The Highest Bidder

Chapter 18

"Trouble with your executive friends, Hale?"

Hargrove's voice finds me in the copy room at 7:14 a.m., before the floor has filled with witnesses. I don't turn around, don't acknowledge the satisfaction dripping from every syllable—just keep feeding pages into the machine with hands that refuse to tremble.

"I don't know what you mean, sir. I've been completing all assigned tasks on schedule, and my performance metrics remain consistent with departmental expectations."

"That's not what I asked." He moves closer. "I asked about your executive friends, plural, the ones who seemed so invested in your career development last week. Funny how you've been hiding down here in the trenches instead of enjoying your corner office on thirty-two. Did something happen to sour the arrangement?"

"There was no arrangement." The words come out flat, automated. "I was temporarily reassigned to assist with administrative overflow during a staffing transition. That transition has concluded, and I'm focusing on my original responsibilities until further notice."

"Is that so?" His breath hits the back of my neck, too close, too deliberate. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like someone who climbed too high too fast is suddenly afraid of heights."

"Nothing changed. I'm simply prioritizing efficiency over proximity, which I would think you'd appreciate given your previous concerns about my competence."

He laughs—low, ugly, satisfied.

"You know what I think, Hale? I think whatever happened on that executive floor taught you a lesson you won't forget."

With that, he leaves me standing in the fluorescent hum of the copy room.

Day two of avoidance. Day two of making myself small enough to disappear.

The work flows through me like water through a cracked vessel. Every task completed with precision that borders on obsession, every deadline met before it arrives, every output impeccable enough that no one can question my value.

But the hunger doesn't stop.

It gnaws at me through spreadsheets and correspondence, through lunch eaten alone at my desk, through hours of productive isolation that prove absolutely nothing except my capacity for self-inflicted misery.

I find myself reaching for my phone every few minutes, thumb hovering over the notification bar before I force it back down.

The afternoon dissolves into a haze of tasks I complete without remembering. I relocate twice—first to an empty conference room on the ninth floor, then to a back office near the archives that no one uses because the heating system broke three years ago and was never repaired. The cold suits me. It feels like penance.

"Ethan."

Cole's voice reaches me before I see him, and my entire body goes rigid against the desk chair. He stands in the doorway of my frozen hiding place, sea-glass eyes catching the weak light from the single functioning bulb, and the hurt written across his features nearly drives me to my knees.

"How did you find me?"

My voice comes out hoarse, scraped raw from hours of silence.

"Jules told me you'd been moving around all day, and I know you well enough by now to understand your patterns." He steps inside, closing the door behind him. "When you're running from something, you always choose cold and dark and isolated—like you're trying to match your external environment to whatever you're feeling internally."

"I'm not running from anything. I'm working, which is what you pay me to do, and I'm doing it exceptionally well if anyone bothered to check my output metrics instead of tracking my physical location."

"I don't care about your output metrics right now." He moves closer, and I see the tension in his shoulders, the careful way he's holding himself like he's afraid of spooking me. "I care about why you've been avoiding all three of us since yesterday morning, why you won't answer our messages, and why you looked at me in that conference room like I was a stranger."

"Because this is the only way I know how to protect myself." The confession tears out of me before I can stop it. "The photograph exists, Cole. Someone is watching me, building a case that will destroy everything I've worked for. And every moment I spend near you is another opportunity for them to add evidence to whatever narrative they're constructing."

"So your solution is to starve yourself of everything that made you happy?" His voice cracks on the last word. "To pretend the last week didn't happen?"

"My solution is survival." I force myself to look at him, and the raw pain in those pale green depths nearly shatters my resolve. "You don't understand what it's like to have everything stripped away because someone decided your desires were unacceptable. You've never had to rebuild yourself from nothing, never had to learn that the only safe way to exist is to want nothing that can be taken."

"You're right, I don't understand that." He stops an arm's length away, close enough that I smell the clean warmth of him beneath his cologne. "But I understand that whatever you're afraid of, we can face it together. You don't have to carry this alone anymore, Ethan. That was the whole point of everything we built."

"And what happens when facing it together means watching you lose everything too?" The words burn like acid. "What happens when the photograph becomes part of a pattern that destroys your reputations alongside my career? I can't be the reason you suffer, Cole. I won't."

"That's not your choice to make." His hand reaches toward me, then stops mid-air when he sees me flinch. "We chose you knowing the risks. And now you're trying to protect us by destroying yourself, and I don't know how to make you see that this isn't protection. This is punishment."

I can't meet his gaze anymore. My eyes drop to the floor, to the dust that's gathered in corners no one visits, to anywhere that isn't the devastation written across his beautiful face.

"I need more time." The words taste like surrender. "I need to figure out how to exist in this situation without putting everyone I care about at risk, and I can't do that when you're standing this close, looking at me like I'm breaking your heart."

"You are breaking my heart." His voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "But I'm not going to force you to accept help you don't want. I just need you to know that when you're ready—if you're ever ready—we'll still be here. All three of us."

He leaves without touching me, and the cold rushes back into the space where his warmth used to be.

This is protection, I tell myself as the last light fades from the window. This is how you keep them safe.

But the hollow ache spreading through my chest tells a different story—one that sounds nothing like safety and everything like slow, deliberate self-destruction.