Finn's POV
The bottle of Macallan sits between us like a dare neither of us has accepted yet. Its amber contents catching the desk lamp and throwing a warm rectangle of light across the polished wood.
Tim drops into the chair across from my desk and stretches his legs out, crossing his ankles on the edge of my credenza. The leather creaks under his weight, settling into the familiar shape of him.
The office is completely empty at this hour—just the two of us.
"You know," Tim says, eyeing the whiskey, "when you texted me at 11PM asking me to come back to the office, I assumed we were about to lose a major client."
He tilts his head, studying my face with the scrutiny he reserves for moments when he suspects I'm about to do something spectacularly stupid.
He's not wrong. The stupid thing is already in motion.
"Neither appears to be the case, so I'm going to need you to explain why I'm here instead of in bed with my beautiful wife."
I push a manila folder across the desk toward him. The folder is thick—nearly two inches of documentation that my legal team has been compiling for the past seventy-two hours.
The paper whispers against the wood as it slides, heavy with evidence. Court filings, financial records, public case histories, client account summaries.
Every traceable transaction that has ever passed through Daniel Palmer's hands.
"Open it," I say.
Tim's eyebrows rise, but he reaches for the folder and flips it open. The pages rustle under his fingers, crisp and damning. I watch his expression shift as he scans the first page, then the second. His feet drop from the credenza with a muffled thud.
"This is... extensive." He looks up at me, his usual humor gone. "Daniel Palmer. Palmer, Palmer… Is it Aubrey's husband?"
"Not for long."
As if I have any right to decide the timeline of her marriage.
"Finn," Tim sets the folder down carefully, like it might bite him, "what exactly am I looking at here?"
I lean back in my chair until the springs protest beneath me and let the words arrange themselves before I release them. The explanation requires precision. Tim deserves to understand what I am asking him to support, and I need him to understand why I am asking.
Because if I say it out loud to someone else, maybe it will stop feeling like madness.
"Three days ago, I instructed my legal team to pull every financial record connected to Daniel they could access. Any cases where he represented clients involving funds that passed through traceable accounts." I gesture toward the folder. "What you're holding is the result of that search."
Tim flips through several more pages, his frown deepening with each one. The paper snaps quietly each time he turns a sheet, punctuating the silence. "And what did they find?"
"Enough." The word carries more weight than its single syllable deserves. "Our guy embezzled from at least two clients, faked billing records, and has a pattern of settlements where the numbers don't add up."
Tim whistles low through his teeth. "This is enough to get him disbarred."
That's the whole point, actually.
Strip him of everything he uses to feel powerful, and watch him realize he was never powerful at all.
He closes the folder and sets it on the desk between us, his expression settling into that narrow-eyed stillness where his jaw goes slack and his gaze turns inward, running numbers I cannot see.
I have seen that look in boardrooms and negotiations and the occasional high-stakes poker game. It means he is taking this seriously.
"Does Aubrey know about this?" Tim asks.
I do not answer immediately. The pause stretches long enough that Tim reads everything he needs to in my silence. I feel the weight of what I'm not saying settle between my shoulder blades.
She asked me to stay out of it. And here I am, elbows deep in the destruction of her husband's life.
"So she doesn't know." He says it as a statement, not a question. "You're building a case against her husband without telling her."
"She asked me to let her handle the situation alone." The admission scrapes against my throat on the way out. "She made it very clear that she doesn't want my interference."
"And yet," Tim gestures at the folder, "here we are. With enough documentation to destroy the man's career and possibly send him to prison."
I stand and move toward the window, the glass radiating the chill of the May night. The city lights scatter across the darkness like fallen stars. The view from this office has always steadied me—the reminder that I built something here, that the empire spreading out below exists because I willed it into being.
Tonight it offers no comfort.
"I've met men like Daniel before." The words leave my mouth with an edge I didn't put there. "They don't release their victims willingly, Tim. They hold on with everything they have because letting go would mean facing the emptiness of their own existence."
I turn back to face him. Tim is watching me with an expression I cannot quite parse—something between concern and calculation. The desk lamp casts half his face in shadow, the other half in gold.
"Aubrey thinks she can manage this on her own because she's been managing it for years. But survival isn't freedom." I return to my desk and place my palm flat on the folder. "By the time she asks for a divorce—and she will, I have no doubt about that—we need to be ready. Daniel should have nothing left to threaten her with."
Nothing left to make her stay.
Tim is quiet for a long moment. The silence between us fills with the weight of what I am proposing—the destruction of another man's life, executed without the knowledge or consent of the woman I am claiming to protect.
"This isn't just about keeping her safe," I said finally. "This is about making sure he can never touch her again. Making sure he loses everything the way I think he deserves to lose it."
I do not bother denying it. Tim has known me too long for pretense.
He exhales slowly and runs a hand through his sandy hair, leaving it standing at odd angles. "You know this could blow up in your face spectacularly, right? If Aubrey finds out you went behind her back…"
"I know the risks."
"Do you?" Tim leans forward, his elbows on his knees, his gaze uncomfortably direct. "Because the Finn I know doesn't usually gamble with stakes this high. This is personal, which makes me nervous."
"She's pregnant, Tim." I meet his gaze without flinching. "And she goes home every night to a man who leaves bruises on her neck and makes her flinch at loud noises. And she thinks she has to handle it alone."
The words hang in the air between us. Tim's expression shifts—the calculation giving way to grief. "I didn't know about the pregnancy," he says quietly.
"Now you do."
Now you understand why I stopped sleeping.
He picks up the folder again, weighing it in his hands like he's measuring the consequences it contains. The paper shifts inside, a soft shuffling sound that fills the space between his decision and mine.
Then he sets it down with a decisive thud and looks at me with the same expression he wore the day we decided to start this company together. Determined, slightly reckless, and entirely committed.
"Tell me what you need," Tim says.