Olivia's POV
Sebastian's face told her everything.
He wasn't a man who scared easily. She had watched him walk into rooms full of hostile investors and come out with handshakes. She had watched him sit across from lawyers trying to dismantle his contracts and barely blink. In five years of marriage, she had seen Sebastian Cross rattled exactly twice and both times he recovered within seconds.
Right now he looked like someone had pulled the floor out from under him.
"You're sure," he said quietly. "Both companies. Same source."
"David is sure. David is never sure about anything until he's completely sure." She picked her phone back up. "I need to make calls. You should do the same."
Sebastian stood slowly. He moved to her window and looked down at the city below and she could see the calculation happening behind his eyes, all the variables rearranging themselves, all the implications landing one after another.
"I brought you into this," he said to the glass.
"I was already in it apparently." She was pulling up her contacts. "Whoever did this didn't wait for you to ask me for help. They moved on my company the same day they moved on yours. That means they planned this before you even walked through my door today."
Sebastian turned around. "Then coming to you was the right call."
"Coming to me put both our problems in the same room," she said. "I haven't decided yet if that's better or worse."
She called David back and spent twenty minutes getting every detail he had. The leaked emails were from eighteen months ago. Someone had been inside her private servers for a long time before pulling the trigger. The journalists running the story had received their information in a package, organized and labeled and ready to publish. Whoever put it together knew exactly which emails would look worst out of context.
This wasn't a leak. It was an execution.
When she hung up, Sebastian was still in her office.
"You should go," she said. "Both of us have fires starting. We can't put them out from the same location."
He nodded. He picked up his tablet from her desk. He walked toward the door and stopped without turning around.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I didn't know it was this bad when I came here. I thought it was just my company."
"I know," she said.
"Does that change your answer?"
She thought about it honestly. Her company was under coordinated attack. The safest thing to do was close ranks, trust nobody new, and handle it alone the way she had handled everything since her mother died and left her a company and an empty apartment and the particular loneliness of being responsible for things that mattered.
"I'll call you," she said. "Tonight."
Sebastian left.
Olivia stood at her window for a long time after that.
The story broke at 4 PM and it broke everywhere at once.
She watched it happen in real time from her desk. First the fashion blogs, then the business press, then the mainstream news picked it up because James Morrison had given a video interview that was timed perfectly for the evening cycle. He sat in front of a camera looking calm and reasonable and wronged and told the world that Olivia Grant had stolen design concepts from him, manipulated company records to cover it up, and used her late mother's name to shield herself from accountability.
He cried at one point. Actual tears.
Olivia's phone started ringing and didn't stop.
Retailers called to say they were pausing orders pending the investigation. Two called to say they were canceling entirely. Her PR team sent a group message that was barely coherent because they were all panicking at the same time. Her board chairman called and used the word concerned eleven times in four minutes.
Maya knocked and came in without waiting. "Three journalists are in the lobby demanding comment. Security won't let them up but they're saying if you don't respond by six PM they're running an even worse version of the story."
"Tell security to keep them there." Olivia's voice was completely steady. "And cancel everything on my calendar for tomorrow."
Maya nodded and left and Olivia turned back to her window.
Forty stories down, her city was moving the way it always moved, indifferent and fast and full of people who had no idea that eleven floors above them a woman was watching five years of rebuilt work start to crack.
She had been here before. Not this exact crisis but this exact feeling. The moment when the ground shifted and everything you thought was solid revealed itself as temporary. Her mother used to say that the difference between women who survived and women who didn't was what they did in the first hour after the earthquake.
Olivia had survived before.
She was going to survive this.
But she needed to know two things first. Who and why. Not eventually. Now.
She called David again at five thirty. He had more.
"Morrison didn't act alone," David said without preamble. "The video interview, the email package, the timing with Cross Tech, none of this is James Morrison's level of coordination. He's bitter and he's messy and he talks too much. Someone organized him. Someone gave him the material and told him exactly when to use it."
"Same person behind Sebastian's collapse."
"Almost certainly."
"Then Morrison is the weapon, not the person holding it."
"Yes." A pause. "Which means going after Morrison publicly is exactly what they want. It keeps you busy chasing the wrong target while the real one stays invisible."
Olivia sat down. She pressed her fingers to her temple and thought hard.
James Morrison making accusations was survivable. James Morrison as the distraction for something larger was a different problem entirely. If she spent the next month publicly fighting a man who was just a decoy, whoever was actually pulling the strings had ninety clear days to finish destroying both companies.
Her phone buzzed with a news alert.
Cross Tech stock had dropped another six percent since close of market.
She looked at the number. Thought about Sebastian's face when she told him someone was behind both attacks simultaneously. Thought about the color leaving his skin.
Then she thought about David's words from that afternoon. The safest thing she could do was handle it alone. The smartest thing she could do was probably something else entirely.
She pulled up Sebastian's contact. She stared at his name for a long time.
In five years of marriage she had called him first for almost nothing. Business decisions, yes. Logistics, yes. But the real things, the scary things, the moments when she needed another person to be in the problem with her, she had always handled alone because Sebastian's walls were so high that asking felt pointless.
She had spent three months learning to stop reaching for the phone to call him.
She picked it up and called him now.
He answered on the first ring. She didn't say hello. She didn't ask how he was or whether it was a good time or any of the things that people said when they were trying to soften what came next.
"I need the money," she said. "Five million. David negotiates the contract. Three months. After that we're completely done." She took one breath. "Yes or no."
The silence lasted two seconds.
"Yes," Sebastian said.
She ended the call.
She set the phone down on her desk and stared at it.
Her company was under attack. The man she had spent three months trying to stop thinking about was now her business partner. Someone dangerous was moving against both of them and laughing, she was almost certain, at how neatly everything was falling into place.
Everything about this situation was wrong.
Her phone lit up with a text from an unsaved number.
She almost ignored it. She was exhausted and her brain was already past capacity and unknown numbers had not treated her kindly recently.
She opened it anyway.
The message was four words.
You called him. Good.
Olivia's blood went cold.
She looked around her office instinctively, which was ridiculous because she was on the fortieth floor and completely alone, but the message felt that close. That immediate. Like whoever sent it was watching the exact moment she picked up the phone.
She typed back with steady fingers. Who are you?
The response came in seconds.
Someone who needs you both in the same building. You just made that happen. Thank you, Ms. Grant.
Her chair scraped back. She stood up. She went to her window and looked down at the street and then at the buildings across from her, at a hundred dark and lit windows staring back.
Someone had wanted this. Not just the attacks. This. Her and Sebastian together. Working the same problem from the same location.
They hadn't stumbled into a trap.
They had been guided into one.
And she had just locked the door from the inside.