One night with my boss

Chapter Six

Cole's POV

Victor left without answering my question.

That was the thing about my uncle. He never gave you information directly. He gave you the shape of it and let your mind do the rest. I had watched him operate that way my entire life and had never once seen it fail on anyone who wasn't paying close attention.

I walked back to my office and closed the door.

The girl's pregnant.

Three words. Delivered casually, like it cost him nothing. Like he had already decided what to do with the information and was sharing it only as a formality.

I sat at my desk and did not move for two minutes.

I was not a man who needed long to process things. I made decisions fast, acted faster, and had spent a decade training myself to keep emotion out of it. But this was not a decision I could isolate. This was Zara Ellis. And the child was mine.

I called Daniel.

He answered on the second ring. "Cole."

"My office. Now."

A pause. Half a second. Long enough. "I'm in the building. Give me five minutes."

He knew. I could hear it in the measured quiet of his voice. Daniel had been managing information for me for six years and I knew exactly what he sounded like when he was already ahead of a conversation.

He came in and sat without being asked. Composed. Prepared.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

"Two days."

"And you came to me immediately."

Not a question. He understood that.

"I spoke to her first," he said. "I wanted to give her the opportunity to handle it quietly before—"

"You accessed her private medical claim and approached my employee before bringing it to me." I kept my voice level. "Explain that."

He chose his words carefully. In six years Daniel had never had to do that with me. The fact that he was doing it now told me more than whatever he was preparing to say.

"Victor contacted me," he said. "Before I went to her."

"How long."

Silence.

"Daniel."

"Eighteen months." He said it quietly. Like a man setting down something that had been heavier than he let on.

I stood up and walked to the window.

Eighteen months. The Henderson acquisition. The Tokyo restructure. The board composition changes I had spent the last quarter engineering. All of it conducted while Victor's man sat three offices down from me with a direct line to my uncle and a six-year institutional knowledge of every lever worth pulling.

"You have until Friday to give HR a complete handover of your portfolio," I said. "Security will walk you out. If you contact Victor Mercer between now and then, I will make sure the board has a full record of this conversation. Are we clear?"

He stood. His face had gone pale and flat. "You're making a mistake."

"Close the door on your way out."

He left.

I sat for a moment. Six years and I had missed it entirely. Not because I was careless — because Daniel had been careful. Patient. Methodical in the way only someone who genuinely understood how I thought could be. That was what it cost to be betrayed by the right people.

I called the records room extension.

Four rings. No answer.

I took the stairs.

The door was ajar. Lights still on, one of the archived boxes sitting half-open on the work table. She had been here recently. The room was empty now.

I went back to the elevator and pressed lobby.

She was at the security desk near the main exit, bag on her shoulder, signing out for the day. She turned when she heard the elevator open and went completely still when she saw me crossing the floor toward her.

I stopped two feet away.

She didn't perform composure the way she had on her first morning in the boardroom. She just looked at me with the kind of steadiness that belonged to someone who had already made up their mind.

"You heard," I said.

"Enough."

"How long were you in the records room?"

"Long enough to know your uncle had the information before you did. And long enough to know that's the part that's actually bothering you."

I looked at her. She didn't move.

"We need to talk," I said.

"Not here."

"No. Not here." I held the lobby door open. My car was at the curb. Marcus had been waiting twenty minutes and would wait twenty more. "I have a driver outside."

She looked at the door. Then back at me.

"I'm not getting in a car with you, Cole."

It was the first time she had used my name since Friday night. Something in my chest recognized it before I could stop it from doing so.

"Then you choose the place," I said.

She shifted her bag and looked at me with an expression that wasn't anger and wasn't fear but something more composed than either. Something that told me she had been thinking about this moment before it arrived.

"Coffee place on Wabash," she said. "Thirty minutes. I'll be there or I won't."

She walked out.

I stood in the lobby while one of the guards quietly studied his monitor and pretended not to notice the CEO of the building standing alone watching the exit doors.

I went back upstairs.

My phone buzzed. Victor Mercer calling.

I declined it and put the phone in my jacket pocket.

Victor's power had always come from knowing things before you did. From letting information accumulate until the moment it could do the most damage. He had walked into that corridor this afternoon and handed me a grenade he thought would destabilize me.

He was wrong.

He had told me too soon. And the moment he looked at me with that careful, calculating calm and walked away, the advantage shifted. For the first time in eighteen months, I was the one who knew something Victor didn't.

I knew that I knew.