CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DAMIEN

The number that kept coming back was four-point-three million.

Four-point-three million dollars across three development deals that had failed in sequence over eighteen months, each failure feeding the next one, the way these things do when you're leveraging one position to fund the bridge to the next and the whole structure is load-bearing debt and one bad quarter somewhere in the chain. He knew it was bad when the second deal fell through. He'd known it was critical when the third one collapsed eight weeks before Knox Blackthorn appeared in Riley's parking lot and turned the board completely over.

He hadn't known the twins were Knox's. That was true, and it mattered to him that it was true, though he was aware that it only mattered to him.

He sat in the hotel suite — he was staying at the Four Seasons because appearances were still a category of expenditure that could not be cut without cutting the thing that made the expenditure possible — and looked at the call log on his phone and thought about the order of things.

The rogue contact's name was Yestin. He'd been introduced through a business associate who'd said, vaguely, that Yestin represented "certain pack-adjacent investment interests," which Damien had understood to mean exactly what it meant. The money had come with conditions. The conditions had seemed manageable at the time.

The conditions were no longer manageable.

Yestin called at noon.

"The timeline is complicated," Damien said.

"The timeline is the timeline." Yestin's voice had the particular flatness of someone who is paid to deliver information and not to feel anything about it. "You promised Blackthorn leverage. We accepted Riley Harper and the property as collateral. The presence of Blackthorn in the building changes the leverage dynamic, it doesn't change the agreement."

"I understand—"

"Deliver something usable or we convert the debt. You know what conversion looks like."

He knew.

He called Selene after. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been expecting him.

"The twins are Knox's," he said.

A pause. "I know."

"You know."

"Damien." Her voice was patient in the way that had always unsettled him — the patience of someone who has already calculated five moves past the current conversation. "I've known for several weeks. Don't do anything. I'll handle it."

"Selene, I have people who want—"

"I said I'll handle it." The warmth dropped out of her voice completely, like a door closing. "Do not contact Yestin again without talking to me first."

She hung up.

He stared at the phone.

Then he drove to Riley's shop with flowers he'd picked up at the florist near the hotel — yellow ones, because she'd mentioned once that yellow was cheerful without being presumptuous — and practiced the version of himself he knew worked best with her. The version that was sorry. The version that wanted to be better. He'd spent three months studying Riley Harper and he knew what she responded to, knew that she'd been let down enough times that genuine-seeming contrition hit differently than confidence.

She was in the middle of the new commission when he got there. A Ducati 996 in progress, base coat half-done, the specific focused attention she had when she was painting that meant she was somewhere slightly outside the normal world. He put the flowers on the workbench.

She pulled off the respirator and looked at him.

"I've been thinking," he said. "About us. About how I've handled things."

He said the right things. He said them in the right order. He watched her face move through resistance and then something softer, something that might've been opening, and he felt the particular skill of it and chose not to examine what it said about him that it was a skill.

He drove back to the hotel feeling like he'd bought himself two weeks.

The filing took forty minutes. The property transfer — Riley's shop lease into the holding company, three shells removed from any name she'd recognize, legally airtight if she didn't know what to look for. He told himself it was protective. That if Knox moved against the property he'd need that layer.

He poured a drink when the confirmation email came through.

Then the wire transfer notification appeared. Forty thousand dollars. Payment for the information he'd sold to Elder Reth's contact three days ago — Knox's legal challenge timeline, the attorney's name, the expected filing date.

He'd told himself it was the only option. He told himself it was true.

He poured another drink and told himself everything was under control, and the thing about Damien Voss was that he was very good at telling himself things, and the thing about lies you tell yourself is that they work perfectly right up until the moment they don't.