24 — Cornered

DEAN POV

**UNKNOWN:** It's been a week. The document is still unsigned. We're losing patience, Dean.

I stared at the message in my car in the parking garage, the same garage, the same spot, like the universe had a sick sense of humor about where it wanted me to have my worst moments.

**DEAN:** It's sitting in his review queue. These things take time, I can't force him to sign faster without it looking suspicious.

**UNKNOWN:** You have until Friday. After that, we stop being patient with you, and we start being patient with your girlfriend instead. Kate, isn't it? Works in marketing. Drives a silver Audi. Takes the same route home every night at roughly the same time.

My hands were shaking by the time I finished reading it, hard enough that I had to set the phone down on the passenger seat just to stop myself from crushing it.

They knew her schedule. Her car. Her route. I'd spent three weeks telling myself this was abstract, distant, a problem I could solve with enough cleverness and enough time, and in the space of one text message it had become something with Kate's face attached to it.

I called the one person I probably shouldn't have, because I didn't have anyone else left to call.

"Carlisle, this better be important, I'm literally walking into a meeting," Japheth answered, sounding exactly as busy and irritated as I'd expected.

"I need five minutes. Now. Not later today now."

Something in my voice must have carried, because the irritation dropped out of his completely. "What's wrong?"

"I can't talk about it on the phone. Can you get away from your meeting?"

A pause. "I'll meet you on the roof deck in ten minutes."

*****

**JAPHETH POV**

Dean looked like a man who'd aged five years in a week by the time he found me on the roof deck, hands shoved in his pockets, pacing in a tight circle like he couldn't quite make himself stand still.

"Okay," I said, closing the door behind me so we had actual privacy. "Talk."

"I need you to not react the way I think you're going to react."

"That's not a great opening line, Dean."

"I know. I know it's not." He dragged a hand down his face. "I've made a genuinely catastrophic series of decisions, and I need your help fixing it, and I understand if the first thing you want to do is call security or Kate or both."

"You're starting to really worry me. What did you do?"

He told me everything  the gambling debt, the two hundred and forty thousand dollars, the men in the parking garage, the document, the shell company, the threats, all of it spilling out in a rush like he'd been holding his breath for three weeks and had finally, desperately, let it go.

I listened without interrupting, because interrupting felt like it might stop him before I had the full picture, and I needed the full picture more than I needed to yell at him, which I very much also wanted to do.

"They threatened Kate," he finished, voice cracking slightly. "Specifically. By name. Her car, her route home. I can't  Japheth, I can't let anything happen to her because of my own stupidity."

I sat down heavily on the edge of a planter, trying to process the sheer scope of what he'd just handed me. "You used Jasmine. You used my girlfriend to get access to my files."

"I know. I know what I did, and I hate myself for it, and I know that doesn't fix anything, but I need you to understand I didn't have a choice I could live with."

"There's always a choice, Dean."

"The choice was watching men who've already shown they're willing to sabotage a plane hurt the woman I love, or betraying my own best friend's trust." His voice broke properly this time. "I chose wrong either way. I know that. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to help me protect Kate, because I clearly can't do it alone, and I'm out of options, and you're the only person I know with the resources to actually make this stop."

I sat with that for a long moment, anger and fear and something uncomfortably close to pity all tangled together in my chest.

"Does Kate know any of this?"

"No. God, no. I couldn't" He shook his head hard. "I was going to fix it before she ever had to know. That was the whole plan. Fix it quietly, pay it off, make sure she never found out how close I came to"

"To getting her killed over a gambling debt."

He flinched like I'd actually hit him. "Yes. That. Exactly that."

I stood up, pacing now myself, mind racing through everything  Voss already investigating, Ranjiv already pulling the document apart, the men who'd made the threat still out there, still watching, still expecting a signature by Friday.

"Here's what's going to happen," I said finally. "You're going to tell me everything names, numbers, every message they've sent you  and I'm going to bring in people who actually know how to handle this. Real security. Possibly the police, depending on what we're actually dealing with."

"If I go to the police, they'll know. They said they're watching"

"They're bluffing about some of it, Dean. Nobody with real resources threatens someone over text message with that little subtlety. They want you scared enough to comply, not actually exposed enough to go public." I kept my voice steady, mostly for his benefit, though I wasn't entirely sure I believed every word of it myself. "But you also need to tell Kate. Today. Not because I'm trying to punish you  because she deserves to know she's in danger, and because she's smart enough to help protect herself if she actually knows what she's protecting herself from."

"She'll hate me."

"Probably, for a while. But she'll hate you a lot more if something happens to her because you were too scared of her reaction to tell her the truth."

He nodded slowly, looking somehow smaller than he had when he first mentioned his law degree to me, years ago, full of easy confidence and manicured ambition.

"What about Jasmine?" he asked quietly. "I used her. She has no idea what she actually helped me do."

My jaw tightened at that, the anger I'd been holding back finally finding somewhere to land. "I'm telling her everything, tonight. She deserves to know exactly what she walked into, and exactly who put her there."

"I understand if you want to press charges. Against me, I mean. I used her position to compromise company assets. That's  I know what that is, legally."

"I don't know what I want yet, Dean, except for Kate to be safe, and for whoever's behind this to actually face consequences instead of just you taking the whole fall alone while they walk away clean." I looked at him directly. "You're going to help me find out who's actually running this. Not just the men sending you texts. Whoever's actually behind the shell company, behind the whole scheme. You owe that much, at minimum, to everyone you've put in danger."

"Okay," he said, quiet, resigned, something like relief and terror mixed together on his face in equal measure. "Okay. I'll tell her tonight. I'll tell you everything."

"Good." I turned toward the door, then stopped, looking back at him. "For what it's worth and this doesn't excuse anything  I understand being desperate enough to make a choice you know is wrong because you can't see another way out. I've been there. Different stakes, but I've been there."

He nodded, not quite able to meet my eyes.

I left him on the roof and went to find Jasmine, dreading the conversation ahead of me more than almost anything I could remember dreading in longer than I cared to admit  not because I thought she'd blame herself unfairly, though I knew she would anyway, but because I was about to tell the woman I loved that trusting someone she cared about had nearly cost the company everything, and that the danger wasn't actually over yet.

I found her at her desk, laughing at something on her phone, completely unaware that the ground under both of us was about to shift.

"Hey," she said, looking up, her smile fading slightly when she saw my face. "What's wrong?"

"We need to talk. Somewhere private."

Her smile disappeared entirely. "You're scaring me, Japheth."

"I know," I said quietly. "I'm sorry. Come on."

She stood, gathering her things with hands that weren't quite steady, following me down the hall toward my office without another word, which somehow unsettled me more than if she'd peppered me with questions the whole way. Jasmine asking nothing meant she was already bracing for something bad, the particular silence of someone who'd learned a long time ago that waiting quietly for the worst was sometimes the only control you had over how it landed.

I closed the door behind us and watched her sit, spine straight, hands folded in her lap, every inch the composed professional even as her eyes tracked my every movement like she was trying to read the verdict before I said a single word.

"Whatever it is," she said quietly, "just say it plainly. I'd rather know than watch you work up to it."

So I did. I told her everything Dean had told me, watching her face move through disbelief, then horror, then something that looked uncomfortably like guilt settling into her shoulders exactly the way I'd been afraid it would.

"I helped him," she said finally, voice barely above a whisper. "I sat right there and pulled up the exact document he needed, because I trusted him, because he's Kate's boyfriend, because it felt normal and boring and I didn't ask enough questions."

"Jasmine, this isn't on you."

"It feels like it's on me."

"It's on Dean, and it's on whoever's actually running this scheme, and it is absolutely not on the person who got manipulated by someone she had every reasonable instinct to trust." I knelt in front of her chair, taking both her hands in mine. "You didn't do anything wrong. You were kind, and helpful, and trusting, and someone weaponized that against you. That's a crime committed against you, not a failure of yours."

Her eyes were bright, blinking fast, but she nodded slowly, like she was choosing to believe me even if she wasn't fully there yet.

"What happens now?"

"Now we figure out who's actually behind this, we keep you and Kate safe, and we make sure nobody gets away with using the people I love as leverage against me." I squeezed her hands. "I'm not going anywhere, and neither are you. We handle this together."

"Together," she repeated, like she was testing the weight of the word, and for the first time since I'd walked into my office ten minutes ago with the worst news of the week sitting heavy in my chest, I watched some of the fear in her face settle into something steadier instead.