Chapter 3 · What Was Mine
Rowan Hale stood when I reached the hotel bar.
No smug smile. No predatory offer. Just a black jacket, wet shoulders, and a laptop covered in stickers from games that mattered more than they sold.
“Maya Reed?”
“If you ask me to prove it, I’m leaving.”
“I was going to offer you a towel.”
That stopped me.
I sat.
Rowan turned his laptop around. A blank document had three headings.
What Maya owns.
What VossWorks owns.
What no one touches tonight.
I stared at it.
He said, “We start there.”
“You believe me?”
“I believe timestamps. Contracts. Version history. Cached video. And people who panic when a woman’s name appears where it belongs.”
Before I could answer, Caleb walked into the bar.
He was soaked from the rain and trying not to look desperate.
“Hale.”
“Voss.”
Caleb ignored him. “Maya, get up.”
I didn’t move.
“This is between us,” he said.
“No. That’s what you told everyone every time they asked why I wasn’t in the room.”
His jaw tightened.
He pulled out his phone. “I’ll post it now. Lead Narrative Designer. Co-creator. Whatever title you want.”
“Whatever title I want?”
“Yes.”
“Because you think titles are stickers.”
His face changed.
I opened the screenshot of Sienna’s merch page and set it on the table.
“My ring. My line. Sienna’s face. Your approval.”
He looked down.
Nothing.
Rowan leaned forward. “That is going to be a problem.”
Caleb snapped, “Stay out of this.”
My phone lit up.
June.
They locked your company email. Did you download your personal docs?
I turned the screen toward Caleb.
“Did your team lock me out?”
“Legal is preserving records.”
“By cutting me off from mine?”
“You walked out during a sponsored launch.”
“You erased me during one.”
People in the bar were looking now.
Caleb saw them looking.
For once, the room wasn’t his.
Rowan stood. “Maya, we should move somewhere private.”
Caleb stepped in front of him. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”
That did it.
Not the sentence. The assumption.
I picked up Rowan’s coffee and threw it onto Caleb’s white shirt.
The cup wasn’t full. It wasn’t hot enough to hurt.
It was enough to stop the room.
“Do not,” I said, “say what I can do.”
Caleb looked at me.
No answer.
At the elevator bank, my phone buzzed again.
June.
They’re deleting Slack channels.
A second message appeared before the doors opened.
I copied the access logs. Tell me where to send them.
Then a third.
Maya, it wasn’t marketing.
I stared at the screen.
June sent one cropped screenshot.
User: C.VOSS
Action: changed public credit line
From: Co-Creator, Maya Reed
To: Narrative Support
Time: 11:46 p.m., the night before launch.
Caleb was still standing in the lobby, coffee dripping from his shirt, when I stepped into the elevator with Rowan.
For the first time all night, he didn’t call after me.
He was too busy realizing I had just found his fingerprints.
