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“Still nothing?” I ask.

He shakes his head without looking up. “Calls go straight to voicemail.”

Elias stands at the windows, work phone pinned to his ear, his back to us. He’s spent the last twelve hours marshaling forces: cybersecurity, legal, and the tension radiates from his rigid posture.

“No,” he says into the phone. “I don’t care about the launch metrics right now. Find every copy of the audio and get it down. If you need our lawyers, use them. If you need money, spend it. Just get her name out of it.”

He ends the call without waiting for a response.

Jace lifts his head. “How bad?”

He crosses to the table and turns his laptop toward us. A spreadsheet fills the screen, links stacked beneath timestamps and engagement numbers. Half are marked for removal. Others are still active.

“We’ve contained the major outlets, but it’s all over the internet." he says. “News sites are easier to take out. Social media is going to take longer.”

“Then keep going.” The words leave me without inflection.

Elias studies me for half a second before nodding.

The television changes again. This time, the clip catches Sloane leaving the ballroom. It’s only a few seconds of her, but it’s enough. Her face turned away. Trey pushes through the crowd behind her. Cameras following anyway.

My stomach turns. “Turn that off.”

Jace reaches for the remote before I finish speaking and kills the screen. The room falls quiet, leaving only the low hum of the ventilation system and the occasional vibration of a phone against wood.

We promised her we'd talk. Instead, she ran, convinced we'd used her pleasure as a weapon. I see her face in my office, pleading. Hear her voice on the tapes. Feel the weight of my own accusation. And I know I was the one who handed her every reason to believe it.

Jace rubs both hands over his face. “How the fuck are we going to fix this?”

“I don’t know that we can,” Elias admits.

Jace’s head snaps toward him. “Well, we need to. She thinks we leaked it for revenge.”

“No one is saying we're giving up, Jace. Elias is saying that this is going to be harder than a simple conversation.”

Jace pushes off the table and starts pacing. “So what are we supposed to do? Sit here while she thinks we did that to her?”

“No.” My answer cuts through his rage. “We find out exactly what happened. We get every copy of that audio buried. We prove she had nothing to do with the breach, and then we tell her the truth.”

Jace lets out a hollow laugh. “You think proof fixes this?”

“No.” The word tastes bitter. “I think she deserves to have it anyway.”

Elias’s laptop chimes. He turns toward it immediately, scrolling through whatever just landed in his inbox. His expression tightens as he reads; a subtle shift near his eyes that tells me he’s found something.

“What?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He opens the attachment, reads another page, then drags the laptop closer. “The first breach and last night’s hijack used the same routing architecture.”

Jace freezes mid-stride as I round the table. Elias scrolls farther.

“Sloane's credentials were cloned. None of the originating access points match her location when the files were taken, and the forensic team found no evidence she initiated or authorized those sessions.”

The words on the page stay perfectly still, but my vision blurs at the edges. There it is. Clean, technical, indisputable proof. The certainty I demanded before I was willing to trust the woman I claimed to love.

Jace reads over Elias’s shoulder, and his jaw tightens.

“So she was right.” His focus lands on me, sharp and accusing. “She was right the entire fucking time. And instead of listening to me you screwed us out of one of the best things to ever happen to us.”