Chapter Six:

"Who is messing with your phone, Sophia?"

Alexander's grip on her hand at the gallery railing tightens further as he waits for an answer. Her face has already given her away. She knows it and he knows it. She makes a split-second decision and holds the phone out.

He reads it. His expression does not change, but the quality of his stillness shifts into something colder. More deliberate. Not the boardroom performance she has seen him use on investors. This is the other kind. The quiet one. The dangerous one.

"How long have the messages been coming?" he asks.

"Since the night Derek appeared at the first gallery opening," she says. "Three weeks ago."

He pauses. "Are there others?"

She unlocks her phone and hands it over without a word.

He scrolls through everything in the folder she built. The unsigned messages. The dates. The restaurant photograph. The news article. Finally, the screenshot of the Kane Global internal document. His jaw tightens. He looks up and scans the room once, unhurried, before handing it back.

"We are leaving," he says.

She does not argue.

In the car Sophia sits on her side of the back seat. Alexander is on the phone within thirty seconds of the doors closing. She catches fragments. Enough to understand he is pulling security protocols. Instructing. When he hangs up, he turns to face her fully. The shift is immediate. Crisis management becomes something else entirely. His full attention lands on her and stays there.

"You should have come to me the moment the first message arrived," he says.

"I was not sure what they were yet."

"You were sure enough to build a folder."

She has no answer for that. The silence in the car is honest, and after everything tonight, she prefers honest.

Back in the penthouse, she sits at the kitchen counter while he stands across from her, still in his jacket.

"Walk me through everything in order," he says. "When each message arrived. What it said. What you thought it meant. And why you kept it private."

She does. She leaves nothing out. She built that folder the way she always holds information. Organized. Private. Saved for the right moment. She has learned to operate in this penthouse the same way she survived in her father's house. Watch. File. Wait. The difference is that this time when she presents what she has collected, Alexander listens.

When she finishes, he is quiet for a moment. "The document Derek sent you is from a distribution list that has eight people on it."

He names the list. He stops there.

She asks him directly. "What does it mean?"

"It means someone inside Kane Global is feeding Derek information. Has been for at least as long as the messages have been running." He pauses. "Possibly longer."

She watches his face. The muscle in his jaw ticks once. His eyes go somewhere else for half a second before coming back to hers. She has only seen this once before. Tonight she sees it clearly.

"I am going to deal with it," he says.

"I want to know how."

He looks at her like he is deciding something. Then: "I am not going to shut you out of this. You are already in it."

She exhales. She had been bracing for the other answer. Her father made decisions about her life and presented her with the outcome after it was already done. Vivienne did the same. Alexander just did the opposite.

"Do you still have every message in that folder?" he asks.

"Yes."

"Do not delete anything."

She nods. Then she asks the question she has been sitting with since she handed him the phone. "Derek's message tonight referenced this penthouse. His glass tower. He knows exactly where I am. He has known for a while."

She pauses. "Is the building security enough?"

"Yes."

He holds her eyes when he says it. Steady. Unflinching. She remembers what she noticed in her third week here. When he is managing a situation, he looks away. When he means something, he looks straight at her and waits for her to look away first. He is looking at her now.

She nods. She is not entirely settled, but she believes him.

The crisis has been handled enough for everything else to surface. She looks at him and thinks about what happened earlier at the railing. The way she pressed her shoulder into his chest. The way she told him she was not doing it for the cameras. He looks back at her like he has been thinking about the same thing. Neither of them says it.

The silence stretches. It is two people sitting in what they have built over three weeks and deciding what to do with it.

She breaks it first.

"I told you at the railing that I was not doing it for the cameras," she says. "Did you understand what I meant?"

"I understood."

"What are you going to do about it?"

He crosses the kitchen. Stands in front of her. His hand comes down on the counter beside her. Close. Not touching. "Not tonight," he says.

Three weeks ago he did the same thing. Pulled back when he could have taken what she offered. Closed her robe. Handed her the tea. Sent her to bed. She sees the cost of the restraint in the set of his mouth. In the way his knuckles press white against the marble.

She wants to push back. She slides off the barstool instead. She is about to say goodnight when her phone lights up on the counter between them.

A new message. Same anonymous platform. Same format. But this one is different. Not a photograph. Not a reference. A single line, sent to both her number and a Kane Global corporate contact address simultaneously.

She reads it. The bottom drops out. She turns the phone so Alexander can see the screen.

Tell me why Derek has access to my personal trust fund documentation.