Chapter 14 - Face to Face
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Paxton ignored the prosecutor. His eyes remained locked on Lennox, desperate and full of unexpressed rage.
"Three years, Lennox," Paxton rasped, leaning over the desk. "Three years I gave you everything! I put you in rooms with senators! I gave you power nobody from your neighborhood ever dreams of!"
Lennox looked around the empty ballroom—at the shattered champagne glasses, the overturned chairs, the abandoned string quartet instruments resting against the velvet drapes.
"You didn't give me power, Paxton," she said softly. "You gave me work. I did the work. You took the credit."
"I protected you!" he shouted, slamming his palm onto the desk—a pathetic echo of the strike he had delivered twelve hours earlier.
"You protected your investment," Lennox corrected, her voice steady as iron. "There’s a difference."
"And what about us?" Paxton whispered, his voice cracking with a sudden, ugly vulnerability. "Was all of it a lie? Every late night in this office? Every deal we closed together?"
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Lennox looked at him for a long, silent moment. For the first time, a small, sad smile touched her lips.
"I loved the work, Paxton," she said quietly. "I thought I loved the man who gave it to me. But then I realized the man was just a hollow box wrapped in an expensive suit."
