Chapter 32 Marcus

It was a lost weekend. I dragged myself home in the early hours on Saturday morning to feed Frank and Sammy and ended up sleeping through most of the weekend. I had countless texts and messages from Alex. I didn't return a single one.

I called in sick on Monday morning, unable to go back to Libra. I didn't know what to think—I didn't know how to face anyone on staff and to let them know it would all soon crumble beneath us, like a precipice crashing into the waves below.

The deal.

The company.

Their goddamn jobs .

I couldn't believe I let it get that far—that I didn't realize what was happening until now. The transactions went back years .

For so long, I had convinced myself I was the reason Libra was the half-billion-dollar engine-that-could. Alex was a visionary, or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself, but I was the secret sauce. I was the one person who knew how to navigate his bravado and volatility. I could take his brilliant mess and package it into something clean, streamlined, and powerful.

I thought it was what I was born to do. A kid born into foster care, shy and sensitive, who overcame bullying and self-doubt. I thought I had weathered enough storms to take on anything. Few people had the experiences I did, coupled with the smarts and the competence, to transform myself from a kid to a business savant in just ten years.

That was na?veté at its finest. I was so, so wrong.

On Tuesday, I returned to the office with a single goal: Don't let anyone figure it out. The nausea persisted throughout the day, churning in my stomach as I remained in the fishbowl, earbuds in and listening to music while the staff went about their business on the other side of the glass walls.

Cass didn't press the issue, as I requested, but I could feel her concern mounting. And when the staff went home for the day, I remained at that table and continued to stare at my laptop screen—at the questionable ledger entries, wondering what would happen first. The exposure was inevitable: either one of the auditors would flag the documents, or I would crack under the unfamiliar pressure of keeping a secret.

Cass remained in the office with me, even at the late hour. She never asked why we were still sitting there, hours after the sun had set and the staff were long gone. The janitor came and went. Most of the office was dark. We just stayed there, both of us working in silence.

It must have been around nine when she got up, walked around the table, and took a seat in the chair to my left. She stared at me, her expression rife with concern. I looked back, taking in the familiar brown of her irises. My eyes drifted along her delicate features—that perfect mouth with those plump lips I loved to kiss, that freckle just a centimeter away, her sun kissed skin. She was stunning. She was mine. But somehow I felt like I had betrayed her as well.

Her hand rested on my knee, the first contact between us since Saturday morning when I shamefully dragged myself out of her bed. At once, I felt my chest swell. My heart started to pound and that indescribable prickle began to rise in my arms.

Fuck, I was starting to tear up. I couldn't let her see that. Immediately, I turned away from her and tried to cover my face with my hand, hoping to keep the tears at bay. It became harder when she rose out of her seat to hug me.

She moved into my lap and put her arms around me, cradling my head as I buried my face against her breasts. I felt a tear move onto my cheek and I let out a sigh that broke into a sob. I hadn't cried in years—not since that Vanity Fair article. I didn't mind crying. Dr. Jensen encouraged it, actually. But nothing had felt so weighty for so long.

Her lips brushed the top of my head, kissing my hair. She clutched me tighter, rocking against me and whispering soothing words as she let me cry into her chest. Minutes passed. She brought her hands up to my cheeks and encouraged me to look at her. When our eyes met, she used her thumbs to brush away the remnants of tears on my skin.

Cass lowered her mouth to mine and she kissed me, urging me to kiss her back. I did, letting the warmth of her lips set in. My body relaxed and the tension slowly left me. I curled my arms around her and held her close, covering her—letting her know I never wanted her to leave.

We stayed like that for a few minutes, wrapped in each other's arms and kissing softly until the tears had long stopped. I could breathe again, indebted to the comfort of her embrace.

And then I saw it.

There in the back corner, I just barely caught a glimpse of the door to the office's back-exit closing.

***

I was standing outside of Alex's front door when he opened it to leave for work. I had been standing there for over an hour, trying to build up the nerve to knock. I never got there.

His eyebrow ticked upwards when he registered I had been waiting. He scanned me up and down once before his gaze settled on my face. After a long pause, he tilted his head to the side and pulled his lips down into a tacit expression of acknowledgment.

"Didn't think you were the type," he finally said.

"Sure you did," I answered. When I spoke, my voice came out labored and crackly. Exhausted.

He glanced over his shoulder at his apartment. "Did you expect to come in?"

I nodded.

"Fine." Alex stepped backwards and held the door open, allowing me into his entryway.

Once the door shut behind us, I paced a few steps into the entryway before I turned around to find Alex staring again. His arms were crossed and his posture was sturdy, combative almost. I was the opposite—conciliatory and loose, although I wasn't sure why. I drew my hand up to my mouth and rubbed my palm over it. My skin hit stubble and chapped lips, byproducts of my sleepless night.

"I don't know what to say," I admitted. "I've been racking my brain for hours trying to come up with the words. Nothing feels right."

"Why didn't you tell me about her?" he asked in a curt, even tone. "Start there."

My eyes traveled to a spot on the carpeted floor and stayed there. It was a diversion from looking at his face as I sifted through the emotions of the past two months. "Maybe I wanted to have something for myself for once."

He flicked his eyebrows upwards. "So, you've been sleeping with our due diligence analyst to feel better about yourself?"

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know. Maybe I did it because you couldn't."

Alex shook his head. "That's not you."

He was right. It wasn't.

"I think you did it because you like her," he went on, which dragged my gaze back to his face. He was watching me like I would camouflage if he took his eyes off me. I wished I could.

"I do," I admitted after a beat. "A hell of a lot, actually, but that's not why I did it in the first place."

"Why did you do it then? I know I was kidding around and flirting with her, but I never would have fucked her."

Fucked her.

I said things like that to Cass all the time. She went wild for me whenever I did. The cruder and filthier, the better. But hearing Alex talk about her like that shot heat through my veins. He had no right to say that. He hadn't earned that. He hadn't painstakingly peeled back the gossamer layers that surrounded this ethereal yet complicated person.

"She was more than she seemed." My anger kept my tone even. "She was so good at pretending to be one thing, but she still maintained her sense of self underneath. I was caught off guard by it at first. I didn't know how to react to it. But once I figured it out, I was weak to it. I couldn't keep away from her."

Alex released a slow exhale. His lips rounded as he respired. After a beat, he said, "So was she worth five hundred million dollars?"

I was slow to respond. I considered my words and put them each in the right place before I said, "For me, yes. For everyone who stood to gain from the sale, no. She wasn't worth five hundred million to them. But neither were we."

He didn't acknowledge my comment, but I sensed it struck him somewhere deep below the surface by the way he finally looked away from me. After a moment, he returned his eyes to my face. "We have a few things to talk about," he said. "And you've been avoiding me. But now it looks like we're both ready to show our cards. What do you think?"

"Fine."

"I'll start," he offered, smiling at me—too handsome for the kind of conversation we were having. "You know I did something allegedly illegal. Only three people know about it: you, me, and her."

"Well, there's also the company you sold the data to…"

"No concern there," he answered flippantly. "So, in my best-case scenario, you keep your mouth shut, I'll do the same, and so will she. The sale goes through, nobody ever knows what I did, and we move on with our lives as two very rich men."

"And in my best-case scenario, you come clean and admit you acted alone, and we try to salvage our futures and the futures of the people who work for us."

He shook his head. "Fuck no."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not going down," he insisted. "No. We don't have to tell anyone the truth. We can just move on."

"She knows, Alex. I didn't even tell her—she fucking figured it out. And the fact she knows I know about it is killing me. I need to tell her and then she needs to be able to do her job—which is to tell Davenport-Ridgeway we did some really illegal, really fucked up shit."

He shook his head again. "She's not telling anyone."

"She has to."

"Then she's going to lose her job." He held up his phone and unlocked it. "See that?"

To say my stomach plummeted would be an understatement. My stomach bottomed out, plunging at top speed through the earth's mantle. It shot right down into the molten core. On his phone, I saw the grainy still of a video of Cass sitting on my lap in the fishbowl.

He had filmed us last night.

"You can smash my phone and delete the video if you want," he went on, shrugging. "I've got copies saved on different cloud accounts."

"If I weren't already facing a felony, I would kill you," I responded, practically feeling heat blow through my nostrils. To fuck up my life was one thing, but to drag Cass into it was another story.

"Because of her? Wow. The pussy must be—"

"Shut the fuck up. I know you're baiting me, Alex, but I'm not going to listen to you talk about her like that. So if you were ever my friend, you'll stop. This crosses a line."

"Her? She's your line?"

She was everything .

"Yeah, Alex."

To my chagrin, he rolled his eyes. "Fine. Here's what we're going to do: You're going to take this to the grave, and you're going to tell her to do the same. In fact, you're going to tell her to do everything in her power to make sure none of those auditors find out about those transactions. Otherwise, I'm sending this to everyone I know at Davenport-Ridgeway and every other company I can think of. I don't think she'll ever work again."

The still of the video on the phone screen showed Cass sitting in my lap. My arms held her close to me, while her arms cradled my head against her body. Alex had filmed us from too far away to see anything other than the intimacy of our embrace. I didn't know if that made it better or worse. What he missed was the fact that I was crying last night—crying in front of her and crying over the fact that Alex had taken something from me. When I left Libra, I hadn't planned on leaving rubble and carnage in my wake. I'd planned on walking away from a palace of gold and crystal. Once this was over and done with, there would be nothing but rubble and carnage. Ashes.

Alex canted his head as he watched me. I didn't know what to say.

"You were the closest thing I've ever had to a brother," I finally said. The admission felt noxious. Over the years, I'd had a lot of sorry excuses for brothers—three foster brothers, to be exact. They had relentlessly hurt me, physically or otherwise, but none of them had ever been quite so effective as Alex.

Without another word, I walked over to the door. I lingered there, staring at the doorknob and waiting for him to stop me. I could feel him watching me.

"You're sure this is what you want?" I managed to say. "This is how you want this to go down?"

When I looked over my shoulder, his blue eyes were sharp. He nodded. "You know what to do," he stated. "Due diligence ends in a week, right? You better hurry up and talk to your girlfriend."