Chapter 144 Chapter One hundred and forty-three
ARA
“Mrs. Slade, we’ve just received a call from an anonymous intel agent claiming to know the location of the tape.”
The words slid into the room like a blade, quiet but sharp enough to make me flinch. I felt like ripping my hair off from the roots.
Ten minutes. Ten minutes before the press release. And now this.
I pressed my lips together, swallowing the string of curses rising up my throat.
“Track that caller,” Thayne ordered immediately.
“We already tried, sir. The signal keeps bouncing.”
I watched the shift happen in real time, the way his jaw tightened, the faint flare of his nostrils, the darkness settling behind his eyes like storm clouds rolling in.
He was furious. But when he spoke again, his voice was terrifyingly calm.
“Dial him now. I’m sure he has something to do with its disappearance.”
The operative nodded and stepped back.
“Stuart,” Thayne called, not taking his eyes off the middle distance. “Run voice recognition. We need to pin this fucker down.”
“Yes, boss.”
Stuart’s response was rough around the edges, fatigue dragging at his posture. Sasha stood close beside him, fingers absent-mindedly brushing his arm in a quiet attempt at comfort.
Odd. Stuart hated being touched. Military conditioning had carved that aversion deep into him. Yet he didn’t shrug her off.
Everyone was tired, even Nick who'd begged to sleep for a few minutes groaned like a century old door when I knocked on the door that led to his suite.
My sisters didn't know he was here with us, and I wanted it to remain like that until we were done with this whole mess. They wouldn't go away if I let them know, and they would be a distraction.
“Connected,” Stuart mouthed, tapping his earpiece.
The air in the room tightened.
Thayne lifted his phone slowly, pressing it to his ear as everyone else instinctively fell silent.
“Hello,” he began, his voice stripped of warmth, of patience, of anything human. “How many grand do I need to wire for you to send the tape?”
A pause stretched across the line. Long enough for my pulse to crawl into my throat. Long enough for every person in that room to stop breathing.
Thayne didn’t move or blink, he didn’t even shift his weight.
He just listened, still as a loaded gun waiting for the trigger.
A groggy voice crackled through the loudspeaker.
“One million.”
Sasha snorted. I shook my head at her, a silent ‘don’t even try it’, but her lips were already parting.
Stuart lifted a finger, spelling something in the air.
Sasha squinted, trying to decode it, but recognition hit me first.
A name that always made my sisters and I uneasy.
Whenever we didn’t want to say it aloud, as if speaking it might summon him, we spelled it instead.
Neil.
Thayne’s grip tightened around his phone as he gestured for Stuart to keep working.
On the computer screen Stuart hovered over, the caller’s location blinked into view.
Thayne caught it too. He raised four fingers, dipping them down and up in a sharp motion. The men around Stuart moved instantly, filing out of the room without a sound.Carrying out his silent command.
“Alright,” Thayne said at last. “Wire or cash?”
“Wire,” Neil replied, his voice still thick and groggy, like he was trying on the role of a drug lord and hoping no one noticed the costume.
It didn’t fool me. Neil was a coward. The same man who couldn’t stand up to the sixteen-year-old who’d bullied my sisters in the subway five years ago.
I’d been the one to shove that boy into a seat, leaning close enough for him to see I meant every word when I promised to knock out his front teeth.
Neil had just stood there, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides. Okay, honestly, those were useless to me.
“Send the details,” Thayne said, ending the call.
“Two more minutes,” Sasha announced.
“So Neil took the tape?” I asked.
Thayne’s jaw flexed. “Yes. And he’s trying to outplay me. For the third time since I've known him.”
Stuart prepared everything for release while Sasha smoothed my hair, guiding me forward toward the crew waiting in tense silence.
Waiting for me to detonate the truth.
“The world knows me as Mrs. Slade,” I began, my voice steadier than I felt. “The woman who never quite fit into the expensive Slade orbit. But I am Arayna, daughter of Lola.”
My throat tightened, but I pushed through. “My mother may be gone, but she left behind a piece of history, one that carried the heartbreak that killed her. Your beloved politician and business mogul, Jimmy Ackerfield…”
The rest spilled out. Anger. Grief. Exhaustion. Every buried thing clawed its way free until speaking felt like bleeding.
When I finished, my body trembled violently. Tears blurred everything. I stumbled back, and Thayne caught me before I could fall, gathering me against his chest as my tears and snot ruined his pristine white shirt.
Sasha and Stuart cleared their throats in perfect unison.
“We beat Jimmy by seven minutes,” Sasha said.
I reluctantly stepped away from Thayne’s arms , only for him to pull me back, locking his arms around my chest from behind.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Jimmy’s release dropped seven minutes after yours,” Stuart explained, throwing Sasha a warning look.
“But…” Sasha fidgeted with the buttons of her peach coat, “…there’s a problem. Jimmy didn’t release the original footage.”
“Sasha,” Thayne said calmly, dangerously, “I will fire you if you keep feeding me information in installments. Like a nursing mother feeding her newborn.”
“Newborns suck their mother’s breasts, Mr. Thayne. Are you implying I’m feeding you—”
Stuart stunned us all by clamping his fingers over her mouth.
“Goddamn you, Sasha,” Thayne muttered.
The moment Stuart let go, Sasha gasped, “Release me, you big, brooding bastard!”
Stuart wiped a smear of lipstick with the curtain behind him, with visible regret.
“What a blessed day,” Thayne murmured into my hair, “to realize I’ve employed wild animals.”
Despite everything, laughter bubbled out of me. Sasha and Stuart joined in, the tension cracking for a fleeting second.
Then reality settled back over us.
“What footage did my father release?” I asked quietly, shattering the moment, and my own fragile calm with it.