Jasmine's POV
The words still clung to the air like smoke.
If we're doing this, you work under me. My rules.
I'd expected arrogance. I hadn't expected the cold satisfaction in his tone, as if he'd already won.
I eased my expression into stillness, masking the fury that pulsed beneath my skin. Ares thrived on reaction, on pulling emotion from his prey like threads from silk. He would not get that from me.
Instead, I turned my head… graceful, deliberate. "Then I accept your terms, Mr. Knight."
His brows lifted slightly, just enough to signal surprise before he hid it beneath that razor-cut smile. He thought he'd bent me. Good. Let him think it.
Because I wasn't bowing. I was baiting.
Minutes later I sat across from him in the smaller KnightCorp boardroom, a glass-walled chamber overlooking Crestfall's skyline. Sunlight poured in, cold and merciless, illuminating every polished surface.
On the table between us lay a memorandum of understanding… initial, symbolic, but enough to announce to the vultures outside that KnightCorp and Duvall Holdings were aligned.
Cassian lingered by the window, arms folded. His gaze flicked between me and Ares with sharp calculation, as though measuring how many sparks would ignite before the room went up in flames.
"Your signature here." Ares said smoothly, sliding the document toward me with a Montblanc pen.
I glanced at the line, then at him. "Funny. You didn't strike me as the type to like things official. Too many witnesses to hold you accountable."
His smile was sharp enough to cut. "On the contrary. I prefer an audience. It makes victories more satisfying."
I didn't blink. Didn't withdraw. I took the pen, signed my name in bold strokes, and slid it back across the table. "Then enjoy your satisfaction while it lasts."
For a fleeting moment his eyes narrowed, the mask slipping just enough to reveal irritation. A win for me, however small.
Back at Duvall Holdings the mood was brittle but controlled. The boardroom crackled with a new energy as we sat at the polished table, the weight of the impending merger hanging over us like a weather front you could feel in your bones. The team murmured about synergies, market share, and quarterly forecasts, but I let them talk. They needed to see me placid, composed… the picture of a CEO who had made a rational choice.
Leonard slid into the seat opposite me with the easy confidence of someone who'd been at my shoulder for a decade. He'd been my friend since university… sharp, sarcastic, and stubbornly loyal. Tonight his presence felt like armor.
"Let's get this over with." I said, glancing at the document before me. "I'll agree to Ares's terms, but only on my terms."
Leonard's brow lifted. "Your terms?"
I could see the amusement already. He knew me well enough to recognize the smile that came with mischief. "You mean you're going to play nice with him?"
A smirk touched my lips. "Play nice? Hardly. But I can pretend for now. Let him think he's in control while I figure out how to take him down from within."
Leonard chuckled, but his eyes went hard. "You're sure about going in so public with it? Once this is out, it'll be in the papers. People will paint you as allied with KnightCorp. It lasts longer than a meeting."
"That's the point." I tapped a finger on the memorandum. "Perception is a weapon. If the world thinks we're united, Ares will relax the suspicion. He'll believe he has me where he wants me."
"And your terms? You said only on your terms." Leonard leaned forward. "Spell it out."
"Access." I said plainly. "Not just to joint ventures, but to the infrastructure. I want audit privileges on the integration team, oversight on shared projects, and a seat… informal, but real… on the KnightCorp integration committee. I want eyes and a legal channel to request internal data when necessary."
He nodded slowly. "You're asking for a rope with which you could be hung… or strangle him."
"Exactly." I allowed that smile to curve. "He'll hand me the rope because he believes I'll choke on it. I'll use it to bind him."
Leon's lips pressed into a line. "And what about the risks? The man doesn't play clean. If he smells betrayal…"
"He'll be given reason to lock down," I finished. "Which also gives me a cover for probing. If I ask for access and run security checks, it'll look like normal due diligence."
"Clever." He said it like a warning. "But being clever won't save you if something goes sideways."
"Then I make sure nothing goes sideways." I said. "We make the move carefully: gather financials, personnel hierarchies, internal comms. I want to know who's loyal to him, who's just waiting for the next bell to ring. I want leverage."
Leon's hand found mine under the table… familiar, grounding. "Whatever you need, I'm in. We go slow, we don't flash everything. You're not alone in this."
I released a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. "Good. Keep our legal team on standby. Run a soft sweep of anyone who's worked with KnightCorp's security. And Leon… if you hear anything about audits or unusual hires, you tell me immediately."
"Understood." He smiled… brief, fierce. "We break him from the inside."
We both knew it was not bravado. It was a plan being born in two minds that had already survived worse.
By the time I returned to the Grand Sterling, Claire was waiting in the suite, tablet balanced against her chest, her expression tighter than usual.
"You agreed?" she said the moment the door closed. "You actually agreed to his conditions?"
I slipped off my jacket, draping it neatly over the chair, as if the action could shake off the suffocating presence of Ares's office. "Outwardly, yes."
Claire's eyes sharpened. "And inwardly?"
I turned to face her, a slow smile curving my lips. "Inwardly, we're already dismantling him."
Relief flickered across her face, chased by worry. "You're sure you can pull this off?"
"Claire, men like Ares Knight believe control is permanent. Untouchable." I walked to the minibar, poured a glass of water, and held it up, watching the light fracture through it. "But even stone empires have cracks. And I intend to find his."
Her voice dropped. "And if he notices you digging?"
"Then I dig faster."
She left me with a look that said she trusted me but feared for me anyway. That was the kind of loyalty that made me ruthless in return.
Nightfall
The city glittered beneath my windows, neon veins running through Crestfall's steel heart. The suite hummed with the silence of late night; Claire had gone to bed hours ago. The kettle whispered in another room, long since cold. My laptop's screen threw bluish light across the room, and the only sound was the soft tapping as I keyed in commands.
KnightCorp's security firewalls were infamous… layered, brutal, designed to repel anything short of a state agency. But I'd learned patience in the years after Ares left me behind.
Patience… and precision.
I'd set the gears in motion weeks ago: a charm here, a carefully placed question there, a contact nudged into complacency with a smile and a name-drop. Tonight was the harvest. I slipped on gloves, not because of physical prints but because ritual steadied me: gloves, two-factor scrambler, encrypted proxies bouncing through networks in three continents.
I bypassed the first barrier with an old exploit buried in outdated employee portals. The second with a social-engineering key I'd planted through a "chance" conversation with a KnightCorp analyst. The third required something more delicate: a cloned digital identity that mirrored an internal auditor's credentials.
Every click was a heartbeat. Every code line, a breath.
To anyone else, it would look like obsession. To me, it was war.
Folders bloomed on the interface: PROJECTS. FINANCIALS. EXECUTIVE MEMOS. The surface-level directories were predictable… enough to satisfy corporate curiosity but shallow for my purposes.
I scrolled past budget forecasts and partnership decks. I traced breadcrumbs: subcontractor names, security vendors, a string of contractors tied to odd, one-off projects in 2018. That tug lodged in my memory… an itch of recollection I couldn't ignore.
I dove deeper, through hidden directories and encrypted sublayers. The architecture was elegant, like a well-maintained house with a room no one wanted to revisit. That was the advantage of terror: it encourages neglect. People bury what haunts them.
A black folder hovered at the edge of the root directory. No label. A date embedded in its metadata: 2018.
My throat tightened. My fingers hesitated just long enough to taste the danger before clicking.
Inside, a single file stared at me, its title cold and deliberate:
"Crestfall Scandal 2018."
My hand froze on the mouse. The room narrowed as if the walls had folded in. For a ridiculous, panicked second I expected sirens to bleed through the quiet… but I was alone, and only the hum of the building answered.
I whispered the name into the dark, testing it against thsilence"Crestfall… Scandal… 2018."
It wasn't coincidence. Not in this city. Not that year.
I remembered flashes now: late-night whispers over champagne, a sudden blankness in society pages, rumors that never fully formed because the right people had a way of making mouths close. Families who'd disappeared from the circuit. A councilman who'd resigned with no explanation. A photograph that had been taken down from a museum overnight and replaced with something safer.
People spoke in euphemism. They said "the incident," and then they moved on.
And here… dormant in KnightCorp's restricted archives… was the phrase in concrete letters.
Ares Knight hadn't merely survived that scandal. He had documented it. Preserved it like a loaded gun, labeled and locked in a vault waiting for the right finger to pull the trigger.
I felt cold and hot at once. Cold at the immensity of what might be inside. Hot with the thrill of leverage so potent it would shift tectonic plates.
Whatever was in that file, it was not business. It was dynamite.
And I'd just placed my hand on the detonator.
The cursor blinked over the file, patient and pitiless.
I thought of Leon's steady face, of Claire's quiet trust, of Cassian leaning in that glass room with his unreadable expression. I thought of all the boardrooms where men like Ares thought themselves invulnerable because they wore power like armor. They forgot how fragile armor could be from the inside.
I had two immediate options. Pry open the file now, in the quiet of my suite, and see the world tilt beneath my feet. Or copy it, stagger out with the evidence, and gather allies before I ever aired the stain. Both moves carried a cost. Both could burn me.
My thumb hovered over the trackpad. The risk didn't make me hesitate; it made me acutely alive.
This was the moment where pretence and intent separated. I had told the board out loud that I would play along. Now I would prove it… on my own terms.
I downloaded a secure, encrypted copy to an off-grid drive I'd wired into the antique clock on my mantle… a ridiculous disguising choice that in practice had saved me more than once. The file's hash crawled across my screen. The copy finished, and the local folder confirmed a successful transfer.
Then I opened the file.
The document unfolded with the dryness of legal language overlaid on something far darker: names, dates, transfers, a string of shell companies funneling funds to unknown accounts, a list of journalists paid to retract, and a single scratched line that stopped my breath:
"Deliverable: neutralize social variables; ensure extract; if necessary, terminate."
Below it, a memorandum with a list of targets… families, journalists, activists… some allegedly "removed from circulation" in 2018. Beside the names, a notation: "confirmed."
My fingers went numb. The sentence read like a verdict.
I read and re-read until the words blurred. Evidence that pointed not simply to corporate malfeasance, but to coordinated, deliberate eradication of voices—and the probable implication of parties I had not expected to see named.
A name scrolled across the bottom of the page…bthe signature line for authorization. The ink-marked handle was blurred in the copy, but the metadata pointed to an internal author ID that mapped, with an obscene neatness, back to KnightCorp's executive legal counsel.
My vision tunneled. I had expected leverage; I had not expected this scale of quiet violence.
The clock on my mantle ticked. Outside my windows the city went on, oblivious. Inside, the file felt like a live wire between my fingers.
Someone in this city had burned down people's lives in 2018… and KnightCorp had been keeping the ashes as an insurance policy.
If I took this public, the fallout would not be contained to Ares and his company. It would ripple through the families, the ghosts who had been buried under silence, and it would drag names from the shadows.
My mouth was dry. Fear rose… not of Ares, but of the truth itself; how it would change everything once it breathed air.
I shut the laptop with a hard, deliberate motion. The simple thud of the lid felt like a gavel.
I had found the detonator. Now I had to decide when… and how… to press it.