Page 18 of Hostile

I looked at him for a long moment. At his earnestness, which had been the most disarming thing about him from the beginning—this man who had been handed every conceivable advantage and had somehow remained in possession of a sincerity so genuine it almost made me angry, because sincerity that real had no business existing under a name like Aldridge.

“She was talking to Billy Brown,” I said. “Before that. They seemed to know each other.”

Something shifted across his expression. Too fast to read clearly. “They’ve crossed paths. Through me.” His jaw shifted slightly. “Billy’s—” He stopped. “He’s complicated.”

“Most people are.”

“Not the way Billy is.” He said it quietly, more to himself than to me, and then seemed to set it aside. “Are you ready to leave? I’m ready to go.”

I looked at him for another moment, at the detail I’d filed—Blair and Billy Brown, a word exchanged, eyes averted—and at the man beside me who’d come back to the kitchen to find me rather than stay where the party was.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We left without saying goodbye to anyone, which should have felt like an exit but felt more like a beginning. He kept his hand at the small of my back as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, just a light pressure through the cashmere, and I let him.

Some things, I was learning, were harder to guard against than others.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MEGAN: PRESENT

The Aldridge Group’s annual investor symposium had been on my calendar for eleven months.

The charity gala was the obvious public event designed to attract attention. In contrast, the symposium was more discreet. It was smaller, invitation-only, and held in a private dining room at a Midtown hotel managed by Aldridge Commercial for the building’s ownership trust. Thirty investors and Aldridge’s senior leadership attended. The event featured a presentation on the company’s Q4 results and future plans, information I had learned through contacts I had built over four years. This year, the presentation aimed to secure commitments for a new development fund.

The fund was Wyatt’s first major initiative since taking over from his father. It was seventy-five million dollars in fresh capital, earmarked for a mixed-use development project in Charleston that his team had been quietly assembling for eight months.

I knew about the Charleston project before Wyatt’s own board did. That was not an accident.

“The symposium is on November ninth,” Charlie said through my phone’s speaker. CharlieVance had been my first hire and was still my best one—officially my head of research, functionally the other half of Hale Capital’s brain, the only person alive who could execute six years of accumulation across forty vehicles without once writing anything down that shouldn’t exist.

I’d pulled up the Aldridge Commercial investor relations page while Charlie talked, looking for the symposium agenda—and found a video instead. It was a two-minute clip from a site visit to the Charleston development site, posted six weeks earlier. Wyatt was on-site, wearing a hard hat, talking with the project architect about the community consultation process.

I watched it for eleven seconds before I closed it. Eleven seconds. His voice, patient and specific, came through my laptop speaker, asking a question about the timeline.

My hand was not entirely steady when I reached for my coffee.

Irrelevant, I told myself. Completely irrelevant.

I opened the symposium agenda. “And our position in the development fund vehicle?”

“Twelve percent. Held through the Meridian subsidiary, with the same structure as the parent company’s acquisitions. It’s clean. Nothing traceable above the shell layer.”

“Good. I want to move the Meridian position before the symposium. Not a sale—a reallocation. Move it into a direct stake in the Charleston development entity.”

Silence from Charlie. This one indicated he was working through the calculations, had reached a conclusion, and was considering whether to reveal it.

“That’ll trigger a disclosure requirement,” he said finally. “The Charleston entity is structured as a limited partnership. Any investor holding more than ten percent has to be disclosed to the other partners.”

“I know.”

“Megan.” His voice shifted—careful now, as it did when he thought she was about to do something that couldn’t be undone. “If you trigger the disclosure, Wyatt will know your name is linked to the Charleston project before the symposium. He’ll have time to⁠—”

“He won’t have enough time.” I was already at my desk, the development entity’s partnership agreement open on my second monitor. I’d been reading it for three weeks, as I read everything—slowly, completely, paying as much attention to the language that wasn’t there as to the language that was. “The disclosure requirement is triggered upon acquisition. He’ll be notified no earlier than forty-eight hours before the symposium. There’s nothing he can do about the partnership stake in that window, and pulling the development fund launch entirely would cost him the investor relationships he’s spent eight months building.”

“So you want him to know.”

I looked at the partnership agreement. At the clause I’d found on page forty-seven of a sixty-two-page document, most people would have stopped reading by page twenty.