CHAPTER 7 — CASSIAN'S PLAN
The lounge was the kind of place where secrets stayed buried not because people knew how to keep them, but because everyone was too afraid to dig.
Dim amber light spilled from low-hung chandeliers, casting shadows across velvet booths. Private corners. Hidden angles. A perfect place for the kind of meeting that shouldn't exist.
Cassian Ward sat alone at the back, a glass of scotch untouched in front of him.
He had the face of a man who smiled rarely and trusted no one. Sharp cheekbones. Dark hair perfectly styled. A tailored suit that screamed wealth and danger. His expression was calm, controlled almost bored.
But his eyes?
His eyes were murder.
A server approached, nervously placing a new drink beside him before fleeing without a word. Cassian didn't look up. He didn't have to.
He sensed her before she arrived.
Liora Vale slid into the booth like a whisper sleek, elegant, lethal. Her heels made no sound. Her perfume lingered like poison wrapped in silk.
Her smile was slow, dangerous.
"You chose a dramatic spot," she purred.
"I chose privacy," Cassian replied, voice steady as stone. "Drama was inevitable."
Liora tilted her head, studying him.
"She knows something," she said. "Doesn't she?"
Cassian's jaw tightened. "Arielle always knew too much."
"Or maybe," Liora countered, leaning forward, "someone finally told her enough."
Cassian's expression didn't shift, but something cold slid through his tone.
"She's too close to him. Too comfortable."
"Damian?" Liora's smile widened. "We knew she'd run to him eventually. She always does."
Cassian's fingers tightened around his glass.
"She's emotional. Soft. Predictable. But Damian? He isn't predictable at all. That's the problem."
Liora rested an elbow on the table and shrugged lightly.
"Then what do you want to do?"
Cassian's gaze turned razor sharp.
"She can't know the truth about the accident."
Liora's eyes flickered with dark amusement.
"Oh, darling. If she's getting close…" She reached for her drink, swirling the liquid. "Then we make sure she pays for it."
Cassian didn't smile. But something cruel flashed in his expression.
"Subtle," he ordered. "Untraceable. She needs to feel watched. Unsafe. She needs to question everything around her."
"Fear is always effective," Liora murmured. "Especially for someone like her."
Cassian leaned back, arms crossed.
"She thinks the world is still kind."
His voice was cold enough to frost glass.
"She needs to learn it isn't."
Liora arched an eyebrow. "You sound almost… emotional about this."
Cassian laughed once a short, humorless sound.
"Emotional? No. But she is becoming a liability. And liabilities are problems. And problems…" He paused, sipping his scotch. "…are solved."
Liora traced her finger along the rim of her glass.
"And what about Damian?"
Cassian's eyes hardened further.
"He'll protect her. He always does. That's why we go through her first."
A beat.
"If he's distracted, he won't see the rest of the plan unfolding."
Liora's lips curled into a wicked smile.
"You've always been good at playing the long game."
"It's not a game," Cassian corrected.
"It's survival."
Arielle felt it immediately.
Not in one big moment, not in a sudden explosion of chaos but in a hundred small shifts that didn't make sense.
Her access card flickered red instead of green when she entered the office that morning. The security guard had to manually override, his brow furrowed. "System glitch, Miss Stone. Happening a lot this week."
Her calendar had rearranged itself overnight. A critical meeting with Japanese investors was deleted. In its place, blocked from 10 AM to noon: "Personal Time – Do Not Disturb." She never scheduled it.
Her phone buzzed constantly with the soft chime of notifications, but when she swiped down, the screen was empty. No new emails. No messages. Just the ghost of alerts.
At her desk, her laptop took an unnaturally long time to boot. When it finally flickered to life, her familiar background a photo of her parents on the sailboat, smiling into the sun was gone. Replaced with a flat, depthless black.
Her stomach twisted. She never changed that background. Couldn't bear to.
She pulled open her top desk drawer, searching for a thumb drive. Her father's old Montblanc fountain pen, the one he'd given her when she'd gotten into Harvard, always lay in its leather case in the left corner. The case was there. Unzipped. The pen was gone.
She never left it unzipped. She never took the pen out.
A cold, metallic taste filled her mouth. Someone had been here. In her space. Touching her things. Not to steal, but to unsettle. To whisper, I can reach you anywhere.
Her assistant, Jenna, bustled in at noon with a salad, her usual cheerful chatter dying on her lips when she saw Arielle's face. "You look like someone tried to murder your soul," Jenna said, setting the food down carefully.
Arielle's voice was barely a whisper. "Someone broke into my office."
Jenna froze, the color draining from her freckled cheeks. "What?"
Haltingly, Arielle listed the violations the card, the calendar, the phantom notifications, the missing pen. "And last night," she finished, her throat tight, "after I got home… a text. From an unknown number. It said, 'The past has teeth. Stop digging before it bites.'" She didn't mention Damian's kiss, the briefcase, his ominous text. Those secrets were a knot too tangled to expose.
Jenna's eyes were wide with alarm. "Arielle… you need to tell Mr. Cross. This is corporate security stuff. Harassment."
"No." The refusal was sharp, instinctive. "Not yet." She couldn't go to Damian. Not when he was at the center of the storm, not when his kiss had rewritten her internal compass, not when her father's recording had painted Liora Damian's shadow as the true enemy. Trusting him felt like stepping onto a bridge she'd just watched him splice with wire cutters.
Jenna opened her mouth to argue, but Arielle's phone, lying face-up on the desk, buzzed again. Not the usual chime. This was a long, sustained, angry vibration, as if the device itself were furious.
They both stared at it.
The screen lit up. No sender ID. No number. Just text, stark white on black.
You don't know who to trust…
Arielle's heart hammered against her ribs, a painful, frantic drum.
The text pulsed, then added a final, terrible line:
…but I do.
The last two words flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then the entire message dissolved, pixel by pixel, leaving the screen dark and empty, as if it had never been.
Arielle recoiled, knocking her chair back. Jenna grabbed her arm, her grip tight. "Arielle who is doing this?"
Arielle's whisper was the sound of splintering ice. "I think someone is trying to break me."
The afternoon became a masterpiece of psychological torture. A presentation she'd spent days on had its crucial data slides replaced with corrupted files. A courier delivered a bouquet of black lilies to her desk with a card that read, "Condolences for your loss of direction." The floral scent, thick and funereal, made her nauseous.
Worst was the silence from Damian. He didn't summon her. He didn't check in. He moved through the office like a sovereign, distant and untouchable. Once, their eyes met through the glass wall of a conference room. He was in a meeting, speaking calmly, but his gaze held hers for a beat too long. It wasn't concern she saw. It was assessment. As if he were evaluating the damage.
Was he the architect of this? Letting Liora and Cassian soften her up? Or was he, as her father's recording suggested, a target himself, and this was pressure aimed at him through her?
Paranoia, a vine with thorns, began to climb her spine.
At 6 PM, defeated, she packed her bag. The missing pen felt like a physical wound. As she slipped her laptop into its case, she noticed a tiny, almost imperceptible smudge on the lid a partial fingerprint in what looked like grey dust. Conduit grease, her mind supplied, the kind used in server rooms and high-end security systems. The kind someone like Cassian Ward, with his military-tech background, would know how to use without leaving clear prints.
She was being herded. The sabotage wasn't random; it was a message written in a language of dread. We own the systems. We own your space. We own your fear.
Instead of going home to the echoing mansion, she drove to the only place that felt like a sanctuary now: her father's old sailing shed down at the marina. It was a rustic, salt-weathered building filled with the ghosts of varnish and rope, untouched by the sleek cruelty of her new world.
She needed to think. To breathe air not filtered through Stone Global's vents.
Inside, under the weak glow of a single hanging bulb, she finally opened her father's briefcase. She bypassed the recorder for now hearing his frightened voice again would shatter her. Instead, she spread the financial documents on a workbench. The list of offshore accounts. The note about Damian's "insurance."
Her father's handwriting next to one account, "C.W. – Zurich – Watch this one."
C.W. Cassian Ward.
Her blood ran cold. Her father had been watching Cassian. And if Damian had "insurance," perhaps it was insurance against Cassian.
The pieces were not fitting the picture she'd assembled. The enemy wasn't a single man. It was a triangle: Damian, Liora, Cassian. A deadly alliance, or a deadly rivalry? And where did her parents fit in the center?
The shed door creaked open.
Arielle spun, a heavy wrench from the bench already in her hand.
Silhouetted against the indigo twilight was Damian.
He wasn't in a suit. He wore dark jeans and a charcoal sweater, hands buried in his pockets. He looked both more human and more dangerous. He took in the scene: her wild eyes, the wrench, the papers scattered like fallen leaves.
"Jenna was worried," he said, his voice quiet. "She said you were… unsettled. I checked your location." He didn't apologize for the invasion. "This is the only place you'd come."
"Get out." The words trembled.
He stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. "The sabotage. The messages. It's not me, Arielle."
"Then who?" she cried, the wrench lowering slightly. "Liora? Your liaison?"
A flicker of surprise, then grim understanding, crossed his face. "You found your father's recording."
"He was afraid of you! He said you were threatening him!"
"I was trying to warn him!" Damian's voice cracked with a frustration so raw it stunned her. "He'd stumbled onto Cassian's side-deals with Thorne Securitas. Deals that would have mortgaged this company's future for black ops contracts. I told him to back off, to let me handle it. He thought I was part of it. He didn't trust me anymore." He ran a hand over his face, the weariness profound. "The 'insurance' he held on me? It was proof I was cleaning up Cassian's mess, using unapproved funds to buy back stolen patents. Your father thought it was embezzlement. It was damage control."
He was offering a new narrative, one where he was the loyal soldier doing dirty work to save the kingdom, misunderstood by his king. It was plausible. It fit the evidence in a different, horrifying way.
"And the accident?" she whispered, the heart of the wound.
His eyes held hers, dark with a pain that looked ancient. "I think Cassian knew your father was getting close. I think he made a move. I've been trying to prove it for months. That's what the payment to Pantheon was not to kill, but to investigate Varga, to turn him. It backfired. Spectacularly." He took a step closer. "The person terrorizing you isn't trying to silence you about me, Arielle. They're trying to silence you about him. You're getting close without even realizing it."
The world spun. Was he telling the truth? Or was this the most sophisticated lie of all framing Cassian, playing the protector, while the real killer stood before her, close enough to touch?
Her grip on the wrench tightened. "Why should I believe you?"
He stopped an arm's length away. "Because you want to," he said, his voice dropping to a husk. "And because I'm the only one who can keep you alive long enough to find out. Cassian's plan isn't just to scare you. It's to isolate you. To make you doubt everything and everyone. Especially me. And then, when you're utterly alone and panicked…" He left the sentence hanging, its conclusion more terrifying than any explicit threat.
The shed was silent save for the distant lap of water and the frantic beat of her heart. The space between them hummed with all that was unsaid: the kiss, the betrayal, the possibility of a different truth.
"What do I do?" The question was a surrender.
"You come with me," he said. "Now. Not to the mansion. To a safe place. And you let me do what I should have done from the beginning: protect you without restraint."
It was the offer of the wolf to walk into its den for safety. The ultimate paradox.
Before she could answer, her phone, still on the workbench, lit up. A video call request. From Selene.
With a numb finger, Arielle accepted.
Selene's face filled the screen, tear-streaked, her back against what looked like a concrete wall. She was in a parking garage.
"Arielle," she sobbed, the sound jagged with panic. "He has me. Cassian. He says if you go with Damian, he'll kill me. He says you have to choose. Right now."
The screen jostled, and Cassian's face appeared over Selene's shoulder. His expression was calm, pleasant even. "Hello, Arielle. Time to decide. The loyal friend? Or the dangerous lover? Your choice will tell me everything I need to know."
The call went dead.
In the silence of the shed, Damian's phone buzzed. He glanced at it, his face hardening into a mask of lethal fury. He showed her the screen. A single photo, taken from afar through a long lens: the two of them, right now, standing in the shed. Below it, a message from Cassian:
The game is everywhere, Damian. Even in your sanctuaries. Send her out. Alone. Or the redhead drowns.
Arielle looked from Damian's enraged face to the wrench in her hand, to the ghost of her father's documents between them. Cassian wasn't just breaking her. He was forcing her to choose which version of the truth to believe, with Selene's life as the price for the wrong answer. The plan wasn't sabotage. It was a sacrifice.