MARRIED TO MY GREATEST ENEMY

Chapter Four: The Question I Shouldn't Ask

I couldn't sleep.

I laid in my apartment staring at the ceiling and turning the email over in my mind the way you turned a stone over to see what lived underneath.

By 3 AM I'd constructed twelve different explanations. By 4 AM I'd dismantled all of them.

Ask him why the Hartwell contract really fell through.

Hartwell had been our biggest deal of the year. Eight months of negotiation, a signed letter of intent, a launch timeline already in the company calendar.

Then Patrick Hartwell's assistant called on a Tuesday morning to say they were pursuing a different direction.

No specifics. No warning. Just gone. Two weeks later, Hartwell signed with a Knight Enterprises subsidiary.

I knew that. I'd filed it under brutal coincidence because the alternative that Adrian Knight had deliberately poached the deal meant something I wasn't ready to examine.

I am ready now.

The question was what to do about it.

Option one: confront him before the legal meeting. Blow up the agreement on day one, lose the only lifeline Calloway had, and hand Victor Hale exactly what he wanted.

Option two: say nothing. Sign the updated contract. Marry the man who might have helped engineer my downfall and spend eight months sleeping down the hall from him, knowing what he might have done.

Option three: find out the truth first.

I picked up my phone and called the one person I knew who could get information that wasn't meant to be gotten.

He answered on the third ring, which for 4 AM was impressive. "Sophia Calloway," said Noah Carter. "This is either very good news or catastrophic news, and given the hour, I know which one to bet on."

My brother. Estranged was the polite word. Complicated was the honest one. Noah had left the family business before our father died, a departure that had been loud and painful and had left wounds neither of us had properly dressed.

He now ran a boutique risk intelligence firm that operated in the gray space between corporate espionage and legitimate research. He knew things. He knew how to find things.

"I need a favor," I said.

A pause. "You need a favor at four in the morning."

"The Hartwell contract. I need to know why it really fell through. Specifically, I need to know if Knight Enterprises had any involvement in the deal collapsing."

Silence. Longer this time. "Sophia. What are you mixed up in?"

"Can you find out or not?"

"I can find out anything." No arrogance in it, just fact. "Give me twenty-four hours. And you're going to owe me a conversation about why you're investigating Adrian Knight."

"Fine."

"An actual conversation. Not a five-minute phone call where you tell me you're fine and hang up."

"Noah"

"Twenty-four hours," he said, and hung up.

The Knight Enterprises legal team operated out of a conference room that probably cost more per square foot than my entire office building.

Three lawyers, a paralegal, and a revised contract that ran to sixty-one pages. I brought my own lawyer Margaret Osei, sixty-two years old, reading glasses on a beaded chain, the kind of woman who'd made partners at three firms before deciding she preferred clients who actually listened to her.

Adrian was already there when I arrived. He stood at the window with coffee, spoke quietly to one of his lawyers, and glanced over when I entered. No greeting. A nod. I returned it with the same economy.

Professional, I told myself. This is a business arrangement. Treat it accordingly.

Margaret and the Knight legal team spent ninety minutes going through the document. I made four amendments. They pushed back on two. We settled on three. Through all of it, Adrian said very little; he watched the process with the particular attention of someone who'd already read every page three times and was now simply monitoring whether the outcome matched his expectations.

Once, I looked up and caught him watching me rather than the document.

He looked back at the lawyers without acknowledging it.

During a break, I got coffee from the credenza.

He appeared beside me with the quiet efficiency of a very large person who'd learned to move without announcing himself.

"You look tired," he said, low enough that it didn't carry to the table.

"I'm fine."

"That wasn't a concern. It was an observation. You'll need to look less exhausted for the announcement photographs."

I turned to look at him. Up close closer than we'd been yesterday there was something different about his face. A small scar near his left jaw I hadn't noticed before.

The faint shadow under his eyes that suggested he hadn't slept easily either.

"I'll be camera-ready," I said. "Don't worry about me."

Something moved across his expression. "I'm not worried about you, Ms. Calloway. I'm managing optics."

"Of course you are."

He poured his coffee. I watched his hands steady, unhurried. The hands of a man who'd never once betrayed himself through fidgeting in his life. I thought about Patrick Hartwell's assistant's voice on the phone. Pursuing a different direction.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to regardless."

"The Hartwell deal." I kept my voice neutral. Conversational. Like it was a minor point of curiosity rather than the thing that had kept me awake until dawn. "They were set to sign with us. Eight months of negotiation.

Then they walked, and two weeks later they were working with one of your subsidiaries. I've always wondered about the timing."

He was very still.

Not the calculated stillness from yesterday. This was different from the stillness of a man who'd just stepped onto ground he'd expected but hadn't been sure when he'd encounter.

"What exactly are you asking me?" he said.

"I'm asking if Knight Enterprises approached Hartwell before or after they pulled out of their deal with Calloway."

He set his coffee cup down. Turned to face me fully. His eyes were doing the thing I was starting to recognize holding more than his face admitted, layered and unreadable and frustrating.

"After," he said.

"You're certain."

"I'm certain of everything I do, Ms. Calloway."

"That's not actually an answer."

"It's the only answer you're getting in a conference room full of lawyers." He held my gaze. "If you want the full answer, ask me tonight. Dinner. My driver will pick you up at seven."

I stared at him. "We're not, this isn't a relationship. We're not doing dinner."

"We're doing a press announcement in nine days that requires us to convincingly portray two people who chose each other." His voice was even. Reasonable. Infuriating. "We need to be able to occupy the same room without looking like we're calculating escape routes. Dinner is practice."

Margaret appeared at my elbow. "They've accepted the third amendment. We're ready to finalize."

I looked at Adrian for one more second.

"Seven," I said.

The contract was signed at 12:43 PM.

I was engaged to Adrian Knight.

My phone rang as I stepped into the elevator Noah, which was fast even for him. "That was quick," I said.

"I didn't need twenty-four hours." His voice was different from this morning. Tighter. "Sophia, I need you to listen to me carefully. The Hartwell contract I found on the paper trail."

My stomach dropped. "And?"

"Knight Enterprises didn't kill it." A pause that lasted exactly long enough to rearrange everything. "Someone did, but it wasn't Adrian Knight." Another pause. "The shell company that made the call to Hartwell, the one that suggested they'd be better served elsewhere, traces back to a holding group. It took me four layers to get through the structure."

"Whose holding group?"

Static. Or maybe just silence.

"Noah."

"It's yours, Sophia," he said quietly. "The shell company is registered to a subsidiary of Calloway and Co. Someone inside your company killed the Hartwell deal. Someone on your team has been working against you from the inside."

The elevator doors opened to the lobby.

I didn't move.

"That's not possible," I said. But even as I said it, I thought about six months of dominoes. I thought about deals that should have held, doors that closed too cleanly, a bank manager who wouldn't meet my eyes.

I thought about the only people who had access to the kind of information that would make all of that possible.

"I'm sending you the documents," Noah said. "Sophia whoever it is, they've been doing this for at least a year. You have a traitor. And they're still in your building."

Someone inside Calloway had been destroying it from within.

Which meant every person I'd trusted, every person I'd fought alongside for four years

One of them had been the knife in my back all along.