A Wrong Love

THE BETRAYAL RUMOR

Chapter 8

They broke apart fast, Damian already moving between Selena and the sound, flashlight swinging toward the far end of the warehouse where a side door stood open that neither of them had unlocked. Whoever had been there was already gone, the door still swinging faintly on its hinge, footsteps fading somewhere out in the alley beyond.

"We need to go," Damian said, grabbing the ledger and pulling her toward the exit. "Now."

They made it out safely, adrenaline still hammering through both of them, the kiss and the fear tangled together into something neither of them had the space to examine yet. But the damage, they'd learn by morning, had already been done somewhere else entirely.

A gossip blog broke the story first, grainy long lens photos of the two of them standing close in the warehouse doorway the night before, captioned in bold red letters: Merger or Motive? Cross Heiress Cozies Up To The Man Who Ruined Her Father.

Selena's phone hadn't stopped buzzing since seven in the morning. Board members. Reporters. An old family friend leaving a voicemail demanding to know if she'd lost her mind, if she'd forgotten who Damian Vale's father was and what he'd done to hers.

Worse than the photos, a rumor had already started spreading through Cross Textiles' own offices by the time she walked in, quiet and vicious, claiming Selena had been secretly negotiating to sell the company to Vale Industries long before the merger clause ever activated, that the automatic clause had simply been convenient cover for a betrayal she'd already been planning.

"I never said that," she told her assistant, hands shaking around a cup of coffee she couldn't bring herself to drink. "I would never sell my father's company out from under the people who kept it running."

"I believe you," her assistant said carefully, not quite meeting her eyes. "But half the floor doesn't. Someone's been feeding this story for days, Selena, planting it in pieces so it would already feel true by the time it surfaced."

Selena stared at the photo of herself and Damian on her phone screen, caught mid-confession in warehouse light, and felt the pieces click into place with cold, sickening clarity. This wasn't about embarrassing her. Reyes, if it was Reyes, didn't care who she kissed.

He wanted her isolated. Cut off from her own company's trust, cut off from allies, cut off from anyone who might believe her over the story he'd spent days quietly constructing.

Damian showed up at her office that evening, ignoring the security guard's half hearted protest, finding her alone at a desk buried under resignation threats and demands for an emergency board meeting.

"You didn't leak the photo," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Neither did you," she said. "I already checked. Whoever's doing this has had access inside both our companies for a very long time."

He sat across from her, exhaustion carved into every line of his face. "Reyes isn't just protecting a secret anymore. He's actively working to separate us, professionally and personally, before we get close enough to prove anything against him."

"Then we stop giving him easy targets," Selena said, closing her laptop with a decisiveness she didn't fully feel. "No more warehouse visits alone. No more meetings without a paper trail. If he wants to isolate us, we make ourselves harder to isolate. We go louder, not quieter."

Damian studied her for a long moment, something like admiration breaking through the exhaustion in his expression. "You really aren't going to let him win this."

"My father spent the last years of his life quietly building a case against this man instead of running from him," Selena said. "I'm not about to fall apart over a bad photo and an ugly rumor. Reyes wanted to scare us back into hating each other. He's about to learn that's not going to work.