IN HIS DEFENSE

CHAPTER TWO: KEEP YOUR TRAP SHUT

I had not seen Ronan Vale once over the entire weekend.

Not even a glimpse of him or even his shadow. For two full days, I had stayed in the east compartment of his house like a very well-accommodated ghost, eating meals that appeared outside my door like I was in a five-star hotel and telling myself that the proximity thing was going fine and would actually kick in any moment now.

The house was simply very large.

That was the best explanation, and I was choosing it, because the alternative—that a man whose board had specifically requested my expertise was now avoiding me—was not a dynamic I had the emotional strength to process before my morning even started.

His office was on the west side of the building, which I had located on Saturday using a combination of the floor plan his assistant had emailed me and the sharp reasoning of someone who had spent forty-eight hours identifying every room that wasn't it. I had prepared over the weekend. Thoroughly. I had a strategy document, a headline analysis, a communications plan spread across eleven slides that I was somehow quite proud of, and a talking points sheet that covered every likely objection with clear, evidence-based responses.

I knocked at five minutes to nine.

Nobody answered.

I knocked again.

Nobody answered.

I opened the door.

He was already at his desk, reviewing something. He did not look up when I came in, he did not look up when I closed the door behind me, or when I walked further into the room, or when I set my bag down and stood in the spot where a reasonable person might expect to be acknowledged.

I waited for him to acknowledge my presence but he didn't.

"Good morning," I said finally.

No response.

I set my documents on the table in front of the chair across from his desk—the chair I had once again not been invited to sit on and was going to sit on regardless, because I had made peace with that particular battle on Saturday. I sat down and opened my folder.

"I hope the weekend was good," I tried again, but there was still no response.

He turned a page on the document he was reviewing like he was still the only one present in the office.

"I've spent the last two days putting together our first strategy," I said, sliding into my professional voice the way you slid into a coat. "I want to walk you through the current headline situation first, because I think it's important to understand what we're working with before we talk about what we're building."

I opened the first page of the analysis that I made.

"The core problem isn't the scandal itself," I started speaking again, my gaze focused on him. "Scandals have a lifespan. They peak, they plateau, they fade—unless something keeps feeding them. In your case, the narrative has staying power because your opposition has been consistently, strategically visible since the collapse. Every time public attention starts to drift, there's a new interview, a new statement, something that recentres him as the victim and you as the—"

"Miss Quinn." He called out gently without looking up.

"Instead of wasting the next hour of both our mornings," he said, with the tone of someone reading aloud from a document they found deeply tedious, "you could simply keep your trap shut, sit in that chair until the time you've scheduled has elapsed, and then scurry back to wherever it is you came from."

My heart dropped as the room went quiet, quiet enough that a pin drop would sound like a loud bang.

I sat with that for a moment, counted to three internally since my therapist said it was useful and could help me calm down in situations like this. It didn't.

I was about to do something that was, by any professional metric, incredibly stupid and no amount of internal counting and breathing in and out could stop me.

I stood up.

My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to jump out of my ribcage as I walked around the side of the desk—not quickly, because confidence was partly a performance and the performance required a certain pace—and picked up the document he was reviewing directly from under his hands.

He went very still.

I held the document at my side and waited until he had no choice but to look at me. Up close, the indifference was harder to read. There was something underneath it that I couldn't name yet and was not going to think about at this specific moment because my pulse was doing something genuinely alarming and I needed every available resource directed at my voice staying level.

"I don't want to be here," I said, "any more than you want me here. I want to be very clear about that, because I think you've been operating under the impression that I find this enjoyable."

He said nothing, he was looking at me now though, that was a new development.

"Here is what I know," I continued. "You didn't ask for this. Fine. I didn't ask to spend my weekend in the east compartment of a house that has more square footage than my entire postcode." I kept my voice calm and level, completely at odds with the way my heart was currently staging a one-organ protest against everything I was doing. "But we are both here, and the people who arranged that are not going to un-arrange it just because we're unpleasant to each other."

I set his document back on the desk.

"So here is my suggestion," I said, looking straight into his eyes. "You cooperate, all I ask for is an hour a day and I will spend the rest of the time entirely out of your way. You give me what I need, I do what I was hired to do, and in a week—maybe less, if you're actually as efficient as your reputation suggests—I will be back where I came from and you will never have to see me again."

I held his gaze for even longer.

His expression had not changed, exactly. But something in it had shifted. He was looking at me with the focused, unreadable attention of someone recalculating something they thought they had already solved then he stood up slowly and walked towards me.

My pulse was off the roof at this point. We were closer than I had planned for, which was a logistical oversight I was now very aware of and could do absolutely nothing about.

He looked at me for a long moment and I felt the weight of his intense gaze.

Then—

"Alright," Ronan Vale said quietly. "What do I have to do."