's not luck, Ms. Sterling. That's someone who's done this before."

I said nothing, because there was no answer that wouldn't sound insane or evasive, and I'd rather he think me cold than think me mad.

"Liam trusts you," Dean said. "I don't yet. I've watched three people use this company to save themselves and leave him holding the wreckage. I'm not going to apologize for wondering if you're the fourth."

"You're not wrong to wonder," I said. "You'd be a poor COO if you didn't."

That answer seemed to unsettle him more than a denial would have. He paused at the door, one hand on the frame, and for a moment I thought he might say something else — something less rehearsed than the accusation he'd walked in with. Instead he simply nodded, once, and left, the particular nod of a man filing a conversation away to revisit later rather than closing the book on it entirely.

I sat alone in the conference room longer than I meant to, turning his accusation over until it stopped sounding unfair and started sounding, uncomfortably, close to something I hadn't let myself examine.

I was using this life the way I'd once used spreadsheets — for outcomes, not people. I told myself that was survival. I wasn't entirely sure, sitting there, that it wasn't also a kind of cowardice.

Liam found me an hour later, still in the same chair.

"Dean talked to you," he said. It wasn't a question either.

"He's good at his job."

"He's good at protecting me. Sometimes those overlap with being good at his job and sometimes they don't." Liam sat across from me, tie loosened, the exhaustion of the week finally visible on him now that the cameras weren't. "I need to ask you something, and I need an honest answer, not a strategic one."

"All right."

"Why do you know these things? Not the trust. Not Kingsley. All of it. The pattern's too clean for luck, and I don't think you're actually psychic."

I thought, for one long moment, about telling him the truth. About a car going into black water. About a version of this exact week that I had lived once already, badly, and lost.

"There are things about me," I said instead, "that I can't explain to you yet in a way you'd believe."

"Try me."

"Not yet," I said. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't yet trust that the truth won't cost me the one thing I actually need from you right now."

"Which is?"

"That you keep looking at me the way you did in that boardroom," I said. "Like someone worth building something with. Not someone to be managed."

Something in his face closed, very slightly, like a door easing shut rather than slamming.

"My ex-wife once told me she loved me while she was already filing the paperwork to leave," he said. "I've gotten good at noticing when someone's telling me half a truth to keep me calm."

"I'm not her."

"I know." He stood. "That's not the same as knowing what you actually are."

"Give me time," I said, quieter than I meant to. "I'll give you the whole truth eventually. I just need it to land somewhere that's already learned to trust me a little, or it will sound like exactly the kind of lie your ex-wife told."

He stopped at the door, his back to me. "How much time?"

"I don't know yet," I admitted. "I've never had to explain it to anyone who might actually believe me."

He left before I could say anything else, and I sat in the empty conference room with the particular ache of having won every battle this week except the one that mattered most — being believed by the one person I most needed to believe me.

My phone buzzed. Nora.

*Board's asking if the wedding date is still happening given everything with Damian. Also — someone's been asking around about your "background" before you moved to the city. Not press. Someone quieter.*

I read it twice, feeling the ground shift under a week I'd thought I finally had control of. Everything I had built in the last five days had depended on one quiet assumption — that the only person in this city with access to memories that shouldn't exist yet was me. That assumption had just become a great deal less comfortable to hold.

*Quieter how,* I wrote back.

*Private investigator. Paid in cash. Asking about a car accident five years ago.*

I set the phone down slowly, my hands, for the first time since I'd opened my eyes in this life, not entirely steady.

Whoever they were, they had reached back further than a gossip column or a shell company. They had reached back to a night I had never told anyone about, in a life no one else was supposed to remember.