Page 32 of Secret Baby Daddy

Merrick crest.

A photo that doesn’t quite match the face beneath us, but close enough to have cleared a checkpoint.

A contractor’s name I don’t recognize and a clearance level I do.

“Level three access,” Calder says quietly, for me alone. “That gets him into service corridors, back stairwells, half the property’s internal network closets.”

“So he’s not press. He’s not an activist with a grievance and a poster board.”

“No.” His expression has gone somewhere flat and cold I haven’t seen from him before, not even over the footage. “This isn’t a narrative problem anymore, Piper. Someone handed this man a real badge, and he used it to get within twenty feet of Sloane Merrick in a room full of cameras.”

I look down at the crest I have spent three days defending to the entire eastern seaboard’s media, and a coldness settles under my ribs that has nothing to do with the floor.

“Then we don’t just have a leak,” I say slowly. “We have someone inside.”

Calder meets my eyes, and for one unguarded second the wall between his job and mine simply isn’t there.

“We have someone inside,” he agrees. “Which means the next time they try it isn’t going to come with a camera crew standing ten feet away to slow him down.”

Around us, my carefully engineered gala continues to fall apart in real time: a socialite recording the aftermath on her phone, a board member demanding to know why security let this happen, an event planner I hired personally crying into her phone, Sloane being walked out a side door I did not authorize and cannot, tonight, find it in myself to object to.

I should be composing the statement already.

I should be three drafts deep.

Instead I am still crouched on marble in a ruined blazer, close enough to Calder to feel the tension still coiled through his shoulders, wondering exactly when I stopped being able to tell the difference between being handled and being protected.

Wren finds me twenty minutes later, phone already in hand, voice pitched low against the noise still rippling through the ballroom.

“Three networks have the tackle on video. It’s already framed as a security failure, not an attack.”

“Let it run that way for now.”

I watch Calder across the room, giving low, clipped instructions to a man twice his size, and the set of his shoulders tells me he has already moved three steps past tonight and is standing somewhere tomorrow, calculating who else might be carrying a badge that shouldn’t work.

“I’ll build the real version once we know who handed out the keys.”

For once, that isn’t a lie I’m telling to buy time.

I watch him a moment longer than the job requires and think that I have spent a year building a narrative about this man that the last four hours have quietly demolished.

8

DOMINIC

Every extraction plan I have ever built assumes the client will cooperate.

I have never once built one that assumed the client’s publicist would try to negotiate the terms of her own kidnapping.

Piper Vale is currently costing me four minutes I do not have to spare, and for reasons I cannot yet justify on paper, I am letting her.

“We are not disappearing her.”

She stands in the middle of Cordelia’s study at seven the next morning, arms crossed, blazer replaced by a plainer jacket that still manages to look like armor.

“You cannot pull the future CEO of a public company off the map four hours after a man with a fake badge tried to grab her at a gala. Do you understand what that looks like?”

“I understand what a second attempt looks like.”