Page 46 of Breaking the Ice Queen
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Dani’s voice was fierce, clipped, the voice of a woman who had spent nine months building a case alongside her best friend and was now watching it be recontextualized by a single page of legal prose. “Both are a betrayal. If she buried it to protect Burty, she’s complicit in three years of additional fraud. If she buried it to protect herself, she’s been lying to you about her motivations since the rooftop. Either way, she had the evidence that could have ended this before it started, and she chose to keep it hidden.”
The elevator chimed. The doors opened. Neither of them moved.
“I need to talk to her,” Sienna said.
“I know.” Dani folded the memo and put it in her jacket pocket. “I’ll be right here.”
Adriana was standing behind her desk when Sienna walked in. She had just ended her phone call. Her jacket was off, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and she looked up with the expression she wore when she was expecting to return to work and found, instead, Sienna.
She saw Sienna’s face and the expression drained from her own.
“You found the memo,” Adriana said.
The fact that she identified it instantly, that she knew without being told exactly what Sienna had found and what it meant, was the final confirmation Sienna needed. Adriana had known the memo was in the shared drive. She had known Sienna would eventually find it. She had not warned her.
“Three years.” Sienna’s voice was quiet. Too quiet. She closed the office door behind her. The voice she used when she was angry enough that volume would be dangerous. “You identified the fraud three years ago. You wrote a memo recommending an audit. You filed it in your sealed records. And for three years, you continued representing Burty Howarth while his operation expanded and his victims accumulated and the evidence I spent nine months gathering existed in your own files.”
“Sienna—”
Sienna’s hand cut through the air between them.
“Was it protection? Were you protecting Burty’s retainer? Protecting the firm? Or was it self-protection, burying your own complicity so deep that no one would ever find it?” Sienna’s jaw was tight. Her hands were clenched at her sides. “Because I’ve been trying to figure out which one is worse, and I keep arriving at the same answer: they’re the same thing.”
“Let me explain?—”
Sienna held up a hand.
“You’ve had three years to explain. You’ve had weeks in that conference room to explain. You sat across from me and shared evidence and proposed an alliance and talked about integrity and the right thing, and you never once mentioned that you had been sitting on the single most damning piece of evidence in this entire case.” Sienna’s voice rose. Not to shouting, to the raw intensity of someone who was no longer containing what she was feeling and was no longer interested in trying. “I trusted you. I let you into the investigation. I let you into my bed. And you were withholding the document that would have made my entire investigation unnecessary.”
“That’s not?—”
Adriana’s hand gripped the edge of her desk.
“Was the alliance real?” Sienna stepped forward. “Because you let me fall in love with you while you were sitting on a secret that changes the meaning of everything. Not a mistake. Not an oversight. Three years of choosing silence while I was in that conference room trusting you with everything I had.”
“Sienna, no.” Adriana’s voice cracked. The Ice Queen she had rebuilt after their nights together, reconstructed brick by careful brick, collapsed. The careful surface she had maintained through every confrontation since the gala, through the Palomar, the rooftop, the conference room debates, the nights in Sienna’s bed, fractured. “The alliance was real. Everything was real. I buried the memo three years ago because I was afraid of losing the firm, and I should have disclosed it when we started working together, and I didn’t because I was ashamed and because telling you would have?—”
“Would have what? Shown me who you really are?”
Adriana flinched. An actual, visible flinch, the first Sienna had ever seen on her face, the first crack in the Ice Queen that came from impact rather than from tenderness. Her gray eyes went bright with tears she was fighting not to shed, and her hands gripped the edge of her desk, and she looked at Sienna across the distance of the office that had been their workspace and their battleground and, for two nights, a place much more vulnerable, and she said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say. Not because Adriana didn’t have words. She had more words than anyone Sienna had ever met. But because the truth of what Sienna had said was too complete and too accurate to be argued with, and Adriana was, underneath everything else, honest enough to recognize it.
Adriana’s eyes were wet. Sienna’s chest tore open a little at the sight. The anger was enormous, but under it ran everything else. The memory of Adriana’s laugh in the conference room, her hands sure on the case files, the warmth of her in Sienna’s bed. She opened her mouth. For one terrible second, she was going to take it all back.
She didn’t.
“The partnership is over,” Sienna said. The words came out level, each one placed with the same careful deliberation she used in the cutting room when she was assembling the final version of a story and needed every frame to mean exactly what it meant. “The alliance. The working sessions. The conference room. The shared drive. Whatever this was between us, the parts that were professional and the parts that weren’t. All of it.”
Adriana opened her mouth. Closed it. Her hands were white on the desk’s edge, and the muscles in her forearms were taut, and she looked like she was holding herself upright through will alone. The eyes Sienna had loved, that Sienna still loved, were wet and wide and holding Sienna’s with a desperation that the Ice Queen had never shown before.
“Sienna. Please. Give me a chance to?—”
“You had three years of chances.” Sienna’s voice was low, final, carrying the weight of a verdict that she was delivering not as a judge but as a woman who had been hurt by someone she had believed in. “Stay away from me. Stay away from the project. Stay away from Dani. If you want to do the right thing, if you actually want to be the person you told me you could be in that conference room, you know where to send the evidence. All of it. Including the memo.”
She took a breath that shuddered on the inhale and steadied on the exhale, and she held Adriana’s gaze for three final seconds, and in those three seconds she let Adriana see everything: the anger, the hurt, the love that was still there beneath both of them. Then she turned and walked out.
