Page 1 of Hostile

CHAPTER ONE

MEGAN: PRESENT

Ten years is a long time to wait for anything.

For most people, a decade passes in the blur of ordinary life—marriages, mortgages, children born, teeth lost, and first days of school. Time moves differently when you spend it sharpening something. When every decision you make, every dollar you earn, and every relationship you carefully keep at arm’s length serves a single, driving purpose.

Ten years. And today, it begins.

I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of my corner office on the forty-second floor, watching Manhattan move below me as it always did—indifferent, relentless, alive. The city had no idea what was happening inside this building right now. It didn’t care. That was one of the things I loved most about New York. It never asked where you came from, whose daughter you were, or which side of the iron gate you grew up on. It only asked what you could do.

I could do this.

My phone buzzed on my desk. The alert I’d set up three weeks ago—the one that read Aldridge Commercial—opening bell. His name wasn’t in it. It didn’t need to be.

Wyatt Spencer Aldridge.

I hadn’t said it out loud in ten years. I didn’t say it now. But it moved through me the way it always had when I let it—less like a thought, more like a tide. Something that arrived with its own pull and momentum and passed through whether you wanted it to or not.

I pressed two fingers against the cool glass and waited for it to pass.

It passed.

It always passed.

I’d made sure of that.

“The market opens in four minutes.” My assistant, Dana, appeared in the doorway, her tablet clutched to her chest and her expression carefully neutral. She’d worked for me long enough to know that when I stood at that window before the bell, I didn’t want conversation. I wanted confirmation. “Charlie says everything is in position.”

“Tell him to hold until I call.”

She disappeared without another word.

I turned back to the window. Forty-two floors below, yellow cabs muscled each other for position, and a food cart steamed in the October morning air, and a thousand people moved through their Thursday with no idea the world was about to shift. Their world, anyway. The small, gilded, generations-deep world of Aldridge Commercial Real Estate—the company that bore the name of the family that had shaped my entire life without ever once considering my existence.

That was about to change.

I’d set the alert myself the same day I confirmed that Wyatt Spencer Aldridge had officially assumed control of the company his father had built. The company his grandfather had built before that. The company that had absorbed the labor of people like my parents and then discarded them without so much as a reference letter when they’d outlived their usefulness.

I watched the second hand on the clock mounted above my bookshelf. A gift I’d bought myself the day I passed my Series 7 exam, still twenty-three and hungrier than I’d ever been in my life. I remembered standing in the store, turning it over in my hands, thinking about all the minutes that had passed since the morning everything fell apart. How many of them I’d spent in bed, unable to move. How many I’d spent staring at nothing. How many I’d spent making a promise to myself that got me out of bed and kept me there.

All those minutes had been building toward this one.

“Charlie.” I’d dialed before I realized I’d reached for the phone. “It’s time. Start buying.”

The thing about a hostile takeover is that the most elegant ones look, at first, like nothing at all.

There’s no announcement. No dramatic entrance. No villain monologue—though I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind on more than one occasion. The best ones are quiet. Methodical. A share here, a share there, acquisitions spread across shell companies and subsidiary accounts until one day the board looks up from their mahogany table and realizes someone has been redecorating their offices while they were busy congratulating themselves on their own brilliance.

That was the plan I’d spent six years executing. If all went according to plan, Wyatt Aldridge wouldn’t know my name was attached to any of it until it was far too late to stop me.

I’d made peace with the fact that what I was doing wasn’t entirely legal in its earliest stages. Peace might be overly generous—I’d made a calculated decision and accepted the risk, as I had with every major decision I’d made since I was eighteen. Carefully. Coldly. With my eyes open and my heart locked behind the kind of wall that takes years of practice to build properly.

I was very good at building walls.

By the time I settled into the chair behind my desk and pulled up the live trading screen, the first acquisitions were already in motion. I watched the numbers with the same focused detachment I brought to every transaction, except this one made my pulse do something it hadn’t done in a long time.

It made it slow down.