Priya's Warning

They didn't head for the elevator. Instead, Priya steered them toward the stairwell, which was the oldest corporate law on Wall Street: if you wanted to have a conversation that needed to stay off security footage, you talked in the stairwell. Sloane followed her down two flights. They stopped at the landing for the thirty-eighth floor, where no one had any reason to be.

Priya set her portfolio on the handrail. "That counter-proposal is the last move you have."

Sloane didn't answer right away. She'd expected it, had built her entire strategy around it, but hearing it said aloud in Priya's steady voice was different. Sharper. It made the thing concrete in a way her own calculations hadn't quite managed.

"I know," Sloane said.

"Do you?" Priya's eyes were level, the same eyes that had watched the acquisition paperwork fly through their offices like ashes. The same eyes that had stayed with Sloane through the funeral, through the six weeks of not sleeping, and then the three months of reckoning with exactly how much power her father had accumulated and exactly how little of it transferred to her. "Because I need you to really understand what that means. If Ethan rejects this proposal—if his team comes back with a counter-counter, or if they stall, or if they just say no—then you're out of plays."

"Then we go to the consortium." Sloane's voice was steady. Strategic. The voice of someone who had already accepted the worst outcome and was walking toward it with her eyes open.

"And you leave. You sign a non-compete, you cash out, you walk away from the company your father built from nothing." Priya didn't turn away from her. That was Priya's gift—she would never let Sloane look away from hard truths. "You become another acquisition casualty. A name in a press release no one reads."

The stairwell was quiet. Concrete and steel and the almost-imperceptible hum of the building's machinery. Sloane's phone was in her pocket—had been there since Ethan's text arrived at 4:47 p.m., sharp and businesslike. I need clarification on your licensing framework assumptions. Come back at six. She hadn't answered. Wouldn't answer. Not yet. Not until she understood what that text actually meant.

She said, "You think he'll reject it."

"I think he might." Priya picked up her portfolio again, but she didn't move. "But that's not what I came to tell you."

Sloane waited.

"He spent two hours with your R&D documentation yesterday," Priya said. "Just the licensing framework. Not with his M&A team. Not with our legal department. Alone. In one of the deal rooms. With the door locked."

She'd moved past fear weeks ago, had metabolized it into something colder and more useful—this was the first sign that the game she'd been playing was not the game Ethan was playing.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I saw the sign-in log. Because I walk these floors every evening, and I noticed the extra security on the deal rooms during his call with New York. Because I've been the CFO of a mid-cap company long enough to know when someone is looking at something that matters." Priya's voice didn't change. It was a statement of fact, as casual as discussing the weather. "And because I've been watching him watch you."

"Priya—"

"I'm not making a play here, Sloane. I'm not saying anything that means anything except this: he's not behaving like someone who acquired the company for standard consolidation. He's not reviewing the portfolio like an asset manager. He's reviewing your work like he's trying to figure something out."

Sloane felt her hands flatten against her thighs. A gesture of control, of stillness. She'd learned it from her father—when you're losing the room, look like you're choosing not to speak. Make them fill the silence.

Priya filled it.

"What do you think he's going to do?"

The question hung there. Sloane understood it on multiple levels. Priya wasn't asking about the business strategy. She was asking: what does his unusual attention mean? Is he suspicious? Does he know what you're actually after? Is he interested in the same thing you are, or is he protecting himself against you?

"I don't know," Sloane said. And that was the problem, wasn't it? The moment you stopped knowing, you stopped controlling.

"I think he's trying to figure out if you're trying to move the patents," Priya said. "Or if he should move them first."

"He can't. Not without risking the licensing agreement with Janus. The patents are locked in until the November deadline."

"Not if he's already planning to break it."

Sloane looked at her. "Why would he—"

"Because he's spending two hours studying your documentation instead of delegating it like a normal M&A lead," Priya said. "His legal team has gone dark on our licensing department since Monday. Because he sent you a text that doesn't make sense unless he's looking for a specific kind of answer." She paused. "Because he's spending more time on your documents than anyone should spend on a standard acquisition."

The stairwell was silent except for the building's breathing—the ventilation system, the elevator somewhere below them carrying people to ground level, to their cars, to their lives. Sloane could smell the coffee residue from someone's abandoned mug, the faint industrial cleanliness of the stairs.

"I don't know what that means," Sloane said.

"Neither do I," Priya said. And then: "But I know you need to find out. Before six o'clock."

She turned and headed back up the stairs, toward the fortieth floor. Sloane watched her go, didn't follow. In another moment, the stairwell door swung shut above her, and Sloane was alone with the sound of the building's machinery and the weight of the one true fact Priya had left her with:

Ethan Cross was paying attention to her in a way that defied prediction.