All Chapters of MASKED AND RUINED: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter TwelveThe Voss Holdings boardroom at nine in the morning looked nothing like the glass and marble Wren had walked through two days earlier. It looked like a courtroom. Ten board members seated around a long table, expressions ranging from grim to openly hostile, general counsel hovering near the door with a folder thick enough to be a verdict already written.Wren wasn't allowed inside. Priya had been firm about that the night before — you cannot be in that room, Wren, not today, it hands them exactly the optics they want — so she waited instead in the reception area outside, watching the frosted glass doors and listening to nothing but the low, indistinct rhythm of voices she couldn't make out.Alaric had left her with one instruction before he went in. Whatever happens in there, don't come in after me. Trust that I know how to fight this.She trusted him. She hated how much she trusted him, given how little practice she'd had trusting anyone in the last eighteen months.For

Chapter FourteenThe security office at The Undisclosed sat two floors below the room where Wren had first felt Nine's hand close around hers, a space so utilitarian it seemed to belong to an entirely different building. Banks of monitors lined one wall, a night manager named Felix hunched in front of them with the particular tension of a man who knew his job was on the line."Show them," Marisol said, arms crossed, standing just behind his chair.Felix pulled up a timestamped clip, grainy but usable, and rewound it to twenty-three minutes past midnight. A figure in dark clothing moved through the service corridor outside the private records room, face angled carefully away from every camera, movements precise in a way that suggested planning rather than opportunity."Whoever this is," Felix said, "knew exactly where our blind spots are. That's not luck. That's someone who's been inside this building enough times to map it."Wren leaned closer to the screen, cataloguing everything out

Chapter SixteenThe paper stayed on screen for exactly eleven seconds before Camille lowered it, long enough for every major outlet in the country to freeze the frame and zoom in. By the time Wren and Alaric made it back to the green room, Priya already had a clean copy pulled up on her laptop, and the sight of it made Wren's stomach drop.It was a standing arrangement, dated four years earlier, between Alaric and The Undisclosed's previous proprietor. Not a target list. Not a name. A general instruction, vague enough to have plausible business reasons behind it, requesting that any guest matching a specific profile — connected to a handful of named companies, Ashby Communications among them — be flagged to him personally before being paired for an evening."It's real," Alaric said quietly, reading it over Priya's shoulder. "I signed this. Four years ago, before your father's company even started to collapse. I was tracking several firms I considered competitive threats. Ashby Communi

Chapter EighteenThey spent the night at Alaric's penthouse, too wired for sleep, spreading every scrap of information they had across his dining table like a war room. Wren sat cross-legged on the floor beside the coffee table, laptop balanced on her knees, running searches on anything that might hint at what Camille could still be holding back."Walk me through everything you've ever told her," Wren said finally, looking up at him. "Not the business. The personal things. Anything you might have said in confidence over the last decade that could be twisted into something damaging."Alaric was quiet for a long moment, pacing near the window, and something in his hesitation made Wren's stomach tighten."There's one thing," he said finally. "I've never told anyone else. Not the board, not the press, not you, until now.""Tell me."He sat down slowly across from her, rubbing a hand over his jaw. "My father didn't just lose his company after the merger collapsed," he said. "He took his ow

Chapter TwentyGrant Whitfield arrived at Alaric's penthouse forty minutes later, alone, without Jonah, looking nothing like the sharp, impatient man Wren remembered from the corridor at Voss Holdings. He looked tired. Older. Like a man who'd spent the night deciding whether his career mattered more than his conscience and hadn't fully settled the question."I'll get straight to it," Grant said, refusing the coffee Priya offered, standing near the window instead of sitting. "Jonah doesn't know I'm here. If he finds out, it's going to cost me a reporter I've spent years training, and possibly my job. I'm telling you that upfront so you understand what this is costing me to walk through that door.""Then why walk through it," Alaric said."Because two days ago, Camille Renard offered my outlet an exclusive," Grant said. "Full access, documents, everything, in exchange for control over the final edit. That's not how journalism is supposed to work, and I should have said no immediately. I