Page 93 of Falling for Mr. Ruthless

My hands still on the keyboard. One heartbeat. Two. Three.

"Then at least this time, it will be my choice. Not Megan's. Not fear's." I resume typing, each keystroke deliberate. "Not the lie I told myself about who deserves who."

He watches me for a long moment before nodding once, decision made. We've worked together long enough that I recognize his surrender to inevitability. His acceptance that this isn't something he can talk me out of. That he shouldn't try.

"Where do we start?" he asks, moving to sit across from me.

"We start by understanding what Megan wants." I pull up her file on the screen, turning it so we both can see. "Not just professionally. Personally. What drives her."

"Power."

"No." I shake my head. "That's too simple. Too clean. Megan doesn't want power as an end. She wants acknowledgment. Validation. She wants to matter to people who've dismissed her."

"Like you."

"Especially me." I lean back, the leather chair creaking beneath my weight. "She's not after Novare. She's not even after Chanel, not really. She's after the recognition that she matters enough to destroy what matters to me."

Tyson absorbs this, connecting dots in the careful, methodical way that's made him invaluable to me for two decades.

"So we don't just dismantle her business," he says slowly. "We dismantle her sense of significance."

"Exactly." Something cold and precise settles in my chest. A plan crystallizing. "We don't just take away what she has. We take away what she believes about herself."

"That's more than professional execution, Jakob. That's?—"

"What she deserves." I cut him off, voice final. "What she's earned."

The silence that follows feels weighted, significant. Tyson studies me with the careful attention of someone reassessing a familiar landscape after an earthquake.

"I've never seen you like this," he says finally.

"You've never seen me," I correct him. "Not really. I've spent my life making sure of it."

I stand, move to the bar cart in the corner of my office. Pour two fingers of scotch despite the early hour. Offer him nothing. This isn't a celebration. This is fuel.

"When I married Chanel, I tried to be worthy of her." The scotch burns down my throat—a cleansing fire. "I thought that meant being better. Being more than what I was raised to be. More than what I knew myself capable of."

I set the glass down with careful precision.

"I was wrong. It wasn't about being worthy. It was about being honest." I turn to face him fully. "I've spent four years pretending to be the man who deserved to lose her. Playing the role of the honorable exile."

"And now?"

"Now I stop pretending that I'm anything other than what I am."

I return to my desk, pulling up another file. Another piece of the architecture of Megan's destruction. "A man who will do whatever is necessary to protect what's mine."

"Even if what's yours doesn't want to be protected."

My jaw tightens. The one tell I've never managed to eliminate completely. "Chanel can make her own choices. But she deserves to make them with all the information. With the full truth of who I am. Who I've always been."

Tyson's phone buzzes. He checks it, expression shifting subtly.

"Collins has something," he says, standing. "I'll bring him up."

I nod once, watching him leave. When the door closes, I allow myself one moment of absolute stillness. One breath where I let myself feel the weight of what I'm setting in motion. The consequences that will follow.

Not regret. Not hesitation. Just acknowledgment.