Olivia's POV
Monday was four days away and Sebastian was still standing in her office.
That was the problem. He had said his piece. She had said her answer. The conversation was finished. He should have picked up his tablet and walked back to his elevator and returned to his crumbling empire to figure things out the way powerful men always did, quietly and alone and without her.
Instead he was standing on the other side of her desk watching her read the same news headline over and over like reading it enough times would change what it said.
She put her phone face down.
"How bad is it," she said. Not a question. More like someone bracing before a doctor gave them results.
Sebastian sat down across from her, which she hadn't invited him to do, but she didn't say anything about it. "Cross Tech is hemorrhaging contracts. Three more clients are scheduled to meet with my board this week. Every meeting is a chance for someone else to walk. If I lose two of the three, my stock drops below the point where my creditors can demand early repayment on loans my father took out." He said it all flatly, like he was reading ingredients off a box. No emotion. No panic. Just facts. "If that happens, the company folds within sixty days."
Sixty days.
Olivia had been in the room when the Grant Group was given forty eight hours before its first bankruptcy review. She knew what a countdown felt like from the inside. She knew the particular cold that settled in your bones when you realized time was the enemy and it was already running.
She looked at him. "And you came to me."
"I came to you."
"Not your board. Not your legal team. Not any of the six hundred people who work for you and get paid specifically to solve problems like this."
"I have all of those," Sebastian said. "They haven't found the leak yet. They haven't identified who fed the information to my client. They've been working on it for ten days and they have nothing." A pause. "You looked at our merger documents five years ago and found three accounting errors my team missed in four months. You saw the problem in twenty minutes."
Olivia remembered that. She also remembered how pleased he had looked when she found them. Not pleased with her. Pleased in the way someone is pleased when a machine performs exactly as expected.
She pushed that thought away.
"What exactly are you asking me to do," she said. "Specifically. Walk me through it."
Sebastian leaned forward slightly. "Come into Cross Tech for ninety days as a strategic consultant. Full access to internal records, financial reports, communications. You work with my operations team and you find where the damage is coming from. You help rebuild investor confidence from the outside while I manage it from the inside." He held her gaze. "Five million dollars when the three months are done, regardless of outcome. David Chen can draw up whatever contract protects you."
The mention of David's name surprised her. Sebastian had never liked David much during their marriage. Too blunt, he used to say. Too loyal to Olivia specifically.
"You already thought about David," she said slowly.
"I thought about everything you would need to feel safe saying yes."
Something about that sentence sat differently than she expected. Not manipulative, exactly. More like a man who had mapped out every possible obstacle between himself and what he needed and removed them one by one before asking.
She stood up and walked to her window. Forty stories below, New York was doing what it always did, moving fast and not caring about anyone's personal disasters.
"If I come in," she said to the glass, "it changes nothing between us personally. We are two professionals with a financial agreement. You don't get to look at me the way you were looking at me ten minutes ago."
"How was I looking at you?"
She turned around. "Like I'm something you lost."
Sebastian didn't answer right away. That was its own kind of answer.
"Agreed," he said finally. "Strictly professional."
She almost believed him. She almost believed herself too.
She walked back to her desk and picked up her phone to call David and stopped because something was bothering her. Something she couldn't place yet, like a word stuck on the tip of her tongue.
She looked at Sebastian. "How did you know?"
"Know what?"
"That my scandal was breaking today." She watched his face carefully. "You came here this morning. The news alert came while you were already in my building. Either that was a coincidence, which I don't believe in, or you knew it was coming before it happened."
Something moved behind Sebastian's eyes. Quick. Controlled. Gone before she could fully read it.
"I heard things," he said carefully.
"What things?"
"Rumors. People in certain circles talking about Grant Group vulnerability." He kept his voice even. "I wanted to get here before the news did."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want you to be alone when it hit."
The room got very quiet.
Olivia stared at him. In five years of marriage she could count on one hand the number of times Sebastian had said something that made her feel seen. Actually seen. Not as his business arrangement or his publicly perfect wife, but as a person who might need something as simple as company during a hard moment.
She wanted to believe him. That was the dangerous part.
She was trying to decide what to say when her phone rang.
Not a buzz. A full ring, loud and insistent, the specific ringtone she had set for David Chen because David never called without a reason.
She answered immediately. "David, I was just about to call you."
"Don't talk, just listen." David's voice was stripped of its usual dry humor. He sounded like a man who had been running. "I just got off the phone with two sources inside the financial press. The story breaking about Morrison and your designs is bigger than we thought. They're not just running the old accusations. Someone gave them new material, Olivia. Specific internal emails. Private development notes. Things that were only ever on your secured company servers."
She felt ice move through her. "That's not possible."
"It happened. Which means someone got inside your system. Not recently either. This was planned. These emails are from eighteen months ago." A pause that lasted too long. "There's more."
"Tell me."
"The same source that leaked your emails also fed information to Cross Tech's major client. The client who just pulled their contract." David's voice dropped lower. "Olivia, I think someone orchestrated both hits at the same time. I think your scandal and Sebastian's collapse were planned together. By the same person."
The phone felt suddenly very heavy in her hand.
She looked up at Sebastian sitting across from her desk, watching her face with that careful unreadable expression she had spent five years trying to decode.
He didn't know. She could see that he didn't know. Whatever he had heard in his circles, he hadn't heard this.
Someone had attacked them both simultaneously. Coordinated. Calculated. Personal.
Which meant this wasn't random bad luck landing on two separate people.
This was someone who wanted them both destroyed at the same time, someone who knew that the fastest way to break Sebastian Cross was to make sure Olivia Grant was burning beside him, someone who understood, better than either of them had admitted to themselves, that they were still connected even after the divorce papers were signed and filed and supposedly final.
"David," she said slowly, "find out who."
"Already on it. But Olivia, listen to me carefully. If I'm right about this, then whoever is behind it knows things about both of you that they shouldn't. Private things. Inside information."
She understood what he wasn't quite saying.
The leak came from someone close. Close to her. Close to Sebastian. Maybe close to both of them.
She ended the call and set her phone down.
Sebastian was already leaning forward in his chair. He had read enough in her face to know something had shifted. "What happened?"
Olivia looked at him for a long moment. Her ex-husband. The man she had signed away. The man who showed up at her door looking like he hadn't slept in weeks, who somehow knew her scandal was coming before she did, who had apparently thought carefully about everything she would need to feel safe saying yes.
A man who might be the reason she was under attack.
Or a man who was under attack for exactly the same reason she was.
She genuinely didn't know which one it was. And that terrified her more than anything David had just said.
"We have a much bigger problem than either of us realized," she said.
Sebastian's jaw tightened. "How much bigger?"
She looked him straight in the eye. "Someone is trying to destroy us both. Together. At the same time. On purpose."
The color left Sebastian's face.
And for the first time since he had walked through her door, he looked truly, completely afraid.