Chapter 8 : The Siege

My back hit the wall before I realized I was moving.

Derek's name on that screen did something to my nervous system that no near-death taxi and no billionaire predator had managed. My lungs stopped working. My vision tunneled.

All three of them moved at once.

Lucian stepped directly in front of me. Gavin closed off my left. Zane came around my right side and took the tablet out of my hands without a word, setting it face down on the desk like it had personally offended him.

"Look at me," Lucian said.

I looked at him.

"Tell me what he did," he said.

"It is a long story."

"Condense it."

I pressed my palms flat against the wall behind me. The cool surface helped. Barely.

"Derek did not just steal my column," I said. "When I found out about him and my editor and threatened to go public, he got ahead of it. He fabricated an expense fraud trail through my journalism accounts. Receipts, invoices, wire records. All fake. All pointing at me." I stopped. Steadied. "He filed a complaint with the Ohio Press Association and copied the state attorney's office. The investigation was dropped for lack of evidence but the file is still open." I looked at Lucian. "If he gets access to the right people in this city, he can resurrect it. And if I am charged, even falsely, the court can move to restrict my custody situation before the babies are even born."

The room went very quiet.

Gavin moved first. He turned away from me and walked to the window, both hands in his pockets, shoulders locked. I had learned enough about him in the last forty-eight hours to know that stillness from Gavin was not calm. It was the opposite of calm.

Zane had not moved at all. He was looking at a fixed point on the floor with an expression I had not seen on him before. The easy, lethal charm was completely gone. What was underneath it was much colder.

Lucian was still watching my face.

"He built a legal weapon and left it loaded," he said.

"Yes."

"Specifically to use if you ever became a threat to him."

"Yes."

A pause. Then: "How many people know the file exists?"

"His attorney. My former editor. The association administrator." I swallowed. "And now you three."

Lucian straightened. Something had settled in his expression. Not anger. Something more deliberate than anger.

"The file will not survive the week," he said. "Not because we will destroy evidence. Because by the time our attorneys are done, every person who touched it will be facing questions that make a fraudulent press complaint look like a parking ticket." He held my gaze. "Derek built a cage to put you back in. We are going to dismantle it board by board. Do you understand?"

I stared at him.

I had carried that file in my chest like a stone for eight months. I had moved cities because of it. I had taken a job inside a foam animal costume because staying invisible felt safer than being seen.

"You do not know what he is capable of," I said.

"He does not know what we are capable of," Gavin said, without turning from the window. "That is a much larger problem. For him."

Zane's phone buzzed.

He glanced at the screen. His jaw tightened. He answered it on the second ring and said nothing, only listened.

I watched his face change.

Whatever expression lived behind the charm and behind the cold, this was the thing underneath that. Pure, contained violence wearing a very thin suit.

He ended the call.

He looked at Lucian first, then Gavin.

"Stadium security," he said. "Derek is in the building. Ground floor atrium." He set the phone down on the desk with a deliberate, careful movement that was somehow louder than slamming it. "He has six reporters with him. Camera crews. He told security he is here to conduct an interview with the team's new Private Media Consultant." His eyes moved to mine. "He knows you are here. He knows the title. He knows the floor."

Nobody spoke.

Then the heavy oak doors of the office suite began to rattle.