The morning sun streaming through the bedroom window felt cruel. Sophia lay awake for hours before Ethan stirred, her mind running through his confession on repeat. He'd been tracking her. Not just competing with her in a general sense, but studying her specifically, tracking her movements, predicting her strategies. It was obsessive. It was manipulative. It was also, she recognized with a sick feeling in her stomach, exactly what a person did when they were obsessed with someone.
She slipped out of bed while he slept and went to her office. The dedicated workspace in the penthouse had become her sanctuary, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park and walls lined with monitors displaying market data, news feeds, and her company's performance metrics.
Marcus called at eight in the morning, his tone urgent. "We have a problem with the Techvision bid."
Sophia's heart rate spiked. "What kind of problem?"
"Blake Ventures just increased their bid by forty million dollars. They're now at two hundred and thirty million, which is way above market value for a tech startup. This doesn't make financial sense unless they're willing to take losses."
Sophia stared at the numbers on her screen, watching the bidding war unfold in real time. Ethan had said he wanted to bid on Techvision. But this move wasn't strategic. This was personal.
"Increase our bid," she heard herself say.
"Sophia, we're already at one hundred and ninety million. That's pushing our valuation on this deal to—"
"I don't care. Match them and add another fifty million."
"That's irrational. We can't justify this financially."
"I said match them."
She hung up before Marcus could argue further. Her hands were shaking, and she couldn't decide if she was angry or betrayed or some combination of both. The memory of Ethan's voice in the dark last night echoed in her mind. "I bid on Techvision specifically because you wanted it."
She'd interpreted it as romantic at the time, like he was paying attention to her dreams. But now it felt like he was playing her. Like every move she made in business, he was one step ahead, watching, studying, waiting.
Ethan emerged from the bedroom at nine o'clock. He was showered and dressed for work, looking entirely too calm for someone who'd just admitted to years of obsessive surveillance. She watched him make coffee in the kitchen, watched him scroll through his phone, watched him exist like it was a normal morning.
"Your company just responded to the Techvision bid," he said without looking at her.
"Did you expect them not to?"
"I expected you to be angry." He finally looked at her. "You are angry."
"You've been tracking me for years. You knew what I was interested in before I even approached it. You've been using that information to position yourself ahead of me in business." The words came out cold and controlled, which was worse than yelling would have been. "That's not competition, Ethan. That's manipulation."
"It was tracking, not surveillance."
"Same thing."
"It's not. I followed your public business moves. I read every interview you gave, every article about your company, every patent application. That's not crossing a line. That's paying attention."
"To me specifically, not to the market."
"Yes." He set his coffee down, giving her his full attention. "I was interested in you specifically. For years, I watched your business moves because I wanted to understand how your mind worked. I wanted to know what mattered to you, what you valued, what you were building toward."
Sophia felt the anger drain out of her, replaced by something more complicated. "That's obsessive."
"Probably. But also honest. I didn't hide it. I'm telling you about it now."
"Because I asked you directly."
"Because you deserve to know." He stepped closer to her. "Sophia, I've been interested in you since we met in business school. That didn't start with the contract. The contract just confirmed what I already knew. That we were meant to be important to each other."
"Or it gave you a excuse to act on an unhealthy obsession."
"Maybe. But I never used that obsession to cheat you in business. I competed fairly. Every success I had, I earned."
Sophia wanted to believe him. She also wanted to protect herself by not believing him. She'd spent seven years building walls specifically to keep people like him out, people who wanted to see inside her, people who were interested in more than just her money or her business success.
Her phone buzzed. An alert from the bidding system. Blake Ventures had increased their bid again.
Without thinking, Sophia pulled out her phone and texted Marcus: "Increase ours by sixty million."
Ethan watched her do it. His jaw tightened slightly, the only sign that he was affected. "You're going to bankrupt yourself trying to beat me."
"Then I guess you should stop bidding."
"You know I won't."
"Then I guess we both lose."
She walked away before he could respond, heading to her office and closing the door. For the next six hours, she and Ethan engaged in a bidding war that was entirely irrational. The value of Techvision kept climbing. The startup that had been valued at fifty million dollars was now being bid up to nearly three hundred million dollars. Any reasonable investor would have pulled out long ago.
They didn't pull out.
By evening, the Techvision valuation had reached three hundred and forty million dollars. Marcus had called Sophia five times, each call more desperate than the last. The company's CFO was in panic mode. This acquisition would consume nearly thirty percent of their available capital. If it fell through, they'd have significant losses.
She didn't care. She was too focused on beating Ethan.
At seven o'clock that night, she was in the kitchen making dinner when Ethan came home. He looked exhausted, his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He looked like someone who'd been fighting a battle he didn't want to win.
"Stop," he said without preamble.
"Stop what?"
"Stop bidding on Techvision. I'm pulling out of the auction."
Sophia turned from the stove. "Why would you do that?"
"Because I don't want this. Any of this. I didn't bid on Techvision to hurt you. I bid on it because I thought it was a good acquisition. Then when you got interested in it, I got competitive because that's how we've always been. But I don't want to keep being that way."
"So you're just giving up?"
"I'm choosing something else."
"What?"
"You. This. Us. I'm choosing not to destroy my company and your company fighting over a startup we don't even need." He moved closer to her. "I'm choosing to stop playing games."
Sophia wanted to believe him. She wanted to trust that he meant it. But the trust had been fractured the moment she found out about his tracking her, his obsession, his years of watching her without her knowledge.
"Your company pulls out of Techvision by tomorrow morning," she said. "When they do, I'll pull out too."
"Sophia—"
"That's the only way I'll know you're serious. That you're willing to lose something to prove you want this more than you want to win."
She watched the moment he accepted the ultimatum. His shoulders tensed, and then he nodded. "Done. I'll tell my team first thing."
That night, they lay in bed together but didn't touch. Sophia stared at the ceiling and tried to reconcile the man who said he was choosing her with the man who'd been tracking her movements for years. They weren't the same person. Or maybe they were, and she just hadn't wanted to see it.
At three in the morning, her phone buzzed. It was a message from Marcus: "We have a situation. Blake Ventures just pulled out of Techvision, but they released a statement saying they did it because they decided the acquisition didn't make financial sense. That gives us a huge advantage in the remaining bid. But Sophia, there's something else. Blake Ventures' withdrawal happened right after they received a phone call from Ethan Blake personally. Whatever he told them, it was significant enough to make them walk away."
Sophia sat up in bed, reading the message twice to make sure she understood it correctly. Ethan hadn't just pulled out of the Techvision auction. He'd called his team and told them to pull out. He'd sacrificed his company's interests for hers, just like she'd asked him to.
But there was something else in the message, something that made her stomach clench. She scrolled to the end of Marcus's longer email and found the real problem: "We also discovered some financial irregularities in Blake Ventures' bidding history. They've been outbidding companies on acquisitions for months using inflated valuations. I need to tell you something you're not going to like: Ethan Blake might be committing corporate fraud."