Chapter 6
She stopped pacing, suddenly catching herself. A faint look of embarrassment crossed her face.
“Sorry,” she murmured, looking down at her socks. “I’m ranting. You work sixty hours a week fixing transmissions, and here I am crying about corporate restructuring.”
“Don't apologize,” Wyatt said softly.
He stood up. In three strides, he crossed the tiny floor and stood before her.
He didn't tower over her to intimidate. He bent slightly, bringing his gaze level with hers. His large, calloused hand came up, hesitating for a fraction of a second before gently cupping her chin. His thumb brushed across her cheekbone with infinite care.
Piper’s breath hitched. Her heart kicked against her ribs like a startled bird.
“You’re fighting a war for people who can’t fight for themselves,” Wyatt murmured, his thumb tracing the soft curve of her jaw. “That makes you braver than any CEO on Wall Street, Piper. Don't ever apologize for having teeth.”
Piper looked up into his hazel eyes, completely paralyzed by the sheer tenderness in his touch. She had spent the last six months being threatened, gaslit, and treated like an inconvenient liability by everyone in her life.
No one had ever looked at her like this.
Like she was precious. Like she was formidable.
“Wyatt…” she whispered, her lips parting.
He leaned in half an inch. The scent of cedar and clean rain enveloped her. For one dizzying second, Piper thought he was going to kiss her—and God help her, every rational thought in her head screamed for him to do it.
Then Wyatt blinked, the fierce hunger in his eyes reined in by an iron wall of discipline.
He lowered his hand slowly, stepping back a pace.
“Go to sleep, Piper,” he said, his voice husky and strained. “You’ve had a hell of a day.”
Piper stood there for a second, her face burning, her skin still tingling where his fingers had touched her. She nodded dumbly, unable to find her voice, and hurried into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her with a soft click.
***
Midnight struck.
The apartment was pitch-black except for the amber streetlamps glowing through the thin blinds. The radiator had finally ceased its wheezing, settling into a quiet, rhythmic hum.
On the pull-out sofa, Wyatt lay on his back, staring at the water-stained ceiling.
His six-foot-three frame hung off the end of the mattress by several inches, his feet dangling over the edge. But he wasn’t thinking about the cramped bed.
He was thinking about the woman sleeping ten feet away behind a hollow-core door.
Wyatt rolled silently off the mattress. Moving with the soundless grace of a ghost, he grabbed his burner phone and slipped out onto the narrow iron fire escape.
The crisp Manhattan night air hit him like a cold shock. Queens stretched out below him in a grid of neon delis, row houses, and distant subway tracks. In the far distance, across the East River, the glittering spires of Midtown Manhattan pierced the black sky—including the razor-sharp silhouette of the Brandt Tower, glowing like a monolith of glass and light.
Wyatt dialed a secure eleven-digit extension.
It was answered on the first half-ring.
“Speak,” came the sharp voice of Julian Vance, Wyatt’s personal senior counsel and the most terrifying litigation shark in North America.
“Julian,” Wyatt said, his voice flat, icy, and lethal. “Wake up the entire forensic accounting team.”
A sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Mr. Brandt? We’ve been searching for you for twelve hours. The board—”
“Shut up and listen,” Wyatt cut him off, staring out toward the Manhattan skyline. “I want an immediate, deep-subpoena audit initiated on Pierce Capital. Focus on their offshore Cayman derivative accounts and cross-reference them with Holloway Logistics’ employee pension reserves over the last six months.”
There was a stunned silence on the line. “Holloway Logistics? Sir, isn’t that the regional freight firm Landon Pierce was pitching as a bolt-on acquisition for our mid-Atlantic expansion?”
“It was,” Wyatt said, his jaw tightening like tempered steel. “Now it’s a crime scene. Landon Pierce has been embezzling forty million dollars from their pension pool to prop up his failing margins. I want the financial trace completed by tomorrow night.”
“Consider it done,” Julian replied instantly, recognizing the lethal cadence in his boss’s voice. “And regarding the Brandt Global restructuring audit? The termination error in Sector 4 analytics that you flagged?”
Wyatt’s gaze drifted toward the small window behind him, where Piper’s silhouette lay peacefully beneath the faded quilt.
“Reopen Sector 4 immediately,” Wyatt commanded softly. “Reinstate every analyst terminated in that sweep with full back pay and a twenty percent retention bonus. But leave Piper Holloway’s file unflagged for now.”
Julian paused. “Who is Piper Holloway, sir?”
Wyatt looked down at the simple tungsten wedding band on his left ring finger, gleaming faintly in the moonlight.
“The most dangerous woman in New York,” Wyatt murmured, a faint, devastating smile touching his lips. “And the next majority shareholder of Brandt Global.”
He hung up, slipping the phone back into his flannel pocket.
Inside the quiet apartment, Piper turned over in her sleep, clutching her father’s notebook to her chest, entirely unaware that the phantom billionaire she despised had just mobilized a two-hundred-billion-dollar empire to burn her enemies to the ground.
The smell of cheap diner roast gave way to the sharp, metallic tang of industrial Queens at six in the morning.
A pale November sun was struggling to burn through the fog clinging to the East River. In Piper’s cramped kitchen, the radiator gave three sullen knocks and fell silent, leaving the air biting and sharp.
Wyatt stood over the tiny two-burner stove, a mug of instant coffee in one hand, completely dressed in his worn flannel and heavy work trousers. He looked entirely too big for the linoleum space, his broad shoulders catching the cold gray light from the courtyard shaft.
Piper emerged from the bedroom with her hair twisted into an efficient knot, already wrapped in an oversized wool cardigan and balancing two thick legal pads under her arm.
“You’re up early for a man sleeping on a torture rack,” she noted, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Force of habit,” Wyatt replied smoothly, his hazel eyes tracking her as she poured herself a cup of water to boil. “Transmissions don’t pull themselves. And the sofa has character.”
“The sofa has an exposed coil that gave me a bruise in college,” Piper corrected, pulling a box of tea bags from the shelf. She eyed his faded jacket hanging on the hook by the door. “You’re heading into your shop in Long Island City today?”
“Have to,” Wyatt said. “If my uncle’s lawyers send a runner to verify continuous operation, an empty bay is all they need to trigger the default clause.”
Piper set her mug down with a firm ceramic click. “I’m coming with you.”
Wyatt paused with his mug halfway to his lips. “To an auto shop?”
“To *your* auto shop,” Piper said, her chin lifting with that characteristic, stubborn fire. “I looked over your lease agreement notes last night while you were asleep. If your uncle holds a predatory secondary lien, the New York Commercial Code requires forty-eight hours’ written notice before any physical inspection. If they show up, you need someone who knows how to quote statutory injunctions, not just throw a wrench at their heads.”
