Page 52 of Hostile

“The files⁠—”

“I read them last night. All of it.” I pressed my fingers against the cab door handle. “There’s enough to build a case against Blair. There’s not enough yet to know how much Wyatt knew.”

“What do you want to do?”

I looked out the window at the city. At forty-two floors of my own building coming into view as the cab rounded the corner, the glass and steel of something I’d built from nothing, floor by floor, year by year, on a foundation of a certainty I was no longer certain of.

“Keep digging,” I said. “I want to know everything.”

“And the acquisition?”

The acquisition. Twenty-two percent of his company. Twelve percent of his most important project. Six years of architecture, running exactly on schedule, aimed at a target I’d spent a decade defining with absolute precision.

Did Wyatt know?

“It doesn’t stop,” I said. “Not until I know.”

The cab pulled up to my building. I paid, stepped out into the November cold, and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at the glass facade of the forty-two floors of everything I’d built.

The arrow in the velvet pouch.

My heart will always point to you.

Mine too, he’d said. It always has.

I went inside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MEGAN: PRESENT

The symposium ran long.

Not long in a bad way—the kind of long that meant the room was engaged, the questions kept coming, and thirty investors had walked in with checkbooks and walked out with conviction. I’d watched from the back of the room, my portfolio closed and my water untouched, as Wyatt held the room for two hours with the focused, unhurried authority of a man who had finally found what he was supposed to be doing.

I’d watched him and thought, against every wall I owned, He’s good at this.

Not inherited-good. Not acting-out-his-father’s-version—good. Genuinely, specifically, himself-good. The way he listened to questions before answering them. The way he said I don’t know yet twice, without flinching, instead of papering over the gaps with confidence he didn’t have. The way the room trusted him—not because of the name on the building, but because of the man standing in front of them.

I’d filed it under irrelevant and kept my face exactly where I put it.

The room cleared slowly. Investors lingered, shaking hands, their satisfied energy that of people who had come to be convinced and had been. I stayed near the back until the crowd thinned, then moved toward the exit with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had somewhere more important to be.

“Megan.”

I stopped.

He was behind me, his jacket draped over one arm, the room nearly empty around him. He looked as he always did after he’d been on for a long time—not tired, exactly, just returned to himself. Present in a way the performance required him not to be.

“Good presentation,” I said.

“You watched the whole thing.”

“I have a twelve percent stake in the project. I was doing my due diligence.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Stay for a drink.”

Don’t. “I have⁠—”