Page 44 of Hostile

“Wyatt.”

I looked at her.

“You caught that clause,” she said again. Not a question this time. Just a fact, stated plainly, with the directness of a woman who had decided honesty was the only currency worth trading in.

I held her gaze. “Your attorney would have caught it.”

“Maybe.” She studied me for a moment with those eyes that had always seen more than I wanted them to. “Why?”

It was a one-word question, carrying about ten years of weight behind it. Why did you do that? Why didn’t you let them box me in? Why are you helping me when I am methodically dismantling your company? Why, Wyatt, why? That was the question beneath every question she’d been asking since the gala, and I couldn’t fully answer it yet without telling her everything. I wasn’t going to do that in a conference room with Marcus twelve feet away in the corridor.

“Because it was the right call,” I said.

She looked at me for another long moment. Something passed across her expression—not the armor, but something beneath it, brief and unguarded, gone before I could read it clearly.

“That’s not an answer,” she said.

“It’s the one I have right now.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly at the echo—she’d said almost the same words to Charlie, I suspected, though I had no way to know. Or maybe she just recognized a deflection when she heard one, which was also possible. Megan had always been very good at spotting them.

She looked at me for one more moment. Then she pulled on her coat with the efficient, unhurried movements of a woman who had somewhere to be and had gotten what she came for, even if she wasn’t yet sure what it was.

“I’ll see you at the next board meeting,” she said.

“I’ll be there.”

She walked out without looking back.

I stayed in my seat after she left, alone in the conference room with the city outside the windows and the cleared table and the quiet of a room that had recently held a negotiation and had now released it.

Why.

Because I’d spent ten years carrying the weight of what I’d done—what I’d let happen, which was its own category of failure—and I wasn’t going to add to it. Because whatever she thought of me, whatever she’d built to take me down, and however completely she’d earned the right to build it, I was not going to be the person who let someone exploit her blind spot against her while I was in a position to stop it. Not again.

Not this time.

I’d once stood in a hallway and made the wrong choice. I’d been nineteen years old and terrified, and Blair had laid out the logic of it in that cold, precise way she had, and I’d believed her when she said it was the only way to protect Megan from something worse. I’d believed her because I’d needed to believe her, because the alternative—that I had simply failed, simply chosen wrong, simply been a coward at the exact moment it mattered most—was the thing I’d been living with ever since.

No, that’s not me.

Four words. The worst four words of my life, and I’d said them because Blair was standing six feet away, Megan was supposed to be in class, and I’d been trying to figure out how to fix something that was already broken in ways I didn’t yet fully understand. Then Megan walked through that door, and I watched her face, and I knew.

I knew there was nothing left to fix.

Then I let her run.

Ten years. And I was still in that hallway, still watching her go, still carrying the weight of a choice I’d made at nineteen, one I would spend the rest of my life wishing I could undo.

She was taking my company apart piece by piece, and I was going to let her, because she’d earned it. Every share she’d bought and every move she’d made had been built on the foundation of something I’d failed to prevent, and she deserved whatever reckoning it took to reach the other side of it.

What I was not going to do was let anyone else hurt her in the process.

I stood up, gathered my notes, and went to find Marcus. Outside, Manhattan moved through its Thursday, indifferent and relentless, as it always did.

I had work to do.

CHAPTER NINETEEN