Page 42 of Hostile

The grief of it had been different from losing my father—less clean, somehow, because my father had loved me back without question, and this had always felt like something that could be taken. Like I’d known, some part of me, that it was too good to hold on to. Like I’d been waiting for the morning when I walked across a quad and the world rearranged itself into the shape it was always going to take.

You saw what it looked like. Not what it was.

I shoved the drawer shut.

I had a plan. Six years of architecture, running exactly on schedule. Twenty-two percent of his company. Twelve percent of his most important project. A board meeting behind me and however many ahead. An endgame that had been clear to me since I was eighteen years old, sitting on a couch in Camille’s apartment, saying to finish my degree and make sure this never happens again.

I had a plan.

I’m not going to fight you on this. But I’m also not disappearing. Not this time.

I turned back to the trading screen and forced myself to look at the numbers until they were just numbers again. Until they stopped being a countdown to something and went back to being what they’d always been—the mechanism. The instrument. The thing I was very good at operating, had been for ten years, and intended to keep operating, regardless of lunch, or coffee cups turned a quarter rotation, or a silver arrow in a velvet pouch that I kept in the bottom drawer of my desk and told myself I’d eventually throw away.

Eventually.

I picked up my pen and got back to work. Outside my window, Manhattan moved through its Thursday afternoon as it always did. It didn’t ask where I’d been.

That was still one of the things I loved most about it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WYATT: PRESENT

The thing about Megan Hale is that she doesn’t ask for anything.

I’d forgotten that about her, or maybe I’d just filed it away in the place where I kept the things that were too specific to be useful and too precise to forget entirely. The way she moved through a room was as if she’d already mapped it. The way she listened—not waiting for her turn to speak but actually tracking, building, and storing. The way she’d sat across from me at lunch two days ago and answered every question I asked with the directness of someone who had decided honesty was the only currency worth trading in and had never changed her mind about that.

She hadn’t asked me for anything in that conference room. Hadn’t asked for an explanation, hadn’t offered a truce, hadn’t flinched when I looked at her across the four feet of the conference table and said I felt it too. She’d picked up her bag, walked out, and left me standing there with the city behind me and my own pulse loud in my ears.

She didn’t need anything from me. That had always been the most disarming—and humbling—thing about her. Megan Hale had built something capable of dismantling my family’s company from the inside without asking a single person for permission, help, or a head start.

She didn’t want my cooperation.

She didn’t need to ask for that. She’d walked in and commanded it, the way she’d always commanded rooms that had no intention of giving her what she’d earned.

She wanted my reckoning.

I’d been watching the pattern for three weeks, and the pattern was telling me something the financial data alone couldn’t.

It wasn’t random. The subsidiaries she’d targeted weren’t the most valuable ones. They were the most symbolic ones. The Meridian subsidiary—my grandfather’s first acquisition after the founding properties. The Charleston development—my first initiative, the thing that was entirely mine. The consulting arrangements she’d uncovered in Blair’s structure—the most personal layer of the company’s internal architecture.

She hadn’t built this strategy to maximize financial return. She’d built it to hit every nerve ending the Aldridge name had.

That wasn’t greed. That wasn’t opportunism.

That was someone who had been paying very close attention for a very long time and had built something out of grief rather than ambition.

I sat with that for a moment.

Something happened to her, I thought. Something she’s never said out loud to anyone. Whatever it was, she’s been certain it was me.

I needed to understand what she believed before I could explain what had actually happened, not the other way around.

I thought about that on the drive to the Meridian negotiation, Marcus beside me in the back of the car, going through the morning’s briefing in the efficient, thorough way he had, and me listening with about sixty percent of my attention while the other forty percent was doing something I’d been trying to shut down since the gala.

She’s going to be in the room.

Not because she was supposed to be. The Meridian negotiation was an internal matter—a dispute between two of our subsidiaries over a shared asset, the kind of thing that was handled quietly in a conference room with attorneys and emerged as a footnote in the quarterly report. Megan had no standing in this room. No reason to be here.