A Wrong Love

THE TRAP

chapter 10

Morning brought clarity neither of them had expected the night before. Lying awake beside Damian in the quiet brownstone, Selena finally put words to the thought that had been circling since the ledger.

"Reyes," she said. "He's the common thread through everything. He advised both companies. He'd have known about Halcyon from the inside. He'd have known exactly which levers to pull to keep our fathers apart, and exactly which ones to pull now to keep us apart too."

Damian sat up, already reaching for his phone. "I've trusted that man with everything since my father died. Estate decisions, board appointments, half of Vale Industries' private financial strategy. If it's him, he's had a front row seat to every move we've made."

"Then we can't move against him directly," Selena said. "Not without proof he can't explain away. Someone that embedded would bury it and walk away clean."

They spent the morning building something careful instead, a controlled leak, planted quietly through two people they trusted absolutely, claiming the missing partnership file had been recovered and was being transferred to a private vault that weekend for safekeeping ahead of the merger's finalization.

It worked exactly as they'd hoped. And exactly as they'd feared.

Saturday night, a break in was reported at the vault location, security responding within minutes, camera footage this time left conspicuously intact. Selena and Damian watched it together in the dim light of his office, both of them silent as the footage rolled.

A driver, Reyes's driver, unmistakable even through the grainy resolution, forcing the vault's outer lock with practiced efficiency.

"We have him," Selena breathed, something fierce and vindicated rising in her chest for the first time in days.

"We have his driver," Damian corrected quietly. "Reyes is too careful to ever let something touch him directly. He'll claim the man acted alone, or was never actually employed by him at all, or a dozen other explanations that'll hold up just long enough for him to disappear the evidence and walk."

Selena's phone buzzed on the desk between them. An unknown number, the same one from before.

A single new message glowed on the screen.

Clever. But you've just told me how close you are. That makes you both a problem I need to solve tonight.

The color drained from Damian's face as he read it over her shoulder. "He knows we set the trap. Selena, if he thinks we're close enough to actually bring him down, he's not going to wait around and see if we succeed."

"Then we don't give him the chance to plan," Selena said, standing fast, pulse hammering. "We go public with everything we have right now, tonight, before he has time to react."

"It's not enough yet. A driver breaking into an empty vault proves nothing without the rest of the evidence connecting it back to him."

"Then what do we do?"

Damian was already reaching for his coat, jaw set in the same hard line she'd seen the day he first mentioned Reyes's name. "We survive the night. And then tomorrow, we finish what our fathers started, whatever it costs us."

Outside, a car engine started in the parking structure below, headlights sweeping once across the window before the vehicle pulled slowly toward the exit ramp, patient, unhurried, in absolutely no rush at all.