2026-03-23 23:09:35
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Chapter 96
Chapter 96"I said stop *looking* at me."Drake's voice had gone up a register — not quite a shout, but close enough that the corridor felt smaller around it. His hand came forward again, shoulder leading, the same shove he'd tried thirty seconds ago.This time Ethan moved.Not back — sideways, barely, just enough to let Drake's momentum carry him into empty air, and then a single firm push that redirected all of it downward. Drake went down hard, the floor making the kind of argument that floors always win, and sat there for a stunned moment with his hands flat against the carpet and his sense of occasion completely destroyed.Ethan looked down at him."Rough afternoon, Mr. Hastings?" He kept his voice light — almost conversational, the tone of a man making pleasant small talk. "I caught the news on the way up here, actually. Something about you and Miss Wilson." He tilted his head slightly. "Publicly. In a restaurant." A pause. "How did that happen, exactly?"Drake looked up at him.
Chapter 95
Chapter 95Drake Hastings had always operated on the assumption that the size of his name was enough to fill whatever room he walked into.He was currently discovering the limits of that assumption in real time."Let me be very clear about something." He pulled himself up to full height, the way people do when they want their posture to do the arguing for them. "The only reason you're standing in this building as a partner — the only reason Victoria Chen looked at you twice — is because of me. My name. My connections. My decision to bring you into this world." He gestured between himself and Sarah with the confident sweep of someone laying out facts rather than opinions. "I made you. And what I make, I can unmake. So I'd think very carefully before you say another word to me.""Drake." Sarah's voice came out flat and clean, with none of the careful management she used to wrap around his name. "You are not B Corporation's partner. I am. Stop walking around this building acting like you
Chapter 94
Chapter 94The message from Victoria had been waiting on her phone when she got home the previous night, nestled between a string of notifications she'd ignored and one from Simon Stone she'd checked four times without getting a reply.*Come in tomorrow morning. We have things to review.*Sarah had set her alarm thirty minutes earlier than usual.---She dressed with intention — not overdressed, not trying too hard, but put-together in the way that communicated she belonged wherever she arrived. Because she did now. That was the thing people like Drake Hastings had never understood about her — they thought the access they provided was the point, that the doors they opened were what made her. They never considered that the person walking through those doors might have been the asset all along.She drove to B Corporation with the morning light doing flattering things through the windshield and her mind already running ahead to the meeting.Simon Stone's read receipts sat in the back of
Chapter 93
Chapter 93The restaurant was the kind of place that managed to be both intimate and visible at once — dim enough for private conversation, well-trafficked enough that being seen here meant something. Sarah had chosen it deliberately, which was the only way Sarah Wilson chose anything.Her car pulled into the lot a few minutes past the time she'd given Drake. Not late enough to be rude. Late enough to be intentional.She checked her reflection in the visor mirror — not from vanity, or not only from vanity, but the way an athlete checks their form before a performance. Everything in place. Expression composed into something that read as neutral and slightly tired, the look of a woman carrying something she hadn't yet decided to put down.She got out of the car and walked in.Drake was already at the table. Of course he was — Drake Hastings was always early, always positioned, always the one who arrived first and let other people come to him. He stood when he saw her, the automatic cour
Chapter 92
Chapter 92Ethan sat in the parked car and read the messages twice.The first time to absorb the content. The second time to read between it.Victoria had forwarded everything exactly as received — no edits, no commentary, just the raw thread of what the Stone family had put in writing. He scrolled slowly, letting each line land with its full weight before moving to the next.The demand was clear enough. The new acquisition — the development Victoria had finalized earlier that week, the one that had made the magazine cover, the one that had apparently been the specific irritant that pushed whoever was pulling the Stone family's strings from impatience into action — was to be transferred. Not negotiated. Not discussed. Transferred, on their timeline, in the manner they specified. A series of asset movements, structured to look administrative from the outside and designed to quietly hollow out what Victoria had built before she'd even had the chance to consolidate it.The compliance win
Chapter 91
Chapter 91The car park had mostly emptied by the time Sarah found him.Simon Stone was leaning against the side of his car with the particular stillness of a man whose body had stopped moving but whose mind hadn't. His arms were crossed loosely, his gaze somewhere out past the concrete pillars and the scattered vehicles, fixed on nothing specific. He didn't look troubled, exactly. He looked like a man running calculations that the rest of the world wasn't privy to.Sarah had seen that look before. She'd decided, somewhere along the way, that it made him more attractive rather than less.She crossed the garage toward him, heels clicking a soft rhythm against the floor, and arranged her expression into something warm and open — the version of herself she'd learned to lead with when she wanted something. She'd had time to recover from the corridor. To recalibrate. The embarrassment of the moment with Ethan had already been folded away into a corner of her mind she didn't intend to visit
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