What Marcus Sees

"Webb," she says, neutral.

He stops a few feet away. There's no threat in the distance, but there's assessment. "How long did you stay last night?"

"That's my concern."

"Until midnight," he says, like she didn't answer. Like he already knows, which he probably does. "And you were in Conference Room B, by yourself, with the portfolio files."

Sloane doesn't move. Doesn't defend. Waiting is often more useful than talking.

"Know what I find interesting?" Marcus's jaw works. He's choosing words carefully, which is worse than any direct accusation. "Ethan has seventeen active acquisition targets right now. Seventeen. His last CFO logged an average of four hours per acquisition, front-end analysis. Standard. Tight. He moves fast."

The hallway stretches between them. Sloane can hear the hum of the climate control, the faint sound of traffic forty-two floors below.

"You know how many hours he's logged on Quinn?" Marcus doesn't wait. "Forty-seven. In eleven days. He's in your files more than I've ever seen him in any single file. He called me yesterday asking about your father's approach to thermodynamic modeling. Thermodynamic modeling, Quinn. He asked about patents, not returns. Not market entry points. The specific engineering work your father did."

Recognition.

"He's in your site visits," Marcus continues. "He's in your technical assessments. He's reading your father's notes like he's trying to understand a person, not absorb an acquisition. This morning—" Marcus pauses, and there's something almost like concern in his voice, which is the most dangerous thing he could show her. "This morning, he pulled up your father's published papers. The ones from before Quinn was even founded. He sat with those for two hours."

Sloane's hands are steady at her sides. Her breathing is steady. But her understanding is adjusting, like a camera lens coming into focus on something she's been seeing but not quite looking at.

"He doesn't do this," Marcus says. His voice is quieter now, but it carries more weight. "Ethan Cross does not get invested in acquisitions. He disassembles them. Optimizes them. Scales them. He moves on. But this—" He gestures, a small frustrated movement. "This is different. This is personal, and Ethan doesn't do personal in business. It compromises everything. It makes you sloppy. It makes you blind."

Sloane finds her voice. "Maybe he's just thorough."

"He is thorough," Marcus agrees, and the acknowledgment is worse than an argument. "But not like this. I've worked with him for twelve years. I know the difference between thorough and obsessed, and right now, he's obsessed with understanding your family's work. Understanding you."

The word lands. Sloane feels it in the small muscles of her face, the back of her neck. She doesn't move.

"I'm telling you this because I respect both of you," Marcus says, and his voice carries an edge of something like regret. "And because I see where this is heading, and I need you to understand something: he's not thinking clearly when it comes to Quinn anymore. Which means he's vulnerable. Which means you're in a position to hurt him in ways that matter. And you should know that before you—" He stops, corrects. "Before this goes further."

"I'm not interested in hurting him," Sloane says, and the statement is true in a way that surprises her. She isn't interested in hurting him. She's interested in surviving him—beating him if she can—extracting what she needs and walking away clean.

Marcus looks at her for a long moment. His eyes are not unkind, but they're analytical. She can see him cataloging her response, measuring it against something he already knows.

"Whatever this is," he says, "he doesn't do this. He doesn't get invested. Make sure you know what you're doing here, Quinn."

He walks past her before she can answer. His footsteps recede down the hallway, back toward the elevators, back toward his office and his own acquisition targets and his normal, comprehensible work.

Sloane stands alone in the corridor.

The climate control hums. The city breathes below.

She thinks about Ethan reading her father's papers. Not the patents. Not the market potential. The actual work. The thinking. The engineering notes scrawled in the margins of published work, the voice of a man trying to solve something real and difficult.

She thinks about Ethan at the window yesterday, refusing to turn around when she said the thing that should have ended this. You want me.

Frustration, because he's not staying predictable. He's not maintaining the cold efficiency she built her strategy around. Something underneath his control keeps showing through—making him harder to read, the distance harder to maintain.

And underneath that, spreading: awareness.

Awareness that Ethan's attention might not be the calculated pressure of a CEO testing a tool. That forty-seven hours in her father's work might mean something Marcus is right to be concerned about. That when he'd looked at her in that conference room, the calculation might have been real, but so might have been the rest of it.

She doesn't know if his investment is dangerous or useful. She doesn't know what it means that he's reading Thomas Quinn's papers like he's trying to understand a person instead of an acquisition. The leverage it gives her, the cost—both still unresolved.

She turns and walks back toward her desk, her mind moving through scenarios and possibilities, none of which quite settle into answer.

Behind her, the hallway is empty. Ahead of her, there's only the unknown shape of whatever Ethan is becoming when he stops thinking strategically and starts thinking about her.