Chapter 4: The House on Ashford Lane

The Voss estate was too large for two people who could barely stand to be in the same room. Twelve bedrooms, a library neither of them had opened, a kitchen staffed by people who called her Mrs. Voss in a way that still made her flinch. Sienna learned its floor plan the way she’d learned everything else in the last two weeks, quickly, efficiently, without asking for help, because asking for help from anyone in this house felt like handing over one more piece of herself she wasn’t ready to give away.

For the first three nights, she and Nathaniel orbited each other like two planets that had been forced into the same solar system without ever agreeing to share gravity. Breakfast in silence. Dinners that lasted exactly as long as politeness required. He worked late in his study; she read in her room until the words stopped making sense and sleep took her whether she wanted it to or not.

She found his study by accident on her fourth night there, drawn by a light still on well past midnight when she’d gone downstairs for water and found she couldn’t sleep anyway. He sat behind a desk stacked with files, tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the elbow, looking less like the composed executive who’d married her in front of cameras and more like a man who hadn’t slept properly in a long time, with dark circles under his eyes and a tension in his shoulders that no tailored suit could hide.

“You’re still awake,” she said, before she could decide whether she wanted to be seen noticing.

He looked up, and for a moment, just a moment, he didn’t put the mask back on fast enough. There was something almost startled in his expression, like he’d forgotten anyone else lived in this house at all. “Your father’s old contracts,” he said, gesturing at the mess on his desk. “There are inconsistencies. Numbers that don’t match what he reported to the board.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and the gesture was so unguarded, so unlike anything she’d seen from him before, that she found herself staying in the doorway instead of retreating the way every instinct told her to. “I’m trying to figure out if he was hiding something, or if someone was hiding something from him.”

It wasn’t what she expected him to say. She’d expected deflection, or dismissal, or the cold efficiency he wore like a second suit in every room she’d ever seen him in. Instead, he’d told her something true, something that clearly cost him a little to say out loud, and she found herself crossing the room before she’d fully decided to.

“Show me,” she said.

He hesitated. She watched him hesitate, watched some old instinct war visibly with a newer one, the same instinct that had made him keep her at arm’s length since the wedding. Then, slowly, he turned the folder toward her.

They worked in silence for the better part of an hour, shoulder to shoulder over numbers that told a story neither of them liked. Payments that didn’t match invoices. Vendor names that appeared and disappeared across quarters with no clear pattern. Somewhere in that silence, Sienna noticed the particular quiet way he concentrated, the small furrow between his brows, the way he tapped a pen against the desk when a number didn’t add up, the fact that he’d stopped looking at her like a line item somewhere around midnight and started looking at her like a person whose opinion he actually wanted.

It was a strange thing, sitting this close to a man she’d spent a decade hating from a distance. Strange to notice, in the low lamplight, that his hands were careful when he turned pages, that he read twice before he spoke, that underneath the ruthless reputation was someone who clearly took his family’s legacy, flawed as it was, seriously enough to lose sleep over it.

“You’re good at this,” he said finally, not looking up from the page.

“You sound surprised.”

“I am.” He met her eyes then, and there was nothing calculated in it, nothing performed, just a kind of tired honesty she hadn’t expected to see on him. “I spent ten years building a picture of who I thought you were. Someone’s daughter. An asset to be accounted for. I don’t think I accounted for you correctly.”

Sienna didn’t have an answer for that. She only knew that something had shifted in the room, quiet and dangerous, the air between them thinner than it had been an hour ago. She looked back down at the papers instead of at him, because looking at him too long felt like standing too close to an open flame.

“We should keep going,” she said. “If someone’s been hiding money for years, there’s more to find.”

“Agreed.” But he didn’t move to hand her another page right away. For a moment he just watched her, something unreadable working behind his eyes, before he seemed to catch himself and looked back down at the desk. “Thank you,” he added quietly. “For staying.”

It wasn’t much. Two words, said almost reluctantly, like gratitude was a language he wasn’t fluent in. But Sienna felt them land somewhere she hadn’t expected, and she wasn’t in any hurry, sitting there in the lamplight with a man she was supposed to hate, to leave.

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