Chapter 10 — Damage Control

POV: BEATRIX

Two mornings after Ivy's nightmare, I found myself sitting at the far end of a conference table I had no official reason to occupy. Watching six people in very expensive suits try and fail to solve a problem I could have fixed in the first five minutes if anyone had thought to ask me.

Nikolai had only texted that I should be there, with no explanation beyond that. 

Neither of us had said a word about that hallway since it happened—not directly—though it had followed us through two mornings of breakfast and one very silent elevator ride, close enough to notice.

I recognized none of the six people at the table except the man at the head, and even he looked different here than he did at home.

Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known what a crisis communications team even looked like in person. 

Now I was apparently expected to sit quietly through a meeting about my supposed instability, and some small, exhausted part of me wanted to laugh at how completely my life had stopped belonging to me somewhere around the second headline.

A woman I would later learn was Priya, the head of communications, was already halfway through a slide deck when I sat down, and the numbers on the screen behind her were not good. 

Sponsor inquiries were up. Not the kind you wanted. 

Three separate platforms published follow-up pieces on Julian's interview overnight, each adding a new adjective to the pile: erratic, obsessive, unstable. 

My name sat under all three headlines like a stain that wouldn't lift. 

Beneath the numbers, in smaller print on Priya's slide, two of the team's largest sponsors had reportedly requested a call with the front office by the end of the day. 

I didn't need her to explain what that meant.

"Our recommendation," Priya said, clicking to the next slide, "is a joint written statement. 

Something calm, something brief. 

We deny the specific characterization, request privacy for the family, and let the news cycle move on to something else within 72 hours."

She read the draft language aloud in the same flat, careful cadence people use for eulogies. 

“Mr. Ashcombe and his wife do not wish to dignify recent allegations with further comment and ask for privacy during this time”

It was the kind of sentence that could have been written about anyone, for anything, and it would sound just as guilty coming out of my mouth as it would anyone else's.

A man beside her nodded along, adding something about tone, optics, and not wanting to dignify Julian's claims with too direct a response. 

I watched Nikolai's jaw tighten, the way it did when a number came in low.

I sat there for three full minutes, rehearsing every reason to keep my mouth shut. 

This wasn't my company. I wasn't on payroll. 

The last time I'd offered an unsolicited professional opinion in a room like this, at my old job, a man two levels above me had patiently explained that enthusiasm wasn't the same as expertise.

"That won't work," I said.

Every head in the room turned toward me at once. 

Priya's expression couldn’t quite hide her surprise or irritation, and I felt my face grow hot, but I was already too far in to stop.

"A denial keeps the story alive," I said. 

"You deny it, three more platforms run the denial as its own headline, and now you've got four days of coverage instead of one. " 

“Julian doesn't need you to confirm anything. He needs you to react."

"And what would you suggest instead?" Priya said, in a tone that made it clear she expected the answer to be useless.

I looked at the numbers on the screen instead of at her. 

"Don't mention him by name. Don't deny a single word he said” 

Release the timestamped photos from the gala instead—the real ones, dated and verified, showing exactly what happened that night in the order it occurred.

Let people do the math themselves. Pair it with the hallway clip of Ivy, which has already gone viral on its own and needs no caption. 

You're not fighting his story. You're just giving people a truer one and letting them decide which version makes more sense."

"And put a number on it," I added. "People trust numbers more than adjectives. If there's a specific date attached to anything you release, use it." 

Vague sympathy gets forgotten by lunch. Specific, boring, verifiable facts are a lot harder to argue with."

The room had gone quiet in a way it hadn't been since I walked in. 

"Facts, not defense," I added, because no one else was going to say it. 

"He wants a fight. Don't give him one."

Nikolai hadn't said a word since I started talking. 

I risked a glance at him, half expecting the same flat, unreadable expression I'd learned to associate with a room full of strangers, but found something entirely different on his face instead.

****

POV:NIKOLAI

I had sat through eleven crisis meetings with this exact team over the past four years, and I had never once heard a plan in that room that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up the way Beatrix's did in under ninety seconds.

Priya's plan was competent. It was also, I understood, the second Beatrix finished speaking, precisely the kind of competent that loses. 

It managed risk downward instead of managing the story at all. 

The corporate reflex is to minimize exposure rather than actually win, and I had approved a dozen versions of that same plan over the years without ever once asking whether a better one was sitting outside the room. 

Priya had been with me for six years. She was good at her job, good enough that I had never once sat in a meeting wondering what a better version of her advice might sound like. 

I was wondering now.

As a rule, I did not enjoy finding out I was wrong in front of a room full of people I paid specifically to keep me from being wrong in public. 

Watching Beatrix lay out a sharper plan than the one I had already half approved, I found I minded it far less than I expected to.

There had been one sitting next to me the whole time.

"We're doing it her way," I said.

Priya's mouth opened, then closed. "Sir, with respect, we haven't stress tested that approach. We don't have data on how the public will interpret it."

"You’ve got three platforms calling my wife unstable this morning, and a denial strategy that guarantees a fourth by lunch.

I kept my voice level, though something beneath it had gone sharp in a way I didn't often let show in front of staff.

"Pull the gala timestamps. Get legal to clear the Ivy clip for official release within the hour. No statement, no denial, no mention of Julian Vance by name in anything this office puts out. Am I understood?"

Priya glanced at Beatrix once, something unreadable crossing her face, then nodded and began gathering her things.

The room emptied faster than I'd ever seen, with six people filing out in the particular hurry of professionals who had just watched their entire morning's work overruled by someone who technically had no title in that building at all. 

I didn't look away from Beatrix once, not until the door had clicked shut behind the last of them and the two of us were alone with the cold coffee and the low hum of the projector still throwing numbers against the far wall.

"You didn't have to do that," she said quietly, some of the certainty from a minute ago already draining from her posture, as though she half expected me to be angry that she'd spoken at all.

"No," I agreed. "I didn't have to. I'm glad I did."

She looked at me as if she were waiting for the catch, some qualifier that would soften what I'd just overruled six people to give her, and I understood, watching her brace for it, exactly how many rooms in her life had taught her to expect one.

There wasn't one coming.

"That was better work in ninety seconds than I pay Priya's entire team four hundred dollars an hour to produce," I said. "And I don't say that lightly."

Something shifted in her face for a moment; neither of us moved to fill the silence that followed. 

I found myself studying the line of her jaw, the way she'd tucked a piece of hair behind her ear without seeming to notice she'd done it, and cataloging details about her the way I had started, somewhere in the last two weeks.

"I used to be good at this," she said at last, a wistful note bleeding into the words. 

"Before."

"You're still good at it," I said flatly, as a fact rather than a compliment, because I'd learned that was the only kind of praise she could hear without flinching. 

"The only thing that's changed is whether anyone bothered to ask."

"Julian used to tell me I was too much," she said, avoiding my eyes. 

"Too intense about work. Too many opinions for a room full of men who didn't ask for them."

"Julian," I said, "was an idiot with access to a woman he had no idea how to value. That isn't a character flaw of yours. That's a failure of his imagination."

She held my gaze a little longer than either of us was probably comfortable with, and I felt, not for the first time that week, the particular danger of a contract that had never once accounted for the possibility of actually wanting the woman sitting across from me.

I was still trying to figure out what to do with that fact when my phone started buzzing on the table between us, Priya's name lighting up the screen, and whatever this moment had been about to become dissolved back into the business of putting out fires that were never, I was beginning to suspect, entirely the ones I thought I was fighting.