Olivia's POV
She never did find out who sent that photo.
Three months later, Olivia still thought about it sometimes. Late at night when the office was quiet and the city below was just lights and noise, she would open her email, stare at that picture of Sebastian in the alley with the heavyset man, and wonder what she was supposed to do with it.
Nothing, she had decided. She was supposed to do nothing.
She had deleted the unknown number's messages. She had closed that door and locked it and thrown the key somewhere she couldn't easily find. Sebastian Cross was her past. The Grant Group was her present. And her present, for once, was actually looking decent.
She leaned back in her chair and looked at the numbers on her screen.
Quarterly earnings were up eleven percent. The fashion line her team launched in February was moving faster than anyone expected. Three major retailers had renewed contracts that James Morrison's betrayal nearly destroyed. The company was breathing again, steadily and on its own, and that felt like something close to a miracle after everything she had been through.
She let herself feel good about it for exactly forty five seconds.
Then her intercom buzzed.
"Ms. Grant." Her assistant Maya's voice was tight in a specific way that meant something was wrong. Not emergency wrong. Complicated wrong. "There's someone at reception who doesn't have an appointment."
Olivia didn't look up from her screen. "Then they need to make one."
"I told him that."
Him. Olivia's fingers stopped moving over her keyboard.
"He said to tell you it's urgent. He said..." Maya paused like she was reading something. "He said to tell you he has nowhere else to go."
The room felt different suddenly. Like the temperature dropped two degrees.
Olivia knew those words. She had heard them before, in a different context, years ago, when Sebastian Cross first walked into her life with a business proposal and the kind of quiet desperation that powerful men were very good at hiding. He had said those exact words that day. I have nowhere else to go. She had thought he was being dramatic.
She had been wrong about a lot of things where Sebastian was concerned.
"Pull up the lobby camera," she said, keeping her voice steady.
"Already on your secondary monitor."
Olivia turned to the smaller screen on her left and looked.
Her first thought was that it wasn't him. The man standing at her reception desk was too thin. Too tired. Sebastian Cross was always the most put together person in any room, the kind of man who looked like he had never experienced a bad day, like sleep came easily and worry simply bounced off him.
This man had shadows under his eyes so dark they looked like bruises. His shoulders were slightly curved inward like something heavy had been pressing on them for a long time. He was still in an expensive suit but it hung wrong on him, like he had lost weight since it was fitted.
Her second thought was that it was absolutely him.
Her third thought was that she needed to send him away immediately.
"Tell him I'm in a meeting," Olivia said.
Thirty seconds of silence from the intercom.
Then Maya's voice came back quieter. "Ms. Grant, he says he'll wait. He says he can wait as long as it takes."
Olivia pressed two fingers against her forehead and breathed.
She watched him on the monitor. Sebastian was standing still at the reception desk, not pacing, not checking his phone, not doing any of the things impatient powerful men usually did when they were kept waiting. He was just standing there. Hands at his sides. Eyes on the elevator. Waiting.
It was the stillness that got to her. Sebastian was never still like that. He was always moving, always thinking three conversations ahead, always angled slightly toward the exit like he was ready to leave before he had finished arriving.
Right now he looked like a man who had used up everything he had just getting here.
Olivia stood up. She sat back down. She looked at her quarterly report with its eleven percent increase and her renewed contracts and all the evidence of a life successfully rebuilt without him.
She pressed the intercom. "Send him up."
She regretted it before Maya even responded.
She used the two minutes it took for the elevator to reach her floor to straighten her desk and her expression and remind herself of several important facts. One, she and Sebastian were divorced. Two, whatever had brought him here was his problem, not hers. Three, she owed him nothing. Not sympathy, not help, not five minutes of her rebuilt and carefully arranged life.
The elevator opened.
She heard the doors before she saw him because she had turned her chair back toward her window, a deliberate choice, a power move, the kind of thing she had learned in the years after her mother died when she had to walk into rooms full of men twice her age who had already decided she was too young and too female to run anything.
She heard his footsteps cross her office floor.
She heard Maya say something and then the door close.
She counted to five, then turned around.
Sebastian was standing in the middle of her office and whatever she had prepared herself for, it wasn't this. The monitor had told her he looked tired. Being in the same room with him told her something worse. He looked like a man who had been fighting something alone for a very long time and was only just now admitting he was losing.
For one unguarded second, something in her chest pulled toward him.
She killed it quickly.
"You don't have an appointment," she said.
"I know." His voice was rougher than she remembered. "I'm sorry."
"You should have called."
"You would have said no."
She would have. He was right and they both knew it, and the fact that he knew it meant he had thought carefully about how to get in front of her before she could stop him. That was the old Sebastian underneath all that exhaustion. Still calculating. Still finding the angle.
"What do you want?" she asked.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a tablet. He walked to her desk and set it down in front of her without a word. Olivia looked at the screen.
Cross Tech's stock chart filled the display. She didn't need to be a tech analyst to understand what she was looking at. The line that should have been climbing was in free fall, sharp and ugly, like something had cut straight through the foundation of his company and everything was caving in from the bottom up.
Numbers she hadn't seen since their merger days flashed across the top. Billions. With a B. Evaporating.
She looked up at him. "When did this start?"
"Ten days ago. A major client pulled their contract. Something about hidden debts from my father's operations. Information they were never supposed to have." His jaw tightened. "Someone gave it to them."
"Who?"
"That's what I need to figure out." He looked at her directly for the first time since he had walked in. "I need help. Not just any help. I need someone who understands both sides, the business mechanics and the personal damage. Someone who has rebuilt something that was being destroyed from inside."
Olivia understood what he was saying before he finished saying it.
"No," she said.
"Olivia."
"Absolutely not."
"I know what I'm asking."
"Do you?" She stood up because sitting felt wrong suddenly, felt like she was at a disadvantage, and she was never at a disadvantage in her own office. "You're asking me to walk back into your world three months after I finally got out of it. You're asking me to spend time with you, work alongside you, pretend the last five years didn't happen and we're just two professionals with a problem to solve."
Sebastian didn't say anything. He just looked at her with those exhausted eyes and waited.
That was the thing about him that had always undone her. He never pushed when she was angry. He just got very quiet and let her feel the full weight of the decision herself.
She hated that about him.
She hated that it still worked.
"Give me one reason," she said. "One real reason I should help you."
Sebastian opened his mouth.
Before he could speak, Olivia's phone lit up on her desk. She glanced at it out of habit.
It was a news alert. Her own name, bold in the headline. She picked it up and read the first three lines and felt the blood leave her face.
The Grant Group Fashion Scandal Resurfaces. Designer Olivia Grant Accused of Design Theft. Former Partner James Morrison Releases Evidence.
Her eleven percent. Her renewed contracts. Her carefully rebuilt life.
All of it, starting to burn.
She looked up at Sebastian still standing across her desk, watching her read, and she realized with a sick dropping feeling in her stomach that he already knew. He had known when he walked in here. He had known when he put that tablet on her desk.
They were both on fire at the same time.
And somehow they had ended up in the same room.
"When do we start?" she heard herself say.
Sebastian's expression shifted, just slightly, just enough for her to catch it before he controlled it again.
It wasn't relief. It was something deeper and more painful than relief. Something that looked, just for a second, like a man who had been afraid he was going to lose the most important thing in his life.
Then it was gone and he was back to being unreadable.
"Monday," he said. "Eight AM."
Olivia nodded and looked back at her phone and the burning headline and tried to convince herself she had just made a smart business decision.
She almost believed it.
Almost.