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But there's a difference between using an advantage and making it your entire personality.
The door opens. Elias’s shadow stretches across the desk before his voice cuts through. “New research project?”
I scrub a hand down my face, heat simmering in my chest.
“The man who shamed her is a fucking nepo baby who’s never really worked a day in his life.” I think of what she told me a few days ago, the tremor in her voice. “He spent seven years making her feel small because he couldn’t handle the scale of her ambition, or her appetite. Meanwhile, his greatest achievement is being handed a VP position from his father.”
Elias’s gaze flicks to the papers, then past them to the one desk outside all three of our offices. Sloane’s perched at her workstation, and Jace is beside her. He’s leaning over her shoulder as he points at something on her screen. Her laugh drifts through the glass, and I find myself thinking of ways I can hear it again.
I look away. Focus on the file.
“So,” Elias murmurs, “how do you want to handle this?”
“Would it be too much to buy his father’s company and fire him publicly?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Probably.”
I set the folder down harder than necessary. “I want everything. Every deal he’s touched. Every company he’s bled dry. Personal liabilities, financial exposure, anyone he’s pissed off badly enough to talk. I want leverage, Elias. I want to know what makes him break.”
He studies me for a moment, then reaches across the desk and closes the file.
I look at his hand. “I wasn’t finished.”
“You are now.”
My eyes lift to his.
“You said you wanted everything,” he says. “I’ll get you everything.”
The certainty in his voice irritates me mostly because it works. Worse, he's enjoying himself. I recognize that satisfaction in his expression. Give Elias a problem nobody else can solve, especially one I've personally handed him, and he'll work himself half to death before admitting it can't be done.
“Every deal.”
“Yes.”
“Any buried litigation. Off-book agreements. Anything his father cleaned up before it became public.”
“Nathaniel.” One eyebrow lifts. “I know what everything means. Have I ever failed you?”
He hasn’t.
Not when we met, and I was too jealous to see straight, not when the first investor tried to gut us, not when Adrian Cross planted his flag on our territory and tried to burn the whole thing down. Elias has never failed me.
That's just who he is. Elias will challenge me on a dozen things before breakfast, but once he realizes I've made up my mind, he stops wasting time trying to change it. He starts figuring out how to give me exactly what I asked for.
Sometimes more.
It's a dangerous arrangement, having someone who knows every ugly part of you and has never once asked you to make yourself smaller.
I lean back in my chair, tension easing from my shoulders.
“You’re not letting this go,” he says.
“I’m not letting him go.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t move. Just watches me, letting the silence stretch until I finally look up.
