Page 65 of Hostile

Wyatt is not the target. He never was.

I sat with that for a long time.

The city was fully lit now, the amber morning replaced by the flat December gray of a Friday that had decided to be overcast. My coffee was cold. My phone had three missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognize—more journalists, probably, and more financial analysts trying to get a comment from Hale Capital about the Aldridge position.

I didn’t return any of them.

Instead, I opened a new email. Not to Charlie. Not to Dana.

To Wyatt.

I stared at the empty subject line for a long moment. Then I typed: We need to talk. Not about the acquisition. About Blair. I hovered my finger over the send button.

For over ten years, I had not initiated a single direct communication with Wyatt Aldridge. Every interaction had been his move—his request for a meeting, his appearance at the gala, his voice in the hallway saying Megan in that quiet way that landed somewhere it shouldn’t. I had responded. I had shown up. I had never been the one to reach out first.

Wyatt is not the target.

I pressed send.

Then I sat back in my chair, looked at the ceiling, and thought about what it meant to spend six years building something with total certainty, only to learn on a Friday morning at six a.m. that the certainty had been right and the target had been wrong.

My phone buzzed. An email notification. His response had come in forty-seven seconds.

I know. I’ve been trying to find the right way to tell you. Can you come to my office this morning?

I read it twice.

I know.

He’d known. Or he’d been working toward knowing—building something on his end the same way I’d been building something on mine. I didn’t know that for certain. What I knew was that his response had come in forty-seven seconds, and that I know wasn’t a question or a denial or a deflection. It was a man who had been waiting for this conversation and had the answer ready.

That told me enough. We’d been investigating the same person, and neither of us had known the other was looking.

I typed back: Give me an hour.

Then I closed the laptop, went to the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror for a moment, with the directness of someone taking stock before something significant.

Six years, I thought. And it ends on a Friday in December with an email that took forty-seven seconds to write.

I didn’t yet know what ending it meant. The acquisition was still running. The position was still twenty-two percent. Nothing had been undone by this morning’s arithmetic.

But something had shifted in what it was for.

I picked up my coat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

His assistant showed me into the office and said he’d be there in five minutes, which proved true, leaving me alone in Wyatt Aldridge’s office on a Friday morning in December, with the full weight of the last six weeks pressing in from every direction and nothing to do with my hands.

I didn’t sit.

The office was both what I’d expected and more than I’d expected—the mahogany desk, the park view, and the framed aerial photographs that matched those lining the corridor outside. The accumulated physical evidence of a company built across generations, displayed with the understated confidence of people who didn’t need to announce their history because it announced itself. My eyes moved through it as they did in every room—methodically, cataloging, left to right.

And then stopped.

The bookshelf ran the full length of the east wall, floor to ceiling, the kind of built-in that had probably been there since the building was constructed. It held what you’d expect—business texts, legal references, and industry reports in matching binders, the working library of a man who used books rather than collected them. Nothing decorative. Everything functional.