Page 32 of When Ice Queens Collide
Julianna’s eyes darkened. “Octavia Virelli, Dr. Amara Kessler, and Naomi Arata.”
Alexandra immediately recognized the names as long-term shareholders who didn’t call without a good reason. When Julianna spoke, her voice sounded tinnier than usual.
“The defense is sound,“ Julianna said. “I'm not here to tell you it isn't. But that isn't the same as winning, and right now the people I'm talking to aren't asking whether the strategy is defensible but if the fight is winnable. Those are different questions, and I don't have a good answer to the second one.“ She stood, tucking the portfolio back under her arm. “I thought you should hear that from someone who isn't going to dress it up.“
“Thank you.“
Alexandra watched Julianna walk out and close the door behind her, and she resisted the urge to let her shoulder slump a half-degree.
Ruth knocked at four-thirty and came in with a folder she set on the desk without opening.
“I have a pattern,“ she said. “Three weeks into the communications archive, and I can tell you how it’s been working.“
Alexandra picked up the folder and opened it.
Ruth continued, “It goes back at least eight months. The routing bypasses the standard distribution chains entirely. Whoever is doing this built separate channels through the division's internal systems and has been maintaining them. It's not a leak in the conventional sense since nothing is leaving the company. But it’s selective internal distribution that’s been constructed carefully enough that it reads as a normal variance unless you're specifically looking for it.“ Ruth paused. “Theaccess profile is narrow. Financial modeling systems for the energy division, knowledge of the internal reporting chains, and board relationships broad enough that documents arriving informally wouldn't raise questions. I'd put the list at five people, maybe six.“
Alexandra reviewed the list. Five names, and she knew them all. She'd worked alongside most of them for a decade, had sat in rooms with them through situations that tested what people were made of, and had never had cause to question any of them. She moved through the list until she reached the fourth name. Everything Ruth had described pointed to someone who knew the company from the inside and who had helped build what they were now quietly dismantling. The fourth name was exactly that person, and she knew it the way you know something you've been refusing to look at directly. She moved to the fifth name and examined it with more care than it deserved.
“I need two more weeks before I can give you anything definitive, mind you,“ Ruth said. “The trail is there, but it's been handled carefully. I won't bring you a name without proof.“
“You'll have whatever you need.“
Ruth stood. At the door, she paused. “The board members and institutional holders receiving the shaped projections have been making decisions based on a version of this division that doesn't reflect its actual position. Eight months of decisions.“ She held the pause. “I thought you should have that in mind before next week's meetings.“
She left.
Alexandra looked at the fifth name for a moment longer, then closed the folder.
There was no reasonable hour left in the day by the time she'd finished returning calls and signed papers Helen had left on her desk. By then, the building had emptied around her so gradually she hadn't noticed until the silence pressed in aroundher. She drove home through empty streets, the city pulled inward against the cold, lights illuminated behind glass, and the occasional pedestrian moving fast with their chin down against the drizzle.
When she got home, she didn't eat. She poured a generous amount of whisky she didn't particularly want, carried it down the hall, and she sat at Dorothy's desk. She had work she could do; there was always work she could do. She looked at the folders on the desk but knew that she wasn't going to open them.
She'd been running the same process for thirty years: fill the space, keep moving, and give the mind something to do with its hands so it couldn't turn and look at the things you'd put behind you. It had worked through her divorce, through her mother’s illness, and through the eighteen months after the funeral when grief had been a stone she simply carried because there was nothing else to do with it.
It had always worked for her. But somewhere along the way, it had stopped. The space she'd been filling was larger now than it had been a year ago, larger than it had been six months ago. Most troubling of all, she hadn't noticed the expansion until tonight.
Simone.
She'd spent four months turning that name into a professional variable, something with a valuation and a legal strategy attached. She had kept doing it the way you kept applying pressure to something that's already gone numb. The truth was simpler and had been simpler for weeks: Simone had looked at her company and seen it accurately, and then looked at her and done the same thing. And the most damning thing was Simone hadn't looked away from either.
This was what Alexandra had been protecting herself against. She could fight an opponent who wanted to take somethingfrom her, but she had no defense against one who saw through everything she’d built around her and didn't use what she found.
Alexandra picked up the whisky, swirled the liquid a few times, then set it back down without drinking it.
She had tried maintaining a professional distance and found it lasted about as long as it took Simone to walk back into a room. She'd tried working harder and discovered there wasn't a speed at which she could run that put enough distance between herself and the fact that Simone Rousseau existed in her city and her company's orbit. She'd lain awake in this house remembering the pressure of Simone's hands.
It seemed that her body had decided, entirely without her permission, that this was information worth keeping. She was fixated on Simone Rousseau, however much she had resisted admitting that before. She felt what was underneath: need.
Alexandra sat with the word and didn't flinch from it, which was itself a kind of violence against everything Dorothy had instilled in her. Need was what you admitted when you had nothing left to protect yourself with. Need was the open window, the unlocked door, the thing that got you hurt. Dorothy had needed no one after Alexandra's father had left. She had built a company out of that specific refusal and had explicitly taught her daughter that a woman who needed nothing could not be taken from.
Yet now, she needed Simone Rousseau.
She’d been living with the desire for Simone for months, but this was deeper and quieter, a fact about the current state of her mind. She didn't reach for something to use to avoid the feeling but instead let it be true, and it was the bravest thing she'd done in this room since she'd sat here twelve years ago and came to terms with the fact that Dorothy wasn't going to recover.
Alexandra sighed. Acknowledging the feeling wasn’t some big revelation that fixed anything, and she walked out ofDorothy’s study to her bedroom. At some point, her hand moved to the nightstand where her phone was, and she felt the cool edge of the metal case under her fingers before she understood what she was doing.
She put it back face-down and stared at the ceiling until she fell asleep.
