CHAPTER 45: The Confrontation

POV: Avalon Pierce

Avalon had been to Diana’s office more times than he could count.

He knew Colton, the lobby security guard — thick-necked, eleven years on the desk, still asked after Nene like she might walk through the door one day. He knew which elevator ran slow, knew Diana kept good coffee in her bottom desk drawer because the office blend tasted like burnt ambition and she had standards about certain things even when, apparently, she had none about others.

He thought he knew her.

That was the thing sitting in his chest as the elevator climbed, not anger but the understanding that familiarity and knowing someone are not the same thing and never were.

Beside him, Selene watched the floor numbers change.

She hadn’t said much since the coffee shop, nor had he. Some things need the silence between words before they can become real enough to speak about.

The doors opened.

The receptionist looked up with a smile that flickered when she registered their faces. “Mr & Mrs Pierce………I don’t see you on the—”

“We won’t be long,” Avalon said as they walked past her.

Diana’s office was at the end of the corridor, glass-panelled. Through it, Avalon could see her at her desk. She was on the phone to her ear while her pen was moving across a legal pad. The ordinary industry of a Tuesday afternoon.

He pushed open the door.

Diana looked up.

Something moved across her face — fast, contained, gone almost before it arrived. He’d been watching for it and he caught it. Whatever it was, she managed it quickly, settling back into the composed, professionally warm expression he’d seen a thousand times.

“Avalon. Selene.” She said something into the phone and hung up. “I didn’t know you were stopping by. Let me—”

“We’re not staying long,” Selene said.

Diana looked at them, then she set her pen down with the careful deliberateness of someone buying herself two seconds.

“Okay,” she said. “What’s happened?”

Avalon placed his phone on her desk face up — the photo he’d taken of Jessica Mendoza’s screen. The G***l address, random letters and numbers arranged to be untraceable and the three characters sitting just before the @ symbol.

He said nothing. Just stared at her as she looked at it.

She didn’t reach for it, nor did she lean forward, she just looked at it from where she sat, and the quality of her stillness told him everything before she opened her mouth.

“D.C.,” Selene said. “Those are your initials, Diana.”

“Many people share those initials.”

“That account sent Elena’s sealed medical records to Jessica Mendoza at TechCrunch six weeks ago, right in the middle of the depositions.” Avalon kept his voice level. “Whoever sent them understood our legal strategy exactly, knew when we were most exposed, what would cause the most damage and when to cause it.” He paused. “That’s not Richard, not Marcus but someone who was inside our case from the beginning.”

The office held its silence.

“Sit down,” Diana said finally. Her voice had changed — the professional warmth gone, replaced by something older and more tired. “Both of you. Please.”

“Diana—”

“Please, Avalon.” She looked at him directly. “What I have to tell you — just sit down.”

They sat.

Selene’s hand found his on the armrest between them and held onto them.

Diana walked to the window and stood with her back to them, looking out at the city. She stayed that way long enough for Avalon to notice the tension across her shoulders. The careful rise and fall of her breathing, the posture of someone managing something large and private.

When she turned around, the composure was gone.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just — quietly set aside. What remained underneath was a woman who looked like she hadn’t slept properly in weeks and had been carrying something alone that was never meant to be carried alone.

“Before I say anything,” she began, “I need you to understand that I know there is nothing I can say that makes this okay. I’m not going to try.” She stopped, then again. “I’m just going to tell you what happened. All of it, you can then decide what to do with it.”

Selene’s grip tightened on Avalon’s hand.

“Eight months ago a man came to my office,” Diana said. “No appointment but he looks expensive. He told my receptionist it was a professional courtesy call.” She stayed standing behind her desk, one hand resting on the back of her chair. “His name is Edward Hales and he runs a private equity firm out of New York.”

Avalon didn’t recognise it. “What did he want?”

“He said he was interested in a discreet consulting arrangement separate from my practice. Well compensated.” Her jaw tightened. “And then he told me what he knew about me, about a decision I made eight years ago on a case that was — wrong. I’ve spent eight years telling myself it was complicated, but it was wrong. He’d found it, documented it and he was very clear about what would happen to my career if it ever came to light.”

“He blackmailed you,” Selene said.

The word sat there, plain and ugly.

“He gave me a choice,” Diana said. “Help him or lose everything I’d built over twenty years.” She paused. “I chose wrong.”

“You chose to help him,” Avalon said…...

“I told myself it was just information. That he only wanted to understand the Pierce case — whether the marriage was genuine or manufactured. I told myself I was just observing, keeping him informed of the general shape of things, nothing specific that would actually cause harm.”

“But it became specific,” Selene said.

“It always does.” She said it as she’d known that from the start. “He asked for the deposition timeline. I gave him a version of it. He asked what would be most damaging if it became public.” She stopped. “I said I didn’t know. That was a lie.”

Nobody spoke.

“Elena’s records,” Avalon said.

“He found them through other channels, hospital contacts. Richard had once mentioned the pregnancy to Marcus who’d let something slip somewhere careless and Hale’s people traced it back.” She looked at Avalon directly now. “He told me what he was planning to do with them before he did it, he said it was just to apply pressure, make the marriage look fraudulent. I told him it was wrong.” Her voice dropped. “He did it anyway and I said nothing.”

The silence that followed was the kind that doesn’t lift easily.

Avalon sat in it.

He was searching for the anger he knew was somewhere in him and kept finding something more complicated instead — something that felt uncomfortably like recognition. Because he knew what it was to make a terrible choice under impossible circumstances. He and Selene had argued exactly that point across a deposition table. People make the choices they can survive in the moment they’re living, but that doesn’t make the choices right. It just makes them human.

He wasn’t ready to say that out loud.

“Why didn’t you come to us?” Selene’s voice was quiet. Genuinely asking rather than accusing, which somehow made it the hardest question in the room. “Whatever Hale had over you — we could have dealt with it together.”

“Because by the time I understood what I was really part of, I was already in it.” Diana sat down finally, like standing had become too costly. “Every piece of information I gave him made me more complicit. Every day of silence made it worse and I kept telling myself I was still protecting you — that I was steering things, managing the damage.” She shook her head. “And then people started dying, I understood that I’d been arrogant enough to believe I had any control at all.”

“The anonymous messages,” Selene said slowly. “The voice modulator. Carol Sung. Patricia’s evidence. That was you.”

“Trying to fix it.” Diana looked at her. “I know that’s not sufficient to fix something after you’ve broken it, it isn’t the same as not breaking it. I didn’t know what else to do.”

The room settled into quiet again.

Avalon looked at this woman across the desk. Someone he’d trusted without question, who’d sat beside him through the worst months of his life, held the full weight of their strategy in her hands, and fed pieces of it to a man he’d never heard of — all while looking him in the eye and then spent months in the shadows trying to undo it.

“Edward Hale,” he said. “Tell me everything you know.”

Something shifted in her face — relief, maybe. 

“He’s been building a position in Pierce Holdings for two years,” she said. “Quietly. Through shell companies. He currently controls approximately twelve per cent of outstanding shares.”

“That’s not a controlling stake.”

“No. But combined with the board allies he’s been cultivating — and the right moment of crisis — it’s enough to tip things.” She paused. “He’s been manufacturing the crisis, Avalon. All of it. Marcus, Vincent, Richard, Patricia. The lawsuits and the leaks and the attacks on your marriage. All of it is designed to weaken the company until a takeover becomes possible something the board welcomes.”

Something cold moved through him.

He's just an opportunist, then, not someone who’d circled existing weakness.

“He knew about Nene’s will before she died,” Avalon said.

“I believe so. I think he’d been studying this company for a long time, waiting for the right fracture point.” Diana met his gaze steadily. “He’s not going to stop. Losing Marcus and Vincent and Richard and Patricia — those were setbacks, not defeats. He has more resources than any of them and far more patience and now he knows you know his name.”

Avalon stood.

“I need all the documents, every communication, every instruction he gave you and every piece of information you passed him. All of it.”

“It will be used against me.”

“It will be used against him.” He stopped. “What happens to you depends on how much you help us from here.”

Diana nodded. “I’ll have everything ready by tomorrow morning.”

Selene stood and moved carefully, one hand briefly at her side — her body holding its own memory of the warehouse, of the cold floor, of how close it had all come. She looked at Diana for a long moment without speaking.

Diana looked back.

“I want you to know something,” Selene said. Her voice was steady. “I understand being trapped, I understand making a terrible choice because the alternative felt unsurvivable, I understand that.” She paused. “But Elena was my daughter who lived for less than a day and I carried her alone for ten years and she was — she was mine. The only thing about that whole time that belonged entirely to me.” “Someone decided she was a useful piece of information, you knew and said nothing.”

Diana’s eyes filled. She didn’t try to manage it this time.

“I know,” she said.

“I know you do,” Selene said. “That’s what’s going to take the longest.”

She walked to the door.

Avalon followed.

They didn’t speak in the elevator or through the lobby.

Colton the security guard said something as they passed. Avalon answered. He couldn’t have said what either of them said afterwards.

Outside, California Street was cold and indifferent. People moved past with coffee cups and earphones and absolutely no idea. The city never pauses for private devastation and Avalon had always found that both irritating and quietly merciful.

They walked half a block before Selene spoke.

“Edward Hale,” she said.

“Edward Hale.”

“How do we fight someone who’s been planning this longer than we’ve known it existed?”

Avalon looked at her.

He reached out and tucked a strand of hair away from her face. 

“We make sure he doesn’t see us coming,” he said. “And we don’t do it alone.”

Selene looked at him for a moment, then she stepped forward and leaned her forehead against his chest.

They stood like that on California Street while the city moved past, with no plan yet. No next move mapped out, just two people holding each other on a Tuesday afternoon because sometimes that’s the most necessary thing.

His phone buzzed.

He ignored it.

It buzzed again.

Selene pulled back. “Get it.”

“It can wait—”

“Avalon. Get it.”

He pulled out his phone.

Unknown number. A text.

Mr. Pierce. My name is Edward Hale. I think it’s time we met properly. I’ve been looking forward to it for quite some time. Do give my regards to Diana — though I suspect that conversation has already happened. It changes very little. See you soon.

He read it twice then showed it to Selene.

She read it without expression. 

“He knew the moment we walked into her office,” she said.

“He’s been watching us this whole time.”

“He’s not running.” She looked at the phone again. “That’s not a message from someone who thinks they’re losing.”

Avalon put the phone in his pocket.

Edward Hale.

Patient enough to play a years-long game. Connected enough to know their movements in real time. Confident enough to introduce himself thirty minutes after Diana confessed.

And somewhere in this city, right now, watching.

“Everything until now,” Avalon said slowly. “Marcus and Vincent and Richard and Patricia and Diana. All of it was the opening.”

Selene looked at him.

“Edward Hale is what comes next,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Then we’d better be ready,” she said.

She took his hand as they walked back to their car.