The car moved through rain that painted the city in streaks of light and blur, windows smeared with colors as if the world was running out of time, and Alondra sat very still, fingers curled in her bag like she was holding on to something private. She had never thought a single photograph could make her stomach so hollow; now that image of her asleep in a strange cabin felt less like an accident and more like a map someone else could follow.
Ezean kept his eyes on the road, jaw set, his voice inside the car sharp and businesslike when he spoke into his phone, "Pull any coverage down, full takedown. Legal now. PR, spin control, and craft a statement that makes this look like a misunderstanding." He listened to the response, nodded once, and said, "And find the source. Whoever leaked this, find them. Cole, I want names." He hung up and breathed out slowly, the sound small and human, like someone who had to remind himself he still had lungs that worked.
Damian sat behind him, shoulders wide as an oak, and when he spoke, it was not to the driver but to Alondra, "Are you okay?" The question wasn't clinical; it held concern. She wanted to answer that she was fine, to say she could do this, that she had survived worse storms at thirty thousand feet, but the world on the ground felt different. "No," she said, the single word sharp and true.
They pulled into a private lane, and the car stopped. The driver opened the door, rain slapping on the pavement. Ezean's apartment—or the wing of a building that had been arranged to look like an apartment that belonged to nobody in particular—smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and old paper, a place meant to be anonymous and safe. The security scanner read their identities with military quickness, doors opened, and Alondra stepped into the light that felt too bright after a hotel with cheap soap.
Inside, it was ordered like a chessboard. Minimal furniture, a kettle ready, and a stack of folded towels that seemed to say things were under control. Ivy arrived two minutes later, hair perfect, heels clicking, eyes doing the math the way a woman who has managed empires does. She looked at Alondra the way someone inspects a piece of luggage for damage.
"He will be on calls for the next hour," Ivy said without preamble. "We need to loop legal and marketing. This is not a small leak." Her voice was flat, but her eyes were busy, working through lists. "Damian, I want a full sweep. Check staff, cameras, and anyone with access to his suite interiors. This is a precision hit, not some tabloid that grabbed a photo."
Damian's reply was short: "I'll do it myself." He met Alondra's eyes with something that was equal parts apology and promise. He didn't ask if she was scared; he assumed she was and treated the fear like it needed a plan.
Ezean's phone buzzed again. He read the message, and, for the first time since she'd met him, Alondra saw him reserve the fury that lived under his composed skin. The screen showed words that could mean nothing good. He set the phone face down, hands steady. "They're calling it a scandal," he said. "The board wants to know what I'm doing with airline staff. They want a statement, maybe a retraction, maybe a resignation. The chairman's temper will make things messy."
Alondra felt the world tilt. "Resignation," she repeated, like a child testing a new, dangerous word. "They'll—my job—what about the airline?" Panic pushed up in her throat, the sort that tastes of iron. "They can't fire me for two people being in the same room, can they?"
Ezean's eyes found hers, and something in them softened. He moved as if to reassure her and then paused, the calculation returning. "They can make your life very difficult," he said quietly. "They will say you broke policy, that it's unprofessional behavior. Some will want to protect the company's image, and you could be an easy scapegoat." His voice was blunt, not cruel. "I won't let that be simple for them, not if I can help it."
"You can't fix this with money," she said, and the words came out harsher than she meant. "You can't buy back a reputation."
"No," he said, and for once, the man who purchased companies could not pitch a solution like a sale, "but I can buy time and some space to breathe while we work. That matters. It's not nothing." He reached for her hand, and she let him; the touch was an anchor in a sea that was becoming too deep.
They tried to make a small life for a minute. Boots were taken off, scarves were draped over a chair, the kettle provided its hum like a domestic hymn, and for an hour the crisis became a thing they would talk about while waiting for a phone call—a thing to be managed. Ezean took calls that were strictly business, curt sentences laced into the night, while Ivy typed, eyes flying across a screen as if she could keep the narrative from mutating.
"You should call someone you trust," Ivy said finally, looking at Alondra like she could read the shape of her life. "A friend, family. If it goes public, they'll look for more than pictures. People love a story." It was more practical than kind.
Alondra's thumb hovered over her mother's name. Marisol, the woman who insisted on matchmakers and had spent half of Alondra's childhood trying to set her up with every cousin of every neighbor. She imagined her mother seeing the photo and imagined how loud that house would be with gossip and worry. She didn't want Marisol to find out like this; she had not wanted to become tomorrow's watercooler tragedy. But hiding felt like cowardice.
"Call her," Ezean said, steady, "let her hear it from you. Her voice will be a better anchor than anything I can provide."
She called. Marisol's voice was bewildered and then sharp with worry. "Mi vida, are you hurt? Who is he? Where are you?" For five minutes, Alondra spoke and soothed and lied in the smallest ways to keep her mother calm. She said she was safe, that it was a mistake, and that she would explain when things were quiet. She heard the small sounds of a kitchen, the tinkle of cups, the background voice of a neighbor, and the faint rattle that meant someone was already telling a story in the house.
"Tell me nothing," Marisol said finally, voice brittle. "I will go to the embassy. I will call your aunt. Don't you hang up." Alondra promised, and when she did, she felt like a child again, hollow and held by a hand she could always trust.
Privacy in the wing felt thin after the call. Ezean paced, and Alondra watched him like watching a storm shift at sea. He explained that the leak looked targeted. "Someone wanted to hit me at a vulnerable point," he said, "but it's not just about me. It's about distractions, leverage, and control. If they can humiliate me, they can make me look weak, and when a man like me looks weak, people make moves."
"Who benefits?" Alondra asked because plots needed architects, and knowing the enemy gives you leverage.
He shrugged, "Competitors, enemies within, a jealous board member, someone trying to force a buyout. It's a long list." He stopped and met her eyes. "It might even be someone inside my circle."
The idea settled like a cold stone inside her. "Someone inside," she said, thinking of Ivy, of Damian, of faces she had yet to meet. Her mouth tasted like metal.
Damian's sweep turned up nothing at first, but he was methodical. He checked the cameras, the maid roster, and the logs of who had access to the suite, and then he checked again. He scrolled through footage and timelines, scrubbing through hours, eyes narrowing until his jaw set. "There's a gap," he said at last, "between when the maid cleaned the suite and when the cameras were checked. A maintenance log shows someone entered the service corridor with badge access under a temp." He tapped the screen. "An ID that shouldn't be here."
Ivy's face sharpened. "Run that ID."
Damian did, and his mouth went thin. "It's been scrubbed," he said. "Fat-fingered, professional. Whoever did it knew how to hide a trace."
Alondra felt small and important all at once, like a secret ingredient that could ruin a cake. "So what now?" she asked, wiping her palms on her jeans, trying not to seem foolish.
Ezean sat down, all the corporate calm evaporating into plain worry. "We secure evidence, we pressure platforms for takedowns, we file a report, and we prepare for the board's tantrum. But there is a second thing." He stared at her. "We need to be ready for retaliation, not just online. Whoever did this may escalate."
"Retaliate how?" she breathed.
He didn't answer right away. The phone on the table buzzed, and Ivy checked it, eyes skimming. Her lips moved in a small line, and she looked up like she'd been punched. "Someone has posted a live feed to a small channel," she said. "It's low bandwidth, but the thumbnail is a clip that looks like"—she swallowed—"like surveillance. CCTV from a corridor outside the suite. It's being streamed to a private group."
The kettle hissed; the room seemed to lean in. Damian's face darkened. "That means someone with access to the building controls is publishing. This is internal."
Ezean's voice got thin. He pulled his phone back and opened an encrypted app, fingers working with practiced speed. "Pull the feed," he ordered. "Whoever is watching, trace them." He looked up at Alondra, eyes hard and suddenly fatherly. "I'm sorry."
"For what?" she asked.
"For dragging you into this."
"You dragged me into nothing," she said, but she felt like she had been dragged into everything. She thought of her mother, of Zara, of Rafael, of how hands reach for you when there's a leak and how some hands yank away to save their own skin.
The app on his phone flashed. The stream buffered. The thumbnail showed an ordinary corridor and a timestamp. Then, for a moment, a frame loaded—a sliver of a face in the background, and behind it, a blur that looked like a moving camera. Ivy cursed softly, and the screen went black.
Alondra's phone lit up with notifications. Her name trended in tags she didn't want, in comments that stripped privacy like clothes at a market. People speculated, people joked, and people assumed. Her mother called again, breathless and furious. "My daughter, people are talking; the neighbours have seen—they have put your picture on the internet."
Alondra's hand closed over her phone until her knuckles went white. She felt a long line of consequences spread out—the airline, her career, her family, and the quiet life she had tried to keep simple. And in the corner of the room, the phone on Ezean's table flipped over and buzzed again with a message that blurred the edges of the night into something like war.
Urgent, it read: INTERNAL BREACH. TRACE FOUND. PHASE II READY.
Alondra read the words, and the room tilted. She looked at Ezean, eyes wide with a fear that was new and very real. "Phase two," she repeated, tasting the phrase like a foreign warning. "What does that mean?"
He didn't answer because Ivy's phone shrieked, a shrill, mechanical sound that cut through the air. She glanced at it and then paled. "There's a live post on a platform with a small but influential channel," she said. "It's tagged with boarding numbers and flight data, and it's already being mirrored. They're selling the footage."
Damian's voice had steel now. "Mirror takedowns don't always work. We need the source, and then we need to contain whatever they have. If this is part of a coordinated hit, there will be more."
Alondra felt cold, a long hollow stretching beneath her ribs. "More," she said. "More what?"
Ezean's hand found hers across the table without ceremony, not protective in a possessive way but steady because there was no other steady thing in the room. "I don't know yet," he admitted, "but I will find out."
Outside the anonymous windows, the rain continued, indifferent, and the live stream count ticked up like a heartbeat. The room held its breath. Then the encrypted line on Ezean's phone flashed with a number she didn't know, and the caller ID read: BOARD CHAIRMAN.
He answered on speaker. The voice that came through was small and controlled, like an official in a war room. "Mr. Carter," the chairman said, "this is not acceptable. Explain yourself." Ezean's reply was measured, but the pause after it was full of everything he could not say. Alondra listened and felt the ground under her feet change into something that might swallow them both.
When the call ended, the chairman's last words echoed like a blow— "We will meet at dawn, and if this is true, there will be consequences."
The phone clicked off, and the room went quiet, the kind of quiet that means a storm has not passed but only shifted. Alondra's heart kicked hard against her ribs, and for the first time since the plane, she felt the weight of what they had done together. The leaked photo had been a mistake, an accident she'd never intended to make news, and now the mistake was not theirs alone to own.
The window reflected the face of Ezean as he stared at his phone, tight and small, and behind that reflection, she saw her own face, pale and line-broken. She wanted to be brave, to say she would stand and fight, but her voice felt small.
Damian moved to the door and checked the corridor, watching like a man who expects danger to taste like someone else's breath. Ivy opened another browser tab, fingers flying. Ezean sat back and finally breathed, not a solution but a pause.
Alondra squeezed his hand, tasting copper and rain, and whispered, "What do they want from you?"
He swallowed, looking at her like someone who had been holding an animal in his hands and suddenly realized the animal had teeth. "Control," he said simply. "And power."
The room held that word like an omen. On the table, the kettle clicked off, and the stream count on the live feed climbed another notch. Outside, a car horn sounded far away, and a shop window flashed its neon.
The phone on the table blinked with one more message, short and precise:
WE HAVE EVERYTHING. PHASE II STARTS IN 02:17.
The digits burned across the screen, and Alondra felt the air in the room thin, like the moment before a plane hits turbulence and the world leans into something it cannot predict.
They had two minutes to decide what to do with a future someone else was already choosing for them.