Chapter 8

Cassian didn’t go home after he signed the contract.

He went to his father.

The Devereaux estate sat forty minutes outside the city, and Cassian made it in twenty-eight. He didn’t call ahead. He never did anymore. Showing up unannounced was the only way to catch his father before the old man had time to decide what version of himself to perform.

He found him in the study, a glass of scotch already half gone at nine forty in the morning.

“You look like hell,” his father said, not looking up.

“I need to ask you something.”

“About the Voss contract? I heard. Three hundred million for a partnership with a woman nobody’s ever heard of.”

“Not about the contract.”

That got his attention. His father set the glass down. “Then what?”

Cassian pulled the photograph from his jacket and set it on the desk. “Seraphina Voss.”

His father glanced at it for exactly one second before looking back at his son. “What about her?”

“You know her?”

“I know of the Voss family. Old money, quiet money. Never made a public fuss about anything.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

His father picked up his scotch again. “I’ve never met the woman, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Cassian watched him. Twenty-nine years of watching that face across boardroom tables and dinner tables had taught him exactly what his father’s tells looked like, and for one flickering second, he saw one.

“You’re lying.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know something.”

His father’s expression smoothed back into practiced boredom, the same face he wore in front of shareholders. “I know that you signed a contract with a woman you clearly can’t stop thinking about, and I know that’s a terrible way to run a company.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.” His father waved a hand toward the door. “Go home, Cassian. Sleep. You’re seeing ghosts.”

Cassian didn’t move. “Why does that word keep coming up around her?”

“What word?”

“Ghosts.”

His father didn’t answer that either. He just looked at his son for a long moment, something unreadable behind his eyes, and then turned back to his desk like the conversation was already over.

Cassian left with more questions than he’d arrived with, which had never happened to him with his father before. Not once. Not in twenty-nine years.

⸻

Seraphina felt it before she saw it, the particular stillness of her assistant standing in the doorway with news arranged carefully on her face.

“What.”

“Devereaux was at his father’s estate this morning.”

Seraphina’s pen stopped. “How do you know that?”

“You told me to keep eyes on him. I kept eyes on him.”

“And?”

“He was only there twenty minutes. Left looking like he’d been in a fight.”

Seraphina set the pen down slowly, careful to let nothing show. Marcus Devereaux. If there was one man in the city who could look at her too long and feel something click into place, it was him, and there was no way to explain that to the woman standing in her doorway without explaining everything else first.

“Anything on what they discussed?”

“No. Just that he went straight there after leaving your building, and left rattled.”

“Keep watching him. I want to know every place Devereaux goes for the next week, and everyone he talks to.”

Her assistant made a note, then looked up. “Can I ask what this is actually about? You’ve had me tracking a man’s movements like he’s a threat, not a business partner.”

Seraphina held her gaze, steady, practiced. “He’s both. I don’t like being caught off guard, and right now he’s asking questions I’d rather he didn’t ask.”

“About the deal?”

“About me.”

Her assistant considered that, clearly hoping for more and clearly not about to get it. “Should I be worried?”

“No.” Seraphina picked her pen back up, a signal that the conversation was over. “Just thorough.”

Her assistant hesitated a moment longer in the doorway, the way she always did when she suspected there was a version of the story she wasn’t getting, and then, as she always did, let it go. “I’ll have something on his movements by tonight.”

“Good.”

The door closed. Seraphina sat alone with the thought she hadn’t said out loud to anyone in five years. Marcus Devereaux had looked at a photograph of her. If he knew who she was, she had no way of knowing.

And if he didn’t, then perhaps she was seeing meaning where there was none.

⸻

That evening, Cassian sat alone in his office long after everyone else had gone home, the photograph of Seraphina propped against his laptop where he could keep looking at it.

Ghosts.

His father had used that word like it meant something specific, then refused to say what.

Cassian opened his laptop and pulled up the Devereaux family’s old event archives, five years of galas, dinners, weddings, the kind of thing his assistant’s assistant usually managed. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He just knew the itch hadn’t stopped since the moment Seraphina Voss had said his name in a boardroom like she’d said it a thousand times before.

He scrolled back further. And further.

Then he stopped.

A wedding photo, five years old, buried in an archive nobody had opened since it was filed. His own wedding. He hadn’t gone looking for it. His hand had stopped scrolling, like it had recognized the file before he did.

He didn’t open it.

He sat there instead, cursor hovering, and told himself there was no reason to. He knew what was in it. He’d lived it. He didn’t need to relive it at midnight because his father had used one strange word and refused to explain himself.

He closed the archive.

He pulled the photograph of Seraphina back to the center of the screen instead and looked at it for a long time, searching for whatever it was that kept snagging: the tilt of her head, maybe, or the way she held a room without raising her voice. Something familiar dressed up as something new. It happened. People reminded you of other people. His therapist, back when he’d bothered going, used to call it pattern matching, the mind’s habit of forcing shapes onto static because static made it uneasy.

That was all this was. Static.

He told himself that twice more before he believed it enough to close the laptop.

But he didn’t delete the folder. He didn’t stop his intelligence team from digging. And long after he’d told himself to let it go, some small, stubborn part of him kept circling back to the one thing he couldn’t explain away with logic: that when she’d looked at him in that boardroom, for exactly one second, it hadn’t felt like being looked at by a stranger.

It had felt like being recognized.

He just couldn’t work out why that frightened him more than it should have.