Olivia's POV
She called him at 11:58 PM and didn't say hello.
"I need the money," she said the moment he picked up. "Five million. David negotiates the contract. I work for three months and then we're done. Those are my terms. Yes or no."
Two seconds of silence.
"Yes," Sebastian said.
She hung up before he could say anything else.
She sat in her dark apartment staring at her phone and told herself this was purely financial. Her company was bleeding. His money would stop the bleeding. It was mathematics, not emotion. Simple addition. She was adding a resource to solve a problem and the fact that the resource happened to be her ex-husband was irrelevant and she was fine with it and she was going to sleep now.
She did not sleep.
Monday morning arrived gray and cold and Olivia was outside the Cross Tech building at seven forty-five because she refused to be late to something she had already almost talked herself out of four times since midnight.
She almost turned around at the corner.
The scene outside Sebastian's building stopped her completely.
There were cameras everywhere. News vans double-parked along both sides of the street. Protesters with signs paced the sidewalk in a ragged line, their breath making small clouds in the cold air. A group of investors in expensive coats stood near the entrance arguing loudly with two security guards. Someone was yelling Sebastian's name through a megaphone from across the street.
His company was dying publicly, loudly, in front of cameras that would broadcast every moment of it.
Olivia had lived through her own version of this two years ago when James Morrison first started dismantling the Grant Group from the inside. She remembered what it felt like to walk into her own building while people whispered and cameras tracked her movements and everyone waited to see if she would break.
She hadn't broken then.
She walked straight through Sebastian's lobby doors now with her shoulders back and her face completely neutral and ignored every single camera pointed at her.
The lobby was controlled chaos. Security personnel were redirecting people. Assistants moved fast with tablets and earpieces. Phones rang from three different directions. Three men in suits were having a tense quiet argument near the elevator bank that stopped when Olivia walked past them.
She recognized one of them. Senior board member. He looked at her like she was a surprise he hadn't been told about.
Good. Surprises kept people honest.
The elevator opened on the executive floor and Sebastian was already there.
He was standing in the hallway outside his conference room with his phone to his ear and dark circles under his eyes that were somehow worse than Friday. He saw her the moment the doors opened and something in his expression shifted, not relief exactly, more like a man who had been staring at a problem for days and suddenly saw the path through it.
He ended his call without finishing it.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would." She walked past him toward the conference room. "Where's David?"
"He's on his way up. He called from the lobby ten minutes ago."
"Good. We're not signing anything until he's in the room." She pushed the conference room door open and stopped.
Eight people were already seated around the table. All men. All older than her. All wearing the particular expression of people who had been told something unexpected was happening and hadn't decided yet whether they approved.
Olivia set her bag on the table and sat down like she had always belonged there.
Sebastian came in behind her and went to the head of the table. He didn't offer explanations or introductions. "This is Olivia Grant. She's consulting with us for the next three months. She has full access to everything. Any questions go through me."
Silence.
One of the men, gray-haired with a tight mouth, leaned forward. "With respect, Mr. Cross, bringing your ex-wife into a sensitive crisis situation seems like a significant conflict of interest."
"It would be," Sebastian said, "if I had a better option. I don't. Next question."
Nobody spoke.
David walked in three minutes later carrying a contract folder and looking like a man who had also not slept. He sat beside Olivia and slid the folder across to Sebastian's lawyer without small talk.
The contract negotiation took forty minutes. Olivia let David handle it. She spent the time studying the faces around the table, reading who was uncomfortable with her presence and who was quietly relieved and who was already calculating something she couldn't see yet.
There was one man at the far end of the table she kept coming back to. Young for this room, maybe mid thirties, very still, very watchful. He wasn't reacting to anything. Most people in tense rooms overreacted, tiny facial movements, small shifts in posture, the usual human signs of stress. This man was just watching. Watching Sebastian. Watching her. Filing things away.
She made a mental note and moved on.
The contract was finalized. David slid it to her. She read every line herself, slowly, while the room waited, and signed at the bottom.
Sebastian signed across from her.
Then he stood and extended his hand across the table.
A handshake. Professional. Appropriate. The correct thing to do when two business partners made an agreement official.
Olivia stood and reached across and took his hand.
The problem was immediate and she was furious about it.
His hand was warm. She had forgotten how warm his hands always were, even in winter, even in cold rooms, like he ran on a different temperature than everyone else. And the moment his fingers closed around hers, something shot straight up her arm and landed somewhere in her chest before she could stop it.
She kept her face completely still.
Sebastian's grip was firm and brief and professional and his face was unreadable and everything about the handshake was exactly correct and lasted exactly the right amount of time and she was going to pull her hand back now.
She didn't pull her hand back.
He didn't let go either.
It was less than two seconds total but in that thin slice of time, the boardroom full of watching men and the cameras outside and the contracts and the five million dollars all blurred out and it was just his hand in her hand and five years of everything they had never said sitting right there in the space between them.
Then Olivia pulled away.
She sat down and opened her notebook and clicked her pen and said, "I'll need the last eighteen months of internal communications by end of day. All department heads, not just operations."
The meeting continued. Nobody mentioned the handshake.
Olivia did not look at Sebastian for the next twenty minutes.
She was reviewing a financial document David passed her when she noticed it. A small thing. The corner of a printed email peeking out from under the gray-haired board member's folder. The letterhead was familiar in a way that made her stomach tighten. She couldn't see the full header from where she was sitting but the font, the specific shade of blue, the layout structure...
She had seen that letterhead before. Not at Cross Tech.
At Grant Group.
Her company's internal letterhead. On a document. Sitting inside a Cross Tech board member's folder. In a room she had walked into thirteen minutes ago.
Her pen kept moving across her notepad like nothing had happened. She kept her breathing even. She did not look at the document again because looking again would signal that she had noticed.
Her heart was going very fast.
Someone in this room had papers from inside her company. Her private company. Which meant the connection David suspected wasn't just theoretical anymore. The two attacks weren't just coordinated from the outside.
Someone in Sebastian's inner circle was directly involved in destroying her.
She was sitting in a room with them right now, shaking hands and signing contracts, and they thought she hadn't seen a thing.
She wrote four words at the bottom of her notepad and turned it slightly so only David could see.
Check who hired you.
David's eyes dropped to the notepad. She watched his jaw tighten by a fraction.
Across the table, the quiet watchful man at the far end was looking at her again.
Olivia looked back at him calmly and smiled like a woman who was exactly where she wanted to be.
She was going to find every single one of them.