CHAPTER 47: The Headline

POV: Selene Castellano

Before she could process what had just happened, he did something that left her breathless.

He stopped.

Then positioned his shaft at the entrance of her core, looked into her eyes and said,“ I see you Selene and I love you so much”, and then penetrated in full as she screams out his name, clawing at his back while adjusting to his length, in less than 10minutes she came undone countless times.

They continued their intimate relationship going on for hours, calling each others name, moaning and groaning until Avalon exploded out of pleasure and emptied himself into her.

Afterward, the room was very quiet.

She lay with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat find its way back to normal. His hand moved through her hair. 

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Better than okay.”

“Your side—”

“Avalon.” She lifted her head. “If you ask about my side one more time tonight I’m sleeping in the guest room.”

A pause.

“Fair,” he said.

She settled back against him.

His heartbeat had slowed to something easy and regular, and she matched her breathing to it without meaning to. The pain medication had worn off hours ago and there was a soft persistent ache in her abdomen but she had stopped minding it. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Right now?”

“My brain doesn’t respect atmosphere.”

She felt him accept this. “What about?”

“What Diana said about Hale building a position in the company for two years.” She stared at the ceiling, organizing her thoughts. “That means before Nene died, before the will was even read. ”

“Yes.”

“Which means he knew about the will’s contents before it was public.”

Avalon was quiet for a moment. “Someone told him.”

“Someone with access to Nene’s legal affairs. Someone close enough to know what was coming before it arrived.” She paused. “That’s a very short list.”

“Nene’s lawyers, her financial advisors.” Another pause. “Margaret.”

The name sat between them.

Not as an accusation. Just as a possibility that neither of them wanted and couldn’t afford to ignore.

“I’m not saying Margaret,” Selene said carefully. “I’m saying we don’t know and not knowing is what got us blindsided by Diana.”

“I know.”

“We can’t assume anyone’s safe just because they feel safe.”

“I know that too.” His voice was tired. 

“It is.” She reached for his hand in the dark. “But we trust each other that's not nothing.”

“That’s everything,” he said.

She squeezed his hand.

They lay in silence for a while.

She was close to sleep — genuinely close, the warm heaviness of it pulling her down — when he spoke again.

“Your laugh,” he said.

She opened her eyes.

“After you left, years later, I couldn’t remember what it sounded like.” His voice was quiet. “That bothered me more than anything else, more than the anger of not understanding why you’d gone. I used to try to reconstruct it and I couldn’t. It was the one thing I couldn’t hold onto and I never told anyone that because—” He stopped.

“Because?” she said softly.

“Because saying it meant admitting how much I’d actually lost and I wasn’t ready to admit that for a long time.”

She turned her face and pressed her lips to his chest, just briefly. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

“I know.”

“So you don’t have to remember it anymore. You can just listen.”

He turned his palm up, laced her fingers through his.

The room was completely still.

She closed her eyes.

Let it be.

Her phone lit the ceiling at 2 AM.

A news alert.

She read the headline once.

Read it again.

Sat up slowly, careful of her side, her heart doing something irregular.

Avalon was awake before she touched him — that immediate alertness he’d developed, sleep never fully claiming him since the warehouse.

“What?” His voice was already clear.

She handed him the phone without speaking.

She watched his face in the blue light of the screen and watched him go completely still.

He read it twice.

“When did this happen?” he said.

“The alert just came through. It could have been hours ago.”

He sat up. Read it a third time like reading it again might change what it said.

BREAKING: Edward Hale, CEO of Hale Capital, arrested by federal authorities on charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. Sources indicate a multi-year FBI investigation. More to follow.

Avalon lowered the phone slowly.

The room was very quiet.

“He’s been under investigation,” Selene said. Thinking out loud. “The FBI has been building a case. Possibly for years.”

“Which means—”

“Which means we weren’t the only ones watching him.” She looked at Avalon. “Someone knew and they must have connections with federal resources.” She checked the timestamp on the alert. “At eleven forty-three PM on a Wednesday.”

“Not a coincidence.”

“Nothing about this has ever been coincidence.” She took the phone back. Read the headline again. “The anonymous helper. The files on Patricia. Carol Sung at Davidson and Park.” She looked at him. “What if it wasn’t about helping us? What if we were just — useful? What if someone needed us to expose Patricia, to draw Hale out, to make him move faster than he’d planned—”

“So they could catch him in the act,” Avalon finished.

The silence that followed had a different quality now.

“We were used,” Selene said.

“Maybe or maybe someone wanted two things at once — Hale arrested and us protected. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“But we don’t know which.”

“No.” He leaned his head back against the headboard. “We don’t.”

She put the phone face down on the nightstand.

Selene thought about Edward Hale in a federal holding cell somewhere, the Patient, calculating Edward Hale who’d been playing a years-long game and had apparently been playing it under the nose of the FBI the entire time.

She thought about who benefits when a man like Hale is arrested.

“The twelve percent,” she said suddenly.

Avalon turned his head. “What?”

“Hale’s twelve percent stake in Pierce Holdings. If he’s arrested and convicted, his assets get frozen. Possibly seized.” She looked at Avalon. “Twelve percent of Pierce Holdings becomes available. Someone will move to acquire it.”

“Who?”

“That’s what we need to find out before morning.” She was fully awake now. “Because whoever moves first on that stake controls a significant portion of the company. And whoever our anonymous helper really is — I’d bet everything they already know this, most likely  been planning for it.”

Avalon looked at her in the dark.

“You think the anonymous helper is after the company.”

“I think the anonymous helper has been three steps ahead of everyone this entire time,” she said. “Including us, and I think Edward Hale’s arrest isn’t the end of anything.”

She picked the phone back up.

“I think it’s an opening move.”

Avalon called Margaret at 2:17 AM.

She answered on the second ring, which meant she’d been awake, which meant she already knew.

“I’ve seen it,” Margaret said before he could speak.

“The twelve percent—”

“I know. I’ve already called our securities lawyers. We have a narrow window to make a pre-emptive move before the market opens and everyone else reads the same headline.”

“How narrow?”

“Three, maybe four hours.”

“Can we do it?”

A pause that was not quite long enough to be reassuring. “We can try.”

Avalon looked at Selene.

She was already on her laptop, pulling up financial databases in the blue light of 2 AM, her hair still undone from earlier, wearing his shirt because hers had been — misplaced, somewhere in the events of the evening — and she looked like someone completely at home in the middle of a crisis, which she was, which was one of the many things he’d filed away tonight without realizing.

“Do it,” he said into the phone. “Whatever it takes.”

He hung up.

“Margaret’s moving on it,” he told Selene.

“Good.” She didn’t look up from the screen. “Come look at this.”

He moved to sit beside her.

She turned the laptop toward him.

A corporate filing dated three weeks ago. A shell company he didn’t recognize registering a small position in Pierce Holdings. Except the registered agent on the filing.

He leaned closer.

Looked at the name.

Looked at Selene.

“That’s—” he started.

“I know,” she said.

“That’s impossible.”

“And yet.” She closed the laptop. “There it is.”

They sat in the blue-lit quiet of 2 AM.

Outside, three hours before the market opened and the rest of the world caught up to the headline, someone had already begun to move.

Someone they knew.

Someone who’d been in this story longer than either of them had realized.

And the game, Selene understood, was nowhere near finished.

It had simply changed hands.