Reformed Villain’s Ex: Don’t Love Me, It’s Futile

Chapter 4 — Old Names in New Lights

The man lowered his camera and removed his hood as if he were performing the final flourish of a bad magic trick. His face could have been classified as “ordinary” if you were into understatement; the kind of face that blends into a crowd until it decides to do something memorable. The name hit me like a subway door: Oliver Kane.

I hadn’t seen that name in years — not since a life made of deadlines and late-night takes and a breakup that left my inbox looking like a crime scene. The memory arrived like someone blasting a horn in an otherwise tasteful funeral: loud, inconvenient, and impossible to ignore.

“How—” I started. Then stopped, because interrogations are for police and therapists. Mostly I wanted to know who hired the photographer, who paid Miriam to show the photo on a rooftop with my son at my feet, and why I felt like the plot of my life had been caveman-scribbled onto a tablet by someone else’s bored fingers.

Oliver smiled like a man who had been practicing smiles for a while. “Aren’t you amused?” he asked. His voice was that easy, practiced tenor of someone who has spent a career making people regret crossing him. He didn’t sound surprised to see me; he sounded pleased, as if this encounter had been on his calendar under the category: *productive awkwardness*.

Damien’s jaw tightened. “You know Ms. West?” he asked, and there was the faintest ripple of the possessive in the question. Protective with a bank account: modern chivalry with benefits.

Oliver’s eyes flicked to the little human at my hip — Rowan — and then to the man who’d been built by economics and a stubborn refusal to be small. He nodded in a way that suggested he knew how to read a room and how to tilt it toward headlines.

“Acquaintance,” Oliver said. He had that particularly British-sounding vowel that makes insult sound poetic. “We met. Long story.”

Miriam looked delighted, the way people in the professional rumor business always look when two pieces fall into place. “Mr. Kane is a freelance investigator,” she announced, as if he’d just volunteered to babysit for charity. “He found who was circulating the photograph. He can trace the sender.”

People like a trail they can follow. The city’s hunger for mystery is an expensive diet; someone pays a lot to be fed one.

Graham — the man who’d removed his hood — moved in with the confidence of someone whose camera had more rights than his conscience. He had a reporter’s face and a photographer’s appetite for chaos. “I work with Oliver sometimes,” he said. “Mostly when the project is unpleasant but profitable.”

“Whose project?” I demanded. My tone had that pleasant danger: like a person asking for directions while holding a can of very loudly labeled pepper spray.

He shrugged. “People with interests. People who like strings that move other people. Puppeteers. PR directors who don’t like being outmaneuvered.” He smiled and that smile carried the sort of apology that intends to be charming and ends up being ominous.

Lila, who had been quiet, finally spoke. “I have no idea who paid for that,” she said, her composure cracking around the edges like a porcelain doll left in too many handbags. “I was at the gala. I had conversations. But I don’t know anything about rooftop ambushes.”

“You don’t have to know,” Oliver said lightly. “You only have to be useful.”

Useful is such a cool word when spoken by someone whose idea of help involves setting teeth on edge. Damien stepped forward, and you could see the logic gears clunk as he measured the scene: one PR crisis, one possible leak, and the rare commodity — an enemy with fingerprints on the keyboard.

“Spill it,” he said to Oliver. “Who benefits from this?”

Oliver folded his arms like a man considering which catastrophe was the most entertaining. “It’s rarely about who benefits,” he said. “It’s about who can convince others they do.”

I laughed — it came out stranger than expected, the sound of a person who’d been told their biography was being ghostwritten. “How literary of you,” I said. “Is this the part where the villain monologues and everyone claps?”

“Try to be less theatrical,” Miriam suggested, but her smile said she loved the theatre. “We have a trace. The email got sent through a shell account. Not anonymous, exactly, but messy enough that it required a fixer.”

“A fixer?” I echoed. I liked the word the way some people like hot sauce: thrilling, a little dangerous, and likely to leave stains.

“Yes,” Oliver said. “One with resources. It’s not directly tied to the tabloids — not that we’re above paying them for artful spins — but it’s someone who wants to provoke you.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why pick now? Why pick the sequence with a toddler involved? Gold star for taste.”

Oliver shrugged with a shrug that was all performance. “Because right now, you are an interesting product. You’re unpredictable, which is a commodity in a market that hates surprises. And someone wants you to fumble.”

I felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the rooftop breeze. Whoever staged this wanted a reaction that would splinter something — maybe trust, maybe media strategy, maybe the careful lines between Damien’s private world and the public stage. Or maybe, less dramatically, they wanted to scare me into making a mistake.

Damien crossed his arms in a line I’d seen in boardrooms and interrogation rooms: shoulders squared, voice ready for verdict. “You’ll find whoever did this,” he told Oliver. “And they will be dealt with.”

Oliver grinned. “I love a man in suits who promises retribution.” He looked at Damien like a person who enjoys theatrical vows but also keeps a spreadsheet of likely outcomes. “But sometimes, Mr. Blake, the retribution is more profitable as rumor than as revenge.”

That sentence landed like a pebble dropped into a placid pond. Ripples everywhere.

I decided, as people do in novels and in hostage negotiation and in extremely bad relationships, to lean into the absurdities. “So,” I said to Oliver in a voice that was syrupy enough to clog any expectation of civility, “you find leaks, trace emails, and then appear on rooftops with dramatic lighting and men who dress like funeral directors. For a hobby?”

“For a living,” he corrected. “And sometimes for sport.”

“Sport?” I snorted. “If it’s sport, you’re playing by sociopath rules. You should at least have the manners to fasten a jersey.”

Oliver’s eyes flared with amusement. “You’re sharp,” he said. “You’ve always been sharp, Lexi.”

I felt that old thing again — the odd recognition that a person from a previous life could call me by a familiar cadence that didn’t belong to Eliza West on paper. He had called me Lexi — a nickname I used before this body memorized new signatures. That slip was either arrogance or mistake.

“Did you know her before?” Damien asked carefully. The possessiveness was tucked behind practicality; he wanted to know how deep the parallel histories ran.

Oliver smiled like someone unrolling a map. “Years ago. Briefly. She wrote something that annoyed me. I wrote something that annoyed her. Then we avoided each other because sometimes people with opinions create bad tabloids.”

“Those are our people, then,” I said. “All of us with sharp tongues and better PR teams.” The roast came out like a reflex. “We’re either going to be a podcast or a tragedy. Either way, someone will monetize it.”

Two lines of laughter broke the tension, one dark and one short. Humans are strangely elastic when it comes to humor in crisis.

Miriam took a breath and said, “We found the sending IP. It routed through a media consultant firm that’s been tied to competitor brands of Mr. Blake’s company. That’s all I can say until the legal team gets involved.”

“Competitor brands,” I repeated. Names began to assemble in my head like satellites: people who might benefit from destabilizing a billionaire’s domestic stability, companies who profit from chaos, rival PR shops hungry for a scoop. Practical motives, boring and banal under the glare of melodrama.

“That’s not the only thing,” Oliver added, then leaned in, private-eye conspirator whisper. “There’s someone in the reflection who shouldn’t be there.”

All eyes turned to the glass wall of the rooftop penthouse. The view reflected the city and, for a heartbeat, someone else — a face I recognized before my brain followed proper courtesy and did the memory-checks.

My stomach pitched. “No,” I said, though my voice sounded like I’d been asked to explain why a cake had been set on fire. “No. Oliver, who are you?”

He stepped forward, the man who had been carefully listed as both nuisance and invaluable. “I’m the person who’s not surprised to find ghosts,” he said. “And you, Ms. West, apparently have more diehard fans than you thought.”

“You mean enemies,” Damien murmured, not yet ready to call friends by such intimate names.

I felt the absurdity of our positions. We had come to a rooftop at midnight because of an anonymous taunt and found a man with a camera and a name from my past who had apparently been dusting off memories like antique silver. Rowan tugged on my sleeve and asked, with the solemnity toddlers possess, “Is this the friend you said we would meet?”

I smiled at him because children are anchors and also because the best defense is disarmingly petty. “Yes,” I said, and then, with the kind of sarcasm that reads well in glossy interviews, “—if by friend you mean a very dramatic person who likes to ruin people’s Mondays.”

The man in the reflection — the one that made my memory lurch — stepped forward so he was not just a ghost in glass. He looked older, a few more lines around the eyes, but the same mouth that used to say the things that cut and then apologized like it was a hobby.

He lifted a hand, not in threat but in recognition.

“Ava,” he said. The name fell like a stone. It hung there, heavy with the pretense I’d hoped to bury.

I felt the room tilt and knew in that sliver of time that this was not just about tabloids and PR anymore. Someone had reached into the old life and pulled a thread. If the thread unraveled, everything sewn over it could come apart.

The man — whose voice had been a rumor in my past — smiled at me like we shared a secret, and whispered, “You didn’t think someone would connect the name, did you?”