She turned, and this time I didn’t let her go. I stood, crossed the room in three strides, and caught her hand.
“Eliza-” I started.
She didn’t pull away. She squeezed, once, as if to remind me she was real and not some equation to be solved.
“I know, Gabriel,” she said, softer now. “But next time? Let me help you. I hate feeling useless.”
“You’re not,” I said, and meant it.
She left, and I let her. Maybe that was what loving her was: not the chase, not the conquest, but the discipline to wait for the moment she needed me.
I sat in my empty office and watched the city flicker, thinking of how easy it was to destroy things, and how impossibly hard to build them back.
The email arrived at 3 a.m. because that’s when certain cowards preferred to operate.
Subject: “Urgent—Immediate Attention Required.” The attachment was a compressed folder, password-protected but barely disguised. I ran a sandbox scan before opening it; no malware, just two high-res photos and a single paragraph of text.
The photos were timestamped from the night we’d shared here in the office. Explicit, loaded, obvious. The message was not subtle.
“Certain activities violate the firm’s Code of Conduct. I am prepared to disclose these indiscretions to the board andmedia unless you resign within 72 hours. Consider your options carefully.”
No signature. No demand for money, just the surgical threat of exposure.
I didn’t bother to panic. The firm had handled worse, and I’d been built for this kind of warfare. But the idea of Eliza, her name, her reputation, dragged through the gutter by some second-string sloppy blackmailer made my skin prickle.
I screenshotted the message, encrypted the full thread, and forwarded it to our head of Legal. “Handle this quietly,” I wrote. “No further action until I say so.”
Then I got to work. Whoever sent this thought they were invisible. They weren’t. I started with the header, working backward through each relay and IP hop. The sender used a proton mail account and two Tor bridges, but the pattern was sloppy. In three hours, I had an approximate geolocation for the device used; a rented apartment less than six miles from our main office.
Amateur hour.
By noon, Legal replied: the blackmailer had also sent hard copies to the homes of three board members. The packets contained the same photos and a printout of the original message. Sloppy again; each envelope sealed with a generic label, the return address a non-existent mailbox in Midtown.
I called the board chair, preempting the scandal. He was already half-spun from the tipoff, but I shut him down with one sentence: “We’ll contain it. No need to escalate.”
“Is it true?” he asked.
“It’s being handled,” I said. “There will be no fallout.”
He grunted, satisfied. For now.
I considered telling Eliza. She had the right to know, and she’d probably never forgive me if I kept this from her. But the mere thought of her reading that email, seeing those photos, tipped the balance. She’d gone through enough. I’d protect her from this, even if it cost me everything.
By 6:00 p.m., I had a suspect: an ex-analyst, quietly terminated last year after a failed embezzlement scheme. He’d left with a grudge and, apparently, a handful of old network credentials that Whitfield must have neglected to purge.
I tracked the guy’s movements: Uber receipts, a trail of coffee shop logins. I could have called the police, but that was never my style. I wanted the confrontation personal. Face to face.
After an hour later, I slipped out the back entrance, crossed three blocks, and waited outside the rat’s apartment complex. The hallway smelled like burnt hair and bleach. I knocked twice. He opened the door just enough to show his panic.
“Valor-? I-”
I didn’t let him finish. I pushed past, pinned him against the wall, and showed him the email on my phone.
“Delete everything,” I said. “All copies, all backups. Right now.”
He shook. “I - look, I just wanted-”
“-To destroy someone. Fine. But you picked the wrong target.”