Page 89 of Hostile

I looked at her.

She was watching me with the clear, focused attention that had always felt like being truly seen. Not pitying. Not managing. Just present. The way she’d always been when it mattered.

“It’s going to take time,” she said simply. “The grief of it. You don’t have to have it sorted out before Monday.”

“I know.”

“You just have to be ready to do the right thing on Monday.”

“I know that too.” I looked at her, at the woman who had spent ten years building a weapon against me and had handed it down the moment she realized what it was meant for. “Are you ready?”

She looked at the monitors. At the trading data, the documentation, and the full picture of ten years, assembled on two screens in a Midtown conference room on a Saturday morning in December.

“I’ve been ready for ten years,” she said. “Just aimed at the wrong target.”

The corner of my mouth moved. “You figured it out eventually.”

“I’m constitutionally incapable of using a system that works against me.” The echo of her own words from a Business Law classroom, spoken with the dry precision that had been dismantling my defenses since the first Thursday coffee. “Once I understood what the system was actually doing, I recalibrated.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

I’ve been wanting to do that since the first day of class.

Eleven years ago, in the October rain.

The same person. Both of us, exactly the same people, just arrived here.

“Let’s build the presentation,” I said.

She pulled her laptop toward her. We got to work.

By four o’clock, we had everything.

The full documentation package—organized, sourced, and timestamped, the kind of presentation that didn’t require interpretation because the evidence spoke for itself. The consulting arrangements. The property intelligence scheme. The Billy Brown payment. The BCA-4 trading vehicle. The securities violation. All of it lay out in the clean, sequential logic of a case that had been built from two directions simultaneously and, now that the two directions had converged, was completely airtight.

Marcus had confirmed the emergency board session for Monday morning at nine. Blair had not yet responded to the notification. I noted it and set it aside.

“One more thing,” Megan said. She was looking at her laptop with the expression she wore when she was about to say something she’d been deciding whether to say.

“What?”

“The twenty-two percent.” She looked up. “I want to put it on the table on Monday, not as a threat—as a proposal.” She held my gaze. “Hale Capital converts the hostile position into a formal strategic partnership. Active investor, board seat, full transparency into the acquisition rationale. The board sees that the person who’s been running the hostile acquisition is now on the same side of the table as the CEO. It changes the narrative completely. Aldridge Commercial isn’t under siege—it has a new strategic partner with a twenty-two percent stake and ten years of financial intelligence on the company’s structure.”

I looked at her.

“You’d take a board seat?” I asked.

“I’d take a board seat.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Someone needs to make sure the Charleston project is managed properly. I have opinions.”

“You have approximately forty-seven opinions.”

“At least.” Her smile was the real one—the quiet one that had never needed an audience and that I’d been trying to forget for ten years and had apparently failed at completely.

I thought about my grandfather. Two properties and a handshake. The best investment he ever made was visible from forty-two floors above the park.

Build something worth inheriting.

“Monday,” I said. “We put it all on the table.”