Page 31 of Hostile

She took me back to her off-campus apartment, made me tea, and sat across from me at her kitchen table with the steady, clear-eyed patience of someone who understood that some things needed time before they could be spoken.

My phone kept buzzing on her counter. She picked it up, turned it off, and placed it in a drawer silently—like someone efficiently removing a smoke alarm with a dying battery. On Tuesday, she went out and returned with a new phone and a new number.

“You’ll want your old contacts eventually,” she said, setting it in front of me. “For now, no one reaches you unless you decide they do.”

Nobody did. I decided that much from the floor of her guest room, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of cedar, listening to a city that had watched me be destroyed carry on with its business outside the window.

I wasn’t ready to talk for two days.

When I finally told her everything, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t offer empty comfort or useless advice. She just listened until I’d said it all, then looked me straight in the eye and asked, “What do you want to do now?”

There it was. Not how do you feel. Not are you okay. The Prescott question. The one that assumed a future and asked only what shape I intended to give it.

I wiped my face and sat up straight.

“Finish my degree,” I said. “And make sure this never happens to me again.”

She nodded as if that were exactly the right answer. “Then that’s what you do.”

I went back to campus the following Monday. Head up, spine straight, armor locked into place for good.

The whispers were still there. The looks were still there. I walked through them the same way I’d walked through every room the iron gate had ever locked me in—cataloging, calculating, giving nothing back—except now there was no soft, hoping girl beneath to do the walking. I’d left her on a sidewalk in Cambridge. What came back to campus was the first draft of the woman who would eventually buy nineteen percent of a company before its own board noticed.

Wyatt wasn’t in Business Law. His seat remained empty that Monday and the Monday after. By the end of the month, the story going around was that the Aldridge boy had withdrawn and gone home to Savannah.

I told myself I was glad. On that first walk back across the quad, I told myself two things. First, I would never again let anyone close enough to hold a camera. Second, I had nothing left to lose.

I was wrong about the second part. But I didn’t know that yet.

The worst was still coming.

I rarely considered what came directly after Cambridge. The aftermath kept its own careful distance—my father’s funeral, my mother’s face at the graveside, and grief that lacked a clear form because it was made of many things at once. The tape, the hallway, the running, and then, fourteen months later, a Thursday morning phone call that intensified everything and, in a way, made it simpler, because losing your father rearranges everything around that loss, giving you a clearer sense of what you’re carrying.

I’d built Hale Capital on all of it. That was the truth I didn’t say out loud. Not just the anger. Not just the vengeance. All of it—the grief and the love and the loss and the intentional, stubborn refusal to let any of it be for nothing.

I closed my eyes for three seconds.

Then I opened them and got back to work.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a man realize he’s been outmaneuvered.

Not the loud kind of satisfaction—I wasn’t built for gloating. The quiet kind. The kind that settles in your chest like a meal you’ve been waiting on for a long time and finally, finally gets to arrive hot.

The Aldridge board had been notified of my position by nine o’clock Monday morning. Charlie handled it, as he did everything, clean and precise. By ten, I had confirmation that the notification had been received. By eleven, three different financial journalists had published pieces speculating on the identity of the unnamed investor with a growing stake in Aldridge Commercial’s parent company.

By noon, my phone had fourteen missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

I returned none of them.

“The board is rattled,” Charlie said through the speaker, his voice carrying the satisfaction of a man who enjoyed watching a well-executed plan unfold. “Three members have called our attorney to identify the acquiring entity. They can’t yet pierce the shell structure. They know someone’s there—they just don’t know how deep.”

“Good. Let them wonder.” I stood at my window, coffee in hand, watching Manhattan do its Tuesday thing forty-two floors below. “What’s Wyatt doing?”

A brief pause. “He called an emergency board meeting for Thursday, and he’s been on the phone with his legal team since eight this morning.”