She wanted to explain, wanted to tell him she was protecting him this time rather than abandoning him. But the investigation's fragile survival depended on her staying quiet. She had chosen silence to protect him, and the silence was destroying exactly what she had hoped to save. Then the trap sprang shut from a direction no one expected. Mason Reed discovered that confidential Hail North documents had been accessed using Sloan's own login credentials.
Every digital trail led back to her, clean and damning, as if she had walked into the vault. and left her fingerprints on every surface. Sloan swore she had done no such thing and she was telling the truth, but the truth had no evidence to stand on. Rowan, bound by the very contract he had written, had no choice but to suspend her according to its terms. In front of the assembled executive team, he asked her to surrender her access badge. And the scene became a perfect agonizing echo of the day Gideon had thrown her out of this same company.
Only this time, the man standing before her was Rowan. As the team looked on, Sloan asked him a single question, her voice barely above a whisper. Do you truly believe I would sell you out again? Rowan met her eyes and gave her the honest answer, which was the only kind he had ever given her. I think you still haven't learned that a secret can be its own kind of betrayal.
She placed the badge on the table and left her spine straight, her heart broken. After she was gone, Evelyn Blackwood made a discovery that turned everything sideways. Sloan's credentials had been used to access those files from a computer located inside the office of a board member that Gideon himself had installed. And Rowan, it seemed, may have judged her far too quickly. Sloan was suspended at the precise moment Gideon filed a lawsuit designed to void Hail North's acquisition entirely.
He claimed that Rowan had used inside information obtained from Sloan to buy Whitmore Meridian for far less than its true value. If the court accepted the claim, temporary control of the company could swing back into the hands of Ashcraftoft Crown. The press seized the story with delight, suggesting that Sloan and Rowan had colluded because of their old romance, dragging their private history into public view. Both of their reputations now hung in the same fragile balance, tied together by a past neither had confessed. What had been a quiet business dispute became a public spectacle overnight, and the truth grew harder to see beneath the noise.