The Billionaire They Never Saw Coming

Chapter 6

"Nothing," Ethan said. "I'll think of something."

It wasn't nothing. It was a whole, honest truth, sitting warm and round against his tongue, waiting to be spat out, but he had swallowed it all the same, the same way he had swallowed it when he stood at his mother's kitchen table, and the same way he had swallowed it across his coffee cup from Isabella's father, the roomful of spectators all too familiar. Some habits didn't care how much they cost you. They just kept working.

Isabella regarded him a second too long, as if she heard the slippage, the shift between everything he said and what he needed unspoken, but a board vote in three days did not account for the time it took to repair the damage.

She squeezed her arm, distracted, already turning towards the thing in her day awaiting her decision, and Ethan watched her go and hated how easy it would be if he only let it.

He went home and placed yet another call.

"Marcus. I need Whitlock."

A pause on the line, the length of which suggested he'd gone searching for a sleeping man.

"Whitlock hasn't heard from you in two years."

"He owes me a favor from four years prior."

"He owes Aurelius a favor. He doesn't know your name's attached to Aurelius."

"Good. Keep it that way." Ethan was already rifling through a legal pad, writing down numbers in the event it became necessary to explain his call. "I want an amicus brief filed with the SEC on Veyron's behalf. Independent counsel, no visible connection to the company. He argues the misrepresentation claim doesn't meet the threshold to freeze Veyron in the first place. If he's good, you save weeks of litigation on top of the board vote."

"That's an expensive favor to call in quietly."

"I'm not interested in loud."

Marcus exhaled, the sound of a man who'd stopped being surprised by what Ethan could move and had never quite gotten used to how carefully he moved it.

"I'll call him tonight. He won't ask who's asking. He never does."

"That's why I use him."

Whitlock filed by Friday morning, dry, procedural, the sort of prose that suggested a defense lawyer in the middle of his shift and not the middle of a battle.

The SEC responded in thirty-six hours- an extraordinarily expedited timeline for a body prone to dragging heels for every major player in history.

They lifted the freeze with restrictions attached, but those were easily navigable. A freeze through the board vote would not have been.

Isabella called the second she'd heard.

"Someone filed an amicus brief," she said, no greeting, breathless in a manner unfamiliar in her voice as any.

"Independent counsel." She sounded as stunned as if she'd seen God smile. "I don't even know who retained him. The SEC lifted the freeze, Ethan. We have three days back I thought were ours."

"That's good news."

"It's more than good news. It's" She stopped herself, recalibration clicking in, the way it always did when something seemed a little too good to have happened to her. "It's strange. No one spends money on something that doesn't belong to them. Whoever retained him wanted this particular outcome badly enough to fund it and walk away unnoticed."

"You're assuming someone wanted this outcome."

"Maybe someone just wanted to see Blackridge fail."

"Maybe." She sounded unconvinced. "Second time. You know. First Meridian. Now this. Someone I'm always discovering just when I need them, and none of them have names I can find."

"Lucky, I guess."

"You don't believe in luck. You told me that yourself, at the mixer. Practically your first words in conversation with me."

Her voice dropped lower, the inflection she used in the conference room when she circled numbers that defied logic. "Neither do I. Not if I'm being perfectly honest."

He didn't answer that, because there wasn't a version of an answer that wouldn't have started unraveling something he wasn't ready to lose, and after a moment she let the silence stand instead of pushing into it, though he could hear, even over the phone, that she hadn't stopped turning it over.

She turned up at his apartment two nights later, unannounced, a bottle of wine in one hand as an excuse for the visit rather than a reason.

He let her in.

She wandered the room slowly, taking in the bare apartment, the furniture, the appliances, the complete dearth of anything that might be said to have belonged to a man worth investigation.

"This is a very ordinary apartment," she said.

"That's generally what people call apartments that are ordinary."

"I mean, it's suspiciously ordinary. As if it's a stage set for an ordinary life."

She ran a thumb along the edge of his bookshelf, not really reading books as she did so, watching him instead in the reflection off a framed photograph.

"You solved Kessler in eleven minutes. You made an SEC freeze appear and disappear with nothing but a lawyer from obscurity. You know things about corporate finance that people who dedicated ten years to learning it don't know about. And you live here." She gestured at the room, small and unremarkable. "None of it adds up."

"Maybe I'm good at my job and bad at spending."

"No one is that good at lying to themselves about their wealth. You'd have to want it that badly to keep lying to yourself."

She turned to face him, arms crossed. No accusation. No disappointment, not really. Not the sort that would have mattered.

"I don't mean to keep asking what you won't tell me. I know there are rules you place on yourself. I understand why I should respect them. But I notice things, Ethan. That's practically a survival mechanism at this point. And I don't think the things that matter about you add up to anything I can understand."

"Does it need to add up?"

"It would be easier," she said, softer now, almost like the confession of it belonged to him. "I think I know where you're from, and then you do something entirely unrecognizable, and I have to learn it all over again."

Careful

went between them in the silence. He had already spent weeks telling himself he was not allowing this to become something that could hurt her. It had sat in his body too long to be anything else at this point.

"I'm not hiding information that would hurt you," he said at last.

True, in the way that truths are generally true when you refuse to acknowledge the things that make them complex.

"That's not the same as telling me you don't have reasons to hide things."

"No," he admitted. "It isn't."

She studied him for a moment then let it drop, setting the bottle of wine down on his counter as a truce neither of them quite believed in.

Someday you're going to run out of ways to not answer that question.

"I know."

"I'm not going to stop asking."

"I know."

She didn't stick around for long, but her goodbye lingered long enough that the silence afterward reminded him of the space between the breaths.

His phone buzzed on the counter behind him.

Marcus, later than usual, the kind of hour that only ever meant something had gone wrong.

Whitlock's office was broken into tonight. Nothing taken but his case files. Someone wanted to know who retained him for the Veyron brief.