In His Bed

Chapter 18: The Deadline

Aria

The forty-eight hours had technically expired three days ago, swallowed up by the gala fallout and the board call and Stan's father, and it wasn't until Stan's phone buzzed at ten that night, the same unknown number lighting up the screen, that either of us remembered the clock had ever stopped.

You didn't pay. You went public instead. Clever. But going public doesn't make the rest of what I have disappear. Check your email.

Stan's face went pale in a way I'd never seen before, not even during the board call, and he opened his laptop with hands that weren't quite steady.

The email contained three more photos, all from the same gala, all more damning than the first. Not of us, this time. Of Stan's father, seated at a private table with two men neither of us recognized, deep in conversation, documents spread between them that even in the grainy resolution looked unmistakably like contracts.

"Who are they," I asked.

"I don't know." Stan zoomed in, jaw tightening with each passing second. "But I know that table. That's the private room reserved for the biggest donors. My father doesn't take meetings like that unless there's real money on the table."

Beneath the photos, a new message.

Your father's private dealings the night of the gala. Interesting company he keeps. I wonder what Whitfield's legal team would think of a competing bid quietly forming behind their backs, using inside knowledge from your own board. Pay the original amount, or this goes to Whitfield directly, and your acquisition dies before it ever closes.

"This isn't about us anymore," I said slowly, the pieces rearranging themselves in my head. "This was never really about us. We were just the easiest leverage to start with."

"It's about the acquisition." Stan's voice had gone hard, focused in the specific way it did when a real threat replaced a personal one. "Someone's trying to sabotage the Whitfield deal, and the gala photo was just the opening move to make sure we'd take the threat seriously."

"Which brings us back to who benefits if the deal collapses."

"Competitors. Someone on the board who never wanted this acquisition in the first place." Something shifted behind his eyes, cold and precise. "Or someone close enough to my father to know about a private meeting nobody else was supposed to see."

The unspoken name sat between us again, heavier this time.

"Yvette manages your father's calendar too, doesn't she," I said quietly. "Not just yours."

"Sometimes. When their schedules overlap." Stan's jaw tightened further. "She'd have known about that meeting. She'd have had access to exactly this kind of information."

"Or someone using her access without her knowledge."

"Or that." He didn't sound convinced either way, and neither, honestly, did I.

We called Whitfield's legal team first thing the next morning, before the blackmailer's threat could beat us to it, and watched Stan's carefully built composure hold through an hour of difficult, necessary honesty about a threat neither of us fully understood yet.

"Better they hear it from us," Stan said afterward, exhausted in a way that went beyond simple tiredness. "Better we control that much, at least."

"How did they take it?"

"About as well as you'd expect. Cautiously. They're not walking away yet, but they want answers, and if we can't produce a source for this blackmail soon, that patience isn't going to last."

"Then we need to move faster."

"I know." He looked at me, something steady and resolved, settling into his expression despite the exhaustion underneath it. "Which means it's time to talk to Yvette directly. Not dance around it anymore. Ask her outright."

"And if she's involved?"

"Then I need to know that today, not after the deal collapses and my father's next scandal takes the whole company down with it." Something hardened in his voice, the specific resolve of a man finally done being cautious. "I've spent six years trusting her with everything. I think I owe both of us the truth, whatever it turns out to be."