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Chapter 597
Chapter 597:
His eyes fixed on the stabilizing green lines spreading across the monitors. His mind worked rapidly. Crawford Love was a predator by nature and by practice. He had never in his career surrendered capital without having his back against a wall — not unless the alternative cost him something he valued more.
There was only one force capable of making Crawford drop his weapons without a fight.
June.
A spike of sharp, instinctive jealousy drove itself into Cole’s chest. June had gone to Crawford. She had spoken to him.
But the jealousy dissolved almost immediately, replaced by something heavier. Crawford hadn’t stopped because she asked him to. Crawford had stopped because she had threatened to walk away from both of them permanently — and Crawford had understood what that meant in a way Cole was only beginning to.
They had pushed her to the absolute edge.
Cole stared at the folder in Davis’s hand. Sending it would win the war. It would also prove every word June had ever said about him. It would confirm, beyond any argument, that he was exactly the destructive, controlling monster she believed him to be.
He closed his eyes. A wave of deep, bone-level exhaustion moved through his entire body.
He lowered his hand.
𝖰𝗎а𝗅𝗶𝘁𝘺 𝗍𝗿𝗮𝗇𝘀lаti𝗼nѕ 𝗼ո
“Shred the file,” Cole said. His voice had nothing left in it.
Davis stared at him. “Sir. We have him by the throat p>
“Shred it, Davis.” Cole turned his back on the monitors. “Call our SEC contacts. Stand down. The war is over p>
He walked out of the trading room and into the quiet, carpeted hallway leading to his private office.
The war between two of the most powerful men on Wall Street ended without a final blow, without a press conference, without a winner — just a slow, silent exhale, and the particular stillness that follows a catastrophic waste of everything.
But Eleanor’s words were louder now than the silence. You absolute fool. His guilt over Caleb had made him blind. He had shielded a parasite and destroyed something irreplaceable. He needed to know the truth — all of it, from the beginning.
Cole took out his phone and dialed his head of security.
“I want a full deep-background trace on Alycia Beasley,” he said, his voice dropping to something cold and final. “Cross-reference her complete timeline against Caleb’s last year in Switzerland. Every person she contacted. Every location she visited. I want to know whether she was even in the country when he claimed to have met that girl.” He paused. “Report on my desk in one hour p>
The late afternoon sun cast long, flat shadows across the Beasley family’s foreclosed villa in Long Island.
Inside, the house had the particular atmosphere of a life mid-collapse. Expensive furniture wore bright yellow bank seizure stickers like badges of failure. The air smelled of stale wine and anxiety that had nowhere to go.
Alycia paced across the bare hardwood floor of the living room, chewing her thumbnail, her heart striking her ribs in an unsteady rhythm. Since the humiliation at Le Bernardin, a suffocating terror had taken up residence in her chest. She hadn’t slept.
Her Hermès phone vibrated on the kitchen counter.
She lunged for it. The caller ID showed Cole’s chief executive assistant.
“Hello?” Her hands were shaking.