IN HIS DEFENSE

CHAPTER THREE: OFF SCRIPT

“Cooperate.”

"Cooperate," he repeated like it was in a language he had chosen never to speak.

"That's the whole job," I continued. "On your end, you cooperate, you follow the strategy, you do what I advise when I advise it. That's it."

He looked at me for a moment. "That's it."

"That's it."

The silence that followed was quite deep. I really couldn’t tell if it was reassuring or suspicious.

"Is that all?" he asked, his eyebrows raising slightly.

"Well." I picked up my folder and shifted my gaze back to him. "There's also the matter of your schedule. Your public appearances, your statements, your media presence going forward—I'll need full visibility into your calendar, your commitments, anything that puts you in front of a camera or a journalist. I'll need access to your communications team. And I'll need—"

"That's a lot." He interrupted.

"No," I said. "It's not."

He had already moved to the other side of the desk. He picked up his jacket from the back of his chair like he was about to leave before I had walked in and had simply paused the motion rather than abandoned it. "You can fill me in on the rest on the way."

I blinked rapidly. "On the way where?"

"The office." He checked his watch without looking at me. "I have a press meeting in forty minutes."

I stared at the back of his head. "I'm sorry—a press meeting."

"Yes, an emergency press meeting." He replied, still looking at his watch.

"An emergency press meeting." I repeated like it was supposed to change anything. "And I'm only finding out now."

"I'm telling you about it currently, yes."

"I asked your assistant to keep me informed of your schedule." The sentence came out with a smile attached to it that had nothing to do with how I felt. "I was quite specific about that. Any public appearance, any media interaction, any—"

"Are you coming or not?" He asked with a finality that suggested that he was done with this segment of the conversation.

I grabbed my bag and we both exited his office.

*******

I was placed in a separate car.

He had been very clear about this. Not rude, precisely—just absolute.

I sat in the back of a vehicle that was extremely comfortable, and thought about the fact that we were in a motorcade of two for a press meeting I had learned about eleven minutes ago, en route to an office I had not yet visited, for a client who had just spent an entire weekend pretending I was theoretical.

The proximity strategy was going beautifully.

I pulled out my phone and opened my notes. Press meeting—emergency— what did that mean for positioning? Had something happened in the press overnight? Had Victor Hale said something? I hadn't seen any alerts, but I had also spent the morning preparing for my meeting with Ronan, so my media monitoring had admittedly lapsed.

We got to the office finally, after a few minutes. It was the kind that made a statement before you'd passed the lobby.His staff moved through the corridors like they had learned to calibrate their pace to his.

I was keeping up, I was keeping up very well, actually.

A woman in a grey suit approached with a tablet and started talking to him.

He stopped outside a set of double doors and through the glass panel I could see a room filled with journalists—cameras set up, recorders out, the collective energy of the press when they had been told something significant was coming and were deciding in advance how to frame it.

He turned to the woman with the tablet. "This is Elara Quinn." He paused, his eyes completely void of warmth. "My new secretary."

I looked at him in an attempt to protest since I wasn't actually his secretary, but he had already turned away.

Reputation Management Consultant, that was my actual title, the title on my actual contract, the title I had spent four years building an actual career under, not something as flimsy as a secretary.

The meeting had barely settled before it was almost his turn. I could feel the shift in the room—journalists straightening, cameras adjusting, they all carried the alertness of people who had come for something and could sense it arriving.

I leaned across the aisle and got the attention of the man I had identified as his communications lead.

"The display screen," I said quietly. "His remarks—I've prepared everything he's going to say. Can your team load them before he takes the podium?"

He blinked, looked at Ronan then back at me.

"Now, please," I said pleasantly.

He loaded them.

I looked at the screen from my seat and read it over once, quickly, in my head.

“I want to begin by acknowledging the impact of recent events—on my former partner, on those connected to our professional relationship, and on the public trust I have a responsibility to honour. The past months have been difficult for everyone involved. I recognise the part I played in that difficulty, and I want to be clear that—”

Ronan stepped up to the podium.

He looked out at the room with the stillness of someone who had never once needed a script and had been tolerating the existence of this one as a courtesy to people whose opinions he had not requested.

He glanced at the screen and something in his jaw shifted.

Not just his jaw, his eyes. Something was deeply wrong, something was—

He looked at the screen one more time and scoffed

"Victor Hale," he said, into the microphone, into the cameras, into the countless recording devices currently pointed at his face, "is a liar."

The room went completely silent.

My heart dropped and I stopped breathing.

"Everything that has befallen him," Ronan continued, with the clarity of a man who had thought about this for a very long time and was now saying it in front of a live press pool, "he deserved. Every consequence. Every rupture. Every piece of it." He paused. "He built his victimhood the same way he built everything else—on a foundation he stole from someone else and set on fire when he was done with it."

My hands were on my knees, I could literally feel them shaking. This wasn't the script, this wasn't—

The room had erupted and murmurs rippled through the air. Journalists were already typing.

Thirty seconds.

That was all it took.

The notifications started arriving on my phone like the opening bars of a song you recognised immediately and deeply did not want to hear.

I looked down at the screen.

One headline, then another, then four more before I could finish reading the first.

The one that loaded at the top, bold and immediate and already being shared faster than anything I had seen in four years of doing this job, read:

VALE UNLEASHED: BILLIONAIRE CALLS HALE A THIEF IN LIVE PRESS STATEMENT — "HE DESERVED EVERYTHING"

And beneath it, already climbing:

RONAN VALE GOES ROGUE: UNPROMPTED ATTACK ON FORMER PARTNER RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT MENTAL FITNESS FOR BUSINESS

I sat in my chair in the third row.

My talking points were still on the screen right in front of him.

“I recognise the part I played in that difficulty.”

I looked at them, then at him, then at the room that was now fully, loudly, irretrievably erupting around me.

I put my phone face down on my knee, pressed both hands flat against it to stop the shaking.