Page 36 of Mister St. James

My thumb floats above the call button. For a second, I think about putting the phone down and walking away, really walking away, starting over. But there’s nothing on the other side of this, even if I solved the case, the mess would follow me everywhere. I’m tied to it, same as I’m tied to her.

I drop the phone onto the marble counter. The sound is louder than I expect, echoing off bare walls. I stretch, joints popping, and walk to the window. The city is still alive out there, traffic slicing through darkness, neon reflected off every wet surface. I press my palm to the window and let the chill seep in. On the thirty-fourth floor, you can pretend you’re above it all, but the city always reminds you that you’re not. You’re just another light in the high-rise, another silhouette with secrets.

I think about the look on Cat’s face in my doorway. Not the hurt, not the anger, those were manageable. It was the second before that, when she thought I might tell her the truth. The hope in her eyes, reckless and stupid, as if I was capable of giving her something that wasn’t a lie.

I go back to the island, pick up the phone. My hands are not steady. I force myself to hold it still, thumb hovering over her name.

I press call.

The line rings. Once. Twice. Every second is a new layer of humiliation. I imagine her seeing my name, weighing whether to answer, her finger over the decline button, maybe hoping I’ll just hang up.

On the third ring, no answer. Just my own reflection, backlit by city lights, holding the phone to my ear, idiot that I am. I close my eyes and let it ring a fourth time, savor the shame, the inevitability.

When I hang up, the silence in the apartment is total.

It’s just me, and the wall of evidence, and the ghost of her voice, daring me to try again.

Chapter seventeen

Breaking Point

Catalina

I walk into his office without knocking. It’s not an act of aggression so much as an efficiency of intent, by the time Aiden looks up from his heap of paperwork and flickering laptop screens, I’m already halfway across the glass-walled perimeter, my heels scoring silent exclamation points into the custom tile. I close the door behind me with a soft but final click. Heads on the open-plan floor swivel. It’s 9:17 a.m., but you wouldn’t know it from the state of him.

Three coffee cups ring his desk like evidence markers at a crime scene. The only thing more ragged than his tie, kinked, half-untied, as if he choked on it during a fitful nap, is the face above it. There are shadows under his eyes that no algorithm could airbrush. His glasses are clean, but the rest of him is wild, unkempt stubble darkening his jawline, hair swept back with the same hand that’s been feeding him caffeine and penning furious notes in blue Sharpie across every exposed inch of his desktop. When I enter, he does not greet me, just watches, like I’m a disruption he’s gamed out but still resents for arriving.

“Not leaving,” I say, arms folded, “until you tell me what is actually going on.”

The only motion from him is a muscle jumping in his jaw. I stay standing. He likes his chair to tower over visitors, but I refuse to give him that inch today.

He reaches for his laptop, as if to close it, but at the last second leaves it open. “I’m in the middle of something, Cat.”

“Yeah. I noticed.” I nod at the post-apocalyptic sprawl of printouts and coffee. “Your calendar is fucked. You canceled two meetings with the European team, moved all hands without telling HR, and you routed my last expense report to dead email. So either you’re prepping for a corporate suicide or you’ve decided to run the place with an eightball and a bottle of Jack.”

His lips twitch, either an almost-smile or a wince. “I’m handling it.”

“You’re not.” I plant my hands on the desk, lean in until my pendant nearly taps his keyboard. “You froze me out, Aiden. Even when you ghost people, you don’t ghost me. And now I’m supposed to just fetch your coffee and wait for my pink slip? Give me some fucking credit.”

There’s a second where he just stares, like maybe he hasn’t slept in so long he’s forgotten language. Then: “This isn’t about you.”

I laugh. “Nothing is ever about me with you. That’s the problem. But your firewalls aren’t as strong as you think.” I lean closer, and it’s like I can smell the salt of his stress, the cold sweat behind the crisp white shirt. “Strip everything else out. Forget the club, forget all of it. I am still your executive assistant. I have been for almost a year and you know I am damn good at my job. Whatever this is, it is my job to help you manage it, and you are actively preventing me from doing that. So tell me the truth, let me help.”

He doesn’t answer. There’s something desperate in the way he organizes his desktop, stacking three folders, squaring them, then moving them aside. I feel a flush of panic. If I lose him now, it won’t just be this job. It’ll be the only thing I’ve ever built from the ground up. The only place anyone ever took my ideas and let them run.

He finally looks at me, eyes ringed with red. “You don’t want to know.”

It lands like a gut punch. “Try me,” I say, voice flat. I hold his stare until he looks away.

He turns the laptop so the screen faces me. The desktop is a chaos of spreadsheets, code editors, a Slack thread that’s a mile long. But front and center, an email. No, not an email, just a photo. JPEG, blown up so the pixels look like a dirty secret.

The image is me and him, side by side at a black-lacquered table. We are masked, but not masked enough. My hair is wild, the heart-shaped birthmark under my left ear visible even in grayscale. Aiden’s profile is sharp, but the tilt of his mouth makes it clear this is not a business meeting. There are others in the background, faces blurred out, but the intent is unmistakable.

Below the photo, a caption in all-caps, courier font: TICK TOCK, ST. JAMES. CASH OR ACCESS. YOUR CHOICE. NEXT PHOTO GOES WIDER.

For a long moment, all I hear is the hum of the building’s AC, the phantom click of a mouse somewhere outside the glass. My heart doesn’t hammer, it thuds, slow and cold, like it’s bracing for news even worse than this.

Aiden slides an actual printout across the desk, the same photo but this time annotated. The blackmail demand. A timestamp. I can see his own notes in the margin, surgical and neat. I don’t recognize the handwriting, but I know it’s his because he’s always printed his letters with the same clipped aggression he uses for every email, every order.