All Chapters of Mistaken Alliances : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

141 Chapters

The Whole Story

I didn't sleep. Not really.I lay in bed and turned what Kade had said over and over in my head until the words stopped making sense and started just feeling like something pressing on my chest.He remembered. He said he remembered and then he walked away.I woke up the next morning with a headache and a decision. I was going to ask him directly. No more waiting. No more building up to it carefully. I had been circling this for weeks and I was done with it.I got to the office early, went straight to his floor, knocked on the door.He wasn't there.Madeline told me he had a breakfast meeting in Midtown that would run until ten. I went back to my desk and tried to work. By the time ten-thirty came and went with no word from him, I was on edge enough that when Killian knocked on my office door at eleven with that easy smile of his, I barely managed to return it.He stopped when he saw my face."What happened?""Nothing.""You look like something happened." He stepped in and closed the d

Not The Man From The Memory

I took two days to process.I didn't return Kade's calls. I didn't answer Killian's texts. I worked, I went home, I sat on my couch and I thought.Eloise Carter had known my name for months. She had sat across from me at that dinner with her warm eyes and her measured smile and she had said nothing. She had watched Killian introduce me as his girlfriend and said nothing. She had looked at me like she was curious and said nothing.On the third day, I called Kade."I want to speak to your mother," I said.A pause. "I can arrange that.""I don't want it arranged. I want her address."Another pause. Then he gave it to me.Eloise lived in a townhouse on the Upper East Side that was tasteful and old money in the way only genuine old money could manage. I rang the bell and she answered herself, which told me she had been expecting me.She was dressed in pale blue slacks and a silk blouse, silver earrings, hair pinned up. Her face when she opened the door was composed but not cold. She steppe

No Mole

The three of us fell into something that had no name.The arrangement continued. Separate time with each of them, my rules, no overlap. But then Killian pushed the line. He joined one of Kade's scheduled evenings by showing up at the restaurant claiming he had a table next to ours. Kade stared at him across the room. Killian grinned and waved. I put my face in my hands.They ended up at the same table. The dinner was chaotic and somehow fun. Kade was dry and exact. Killian was loud and unfiltered. I sat between them and laughed more than I had in months, even as some distant part of my brain flagged this as insane.By the end of the evening, they had argued about football, disagreed about the wine, and managed a full conversation about the company restructuring without once trying to one-up each other. Progress, maybe, or just exhaustion.Walking out, Killian threw an arm over my shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world."This worked," he said."You crashed the dinner,

Ghost Accounts

I said nothing about the mole. Not yet.Instead, I focused on the thing I could actually do something about, the documents. The falsified compliance records that had been sitting in the firm's filing system like a time bomb. Kade had flagged it as an inside job and the more I dug, the more I agreed.I pulled the audit trail on the documents that Wednesday and stayed in the office until seven cross-referencing them. Kade found me there and sat across from me without saying anything, pulling his own copy of the files and starting from the beginning. We worked in a silence that was productive and easy in the way that very few silences are."Here," I said, pushing a page across the table.He looked at it. His jaw tightened.The document had been accessed by a user profile that didn't exist in the current employee database. Someone had created a ghost account."That's deliberate," Kade said."Very," I agreed. "And the timestamp puts it at a day the office was closed. Whoever did this had a

Smiling At Her Screen

The evidence against Clover was building. But I had no idea what was about to happen at the company event.Carter Group hosted a quarterly client reception at a rooftop venue in the Meatpacking District. Kade had put my name on the hosting committee because of the shares, which meant I was there early, setting things in order with the events team, checking that the client welcome packs were in the right order.Clover was also there. She had been added to the guest list by Killian's assistant and I hadn't known until I saw her come off the elevator in a red dress, her blonde hair loose.She spotted me and smiled like nothing in the world was wrong."You look incredible," she said, kissing my cheek."Thanks," I said, studying her face. Nothing. Not a flicker.I kept her close for the first part of the evening. Watched her work the room. She was charming and easy and she found Killian within twenty minutes. I watched from across the room as she made him laugh at something she said. He le

Bright and Certain

I called Kade.He was there in three minutes with the kind of focused efficiency that didn't leave room for panic. Together we got Killian off the terrace and into a private room, away from the guests.Killian was out of it in a way that was frightening to watch. He kept reaching for my hand and then looking confused when he found it, as if some part of his brain knew he was somewhere safe and was trying to confirm it."She gave him something," I told Kade."I know. I've already sent someone after her." His voice was flat and focused. He knelt in front of Killian, checked his breathing, checked his eyes. "He needs to be looked at tonight.""Are you calling a doctor?""I'm calling the family doctor. Discretion matters right now." He looked at me. "Were you with him the whole evening?""Most of it. I took one drink from him earlier when I thought she was about to put something in it. But there must have been a second moment I missed."Kade looked at me for a second with something that w

Thirty Seconds

Clover sent the recording two days later. Not to me. To every gossip blog in the city, three financial news outlets, and, most pointedly, directly to my phone. I was at my desk when it came in. A message from her. Just the video file. No caption. No explanation. I pressed play. The footage was thirty seconds long. It showed Killian on the terrace, unsteady, confused, his voice slurred. He was talking, and even through the haze in his voice you could hear the words clearly. "I went after her to hurt Kade," he said. "She was just... she was supposed to be a game." The recording cut there. I sat very still. I played it again. Then I put my phone face down on the desk and stared at the wall. He went after her to hurt Kade. She was supposed to be a game. The words settled into me like stones into water, slow and deep and cold. I knew, on some level, that Killian had not started this out of pure feeling. He had told me himself that evening at dinner. That's how it st

Grey Light

Four days later, Killian crashed his car. I heard from Kade. He called me at two in the morning, his voice stripped of everything except the facts. Killian had been driving late, well above the speed limit on the highway leaving the city, and he had gone off the road. The car was destroyed. He was alive. That was the first thing Kade said and the relief in those words was the only time I had ever heard his voice break. I was at the hospital in twenty minutes. Eloise was already there when I arrived, sitting in a plastic chair in the waiting area with her hands folded and her back straight, the posture of a woman who had learned to hold herself together in places like this. Madden was at the window, turned away from the room, staring at the parking lot. Kade was by the door when I came in and when he saw me, something in his face shifted. "How bad?" I asked. "Three broken ribs. Fractured wrist. Head laceration. He's stable." His jaw was tight. "He'll be all right." I sa

The Wrong Aide of the Table

While Killian recovered, the company was still under attack. Kade moved methodically. He had a forensic accounting firm go through every document that had been accessed by Clover's ghost account. He had his legal team prepare a case. He built it quietly and carefully, the way he did everything. And then one morning he called me into the executive conference room, where a woman I had never seen before was sitting on the wrong side of the table. She was beautiful in a deliberate way. Dark hair, expensive clothes, a particular kind of composure that said she was used to controlling rooms. She looked at me when I walked in with something that was not quite hostility but was certainly not nothing. "Mia Perez, this is Serena Ashworth," Kade said from beside the window. The woman looked at me and then she looked at Kade. "I agreed to meet with you," she said to him. "Not her." "Ms. Perez is a shareholder in this company," Kade replied. "She stays." I sat down. Serena Ashw

We Deal With It Together

It was Kade's mother who figured it out first. We were having lunch at the townhouse, just Eloise and me, a habit that had developed quietly over the past weeks. She fed me and I told her things I didn't tell the twins, not always about them, sometimes just about work or the city or things I was reading. She was good company in the specific way of someone who has already seen most of what life has to offer and is not surprised by any of it. I was two weeks past my birthday when I noticed I was off. I mentioned it without thinking, just a passing comment about feeling unwell in the mornings. Eloise set down her fork. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't read immediately. "How long?" she asked. "A few days," I said, confused by the look. "Probably just—" "Mia." She said my name gently. "When did you last have your period?" The world stopped turning. I sat there at her kitchen table and counted backwards and felt the colour leave my face. "Oh," I said. "

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