Page 36 of Hostile

“Yes,” he said simply, without hesitation or embellishment, and reached past me to press the button I had already pressed.

The car arrived. He held the door with one hand and waited, giving me the choice he always gave me—every room, every door, every conversation, the exit left unlocked—and I stepped in, because taking the stairs down forty-five floors would have been a concession, and I did not make them.

The doors closed. The building fell away beneath us in silence, floor numbers shedding themselves in amber above the doors.

“Can I ask you something that isn’t a negotiation?” he said, around the fortieth floor.

“You can ask.”

“The Meridian structure. Forty vehicles, six years, not one footprint.” He was looking at the numbers, not at me, which somehow made it worse. “Nolan has been mapping it for a month. He keeps coming to my office after hours just to admire it. Yesterday he called it the cleanest thing he’s ever taken apart, and he said it the way other men talk about cathedrals.” He let out a quick huff. “I wanted to say that in a room without lawyers. It’s the best work I have ever seen.”

Thirty-four. Thirty-three. Thirty-two.

“You’re complimenting the gun pointed at you,” I said.

“I’m complimenting the engineer.”

I looked at him then, because some sentences require it, and found him already watching me—not the boardroom look, not the gala look, but something quieter and considerably more dangerous, the look of a man conducting an inventory he had no intention of sharing. The pale Aldridge blue should have made it easy to look away. It did not.

“The girl I knew was the smartest person I’d ever met,” he said. “I’ve had ten years to assume that memory was inflated. Then you walked into my office, and it turned out the memory was conservative.” He shook his head slightly, eyes back on the falling numbers. “I keep trying to be strategic about you, Megan. It keeps not working.”

Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen.

Every wall I owned reported for duty. The corridor replayed itself—eleven years, the reference letter, I’ll make sure of it personally—and beneath my ribs, something shifted its weight from one foot to the other. I informed it, in the coldest interior voice I could muster, that we were in a metal box with the enemy and that it could compose itself.

“That sounds like a personal problem,” I said.

He laughed—the real one, quiet, caught off guard by himself—and the sound filled the elevator in a way I declined to log.

“It is,” he agreed. “Entirely mine. I’m not asking you to solve it.” The numbers ran out. The car settled. “I’m just done pretending I don’t have it.”

The doors opened to the lobby’s marble and noise, and he held them with one hand and did not move, and for two full seconds neither did I.

“Thursday, then,” he said.

“Thursday.”

I walked out first. I did not look back. It took more than it should have.

Outside, the November lunch crowd swallowed me whole, and I let it. By the time I reached my lobby, I had the entire Tuesday filed where it belonged—the corridor, the eleven years, the reference letter, Marcus’s sentence and its careful deniability, forty-five floors of Wyatt Aldridge complimenting the engineer, his eyes on the numbers, all of it labeled and shelved in the archive of things I knew but did not intend to act on.

Filed is not the same as closed.

I knew that even then.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

The Aldridge board meeting was on a Thursday, and I arrived late on purpose, as planned.

Not rude late. Strategic late. The kind when everyone is already seated, the room has settled into its pre-meeting rhythm, and then the door opens and the energy shifts. I’d learned that move in my first year on Wall Street from a woman who ran a hedge fund from a Tribeca loft and wore the same expression at every meeting—the one that said I already know how this ends.

I’d been practicing it ever since.

Charlie was already inside, seated two chairs down from the chairman. The rest of the board—seven men of a certain age, the kind who had sat in rooms like this since before I was born—looked up as I walked in, their collective expression one of deciding whether to be impressed or unsettled.

Both worked for me.