chapter 4

Heir to Skyfall

Chapter 4 — Trust in the Dark

Her first week at Skyfall Estate passed like being dropped into a river and told to swim while also learning what water was.

Alexander's assistant walked her through the company structure every morning — subsidiaries, board members, pending negotiations, legal exposure. It was a lot. She had a business degree she'd barely used working mid-level marketing for a firm that had just fired her via voicemail, and now she was supposed to understand the architecture of a company that employed eleven thousand people and had interests on three continents. She took notes. She asked questions. She went back to her room at night and read everything twice.

Victor smiled at her in the hallways. His smiles all looked the same — warm on the surface, nothing moving underneath. Twice in the first week she found small errors in documents she'd been given to review: figures that didn't match the reports they were supposed to summarize, a meeting recorded in the minutes that had never actually taken place. She flagged both to Alexander's assistant without making a scene. The assistant looked at her for a moment, then quietly corrected the records.

Nobody said Victor's name in connection with it. Nobody had to.

Drew found reasons to appear wherever she was. The library. The terrace. Once, inconveniently, the kitchen at seven in the morning when she was still in her pajamas and had been counting on being alone. He was persistent in the way that men are persistent when they've decided that patience is a strategy rather than a feeling. She was polite and she was clear and she did not let him stand close enough to touch her.

The one person who made none of it worse was Salvador.

He found her in the estate gym on the third morning. She'd been using the treadmill, earphones in, trying to run the tension out of her shoulders, and looked up to find him on the mat in the corner doing something with his bodyweight that should not have looked as effortless as it did.

He saw her looking. Didn't comment on it.

Twenty minutes later he said, "Alexander asked me to make sure you know how to handle yourself. Given everything." He said it matter-of-factly, like it was just logistics. "You up for that?"

"You mean self-defense."

"I mean not being helpless if someone gets close who shouldn't."

She pulled her earphones out. "When do we start?"

They started that morning. He was a good teacher — patient, precise, no ego in it. He'd correct her form by adjusting her stance with both hands, fingers firm and brief on her wrists or shoulders, and then step back to the right distance without lingering. Except that sometimes he did linger — not inappropriately, just a half-second longer than necessary, his hand staying at her hip while she set her weight, his eyes on her face instead of her feet — and she felt those half-seconds in her skin for the rest of the day.

The sessions ended with both of them breathing harder than the work strictly required.

In the evenings they talked. That surprised her most. She'd expected him to be guarded — a former Special Forces operator managing security for a powerful family, a man who'd grown up watching adults play dangerous games in this house. She'd expected walls.

Instead, sitting on the stone terrace after dinner with the city glowing in the distance, he told her things. About his father — not the full story, not yet, but the edges of it. The way a seven-year-old processes losing the person who made the world make sense. The years after, when Alexander had stepped in with a kind of quiet constancy that didn't try to replace anything, just stayed. About the military — what it gave him, what it cost, what he'd had to put down when he came back because he couldn't keep carrying it and also be a person.

She told him about Martin. She hadn't talked about it with anyone except Brooke, and even with Brooke she'd kept the worst of it surface-level. With Salvador she said the part she hadn't said out loud yet: that what hurt most wasn't the betrayal itself. It was that she'd been so sure. She'd read the signs she wanted to read and ignored the rest, and she didn't know yet how to trust her own instincts again.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "He was careful. That's on him, not your judgment."

"That's a kind way to say I was naive."

"That's an accurate way to say he was a liar." He turned to look at her. "Those are different things."

She looked back at him and felt something in her chest loosen slightly, like a knot that had been pulled too tight for days finally giving a little slack.

On the fifth evening his phone buzzed on the terrace table between them. He glanced at it. Something shifted in his expression — quick, controlled, but she caught it. He turned the phone face down.

"Your ex?" she asked.

He looked at her, a little surprised by the directness. "Yes."

"She wants to reconcile." It wasn't quite a question.

"She wants what she thinks she can get back." He said it plainly, without bitterness. "It's not the same thing."

Lydia looked at the city lights and said nothing. But something had moved through her at the sight of that notification — hot and involuntary and entirely inconvenient — and she was still feeling it twenty minutes later when she went inside.

She didn't like how much she cared. She didn't know what to do with it yet. She filed it away and went to bed and lay there thinking about the way his jaw had looked when he turned the phone over. Like the decision had already been made and he was just waiting for his ex to understand that.

The next afternoon Alexander called them both to his study.

The room smelled of books and old wood and whatever Alexander used to treat the leather of his chair. He was sitting behind his desk but he looked smaller in it than he should have. He'd looked smaller every day this week, in a way that had nothing to do with posture.

"The Santas are moving again," he said. He didn't waste time on preamble. "I have intelligence suggesting they're planning a challenge to the succession on legal grounds — reaching back to the original arrangement. If anything happens to me before this is settled—" He looked at Lydia. "Skyfall goes to you. Only you. The bloodline is documented, the board resolution is being prepared, and the legal team is clear." He paused. "Salvador can never inherit. That was never the design. But his role in protecting this company and protecting you is the same as his father's was with me."

Lydia nodded.

Alexander looked at Salvador for a moment without speaking. Then he pushed back from his desk. "I'll let you two talk." He left and closed the door behind him with the care of someone who'd just done something that took effort.

The study went quiet.

Salvador turned to look at her. His eyes were dark — not the storm-gray of their first night but something deeper, lit from underneath. He crossed the room in three steps and stopped right in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to hold his gaze.

"I don't want Skyfall," he said. "I never did. That was never—" He stopped. Started again. "I only want you."

She felt the words land low in her stomach.

He backed her gently against the edge of Alexander's desk, his hands framing her face, and kissed her — not like the garden, not careful this time. Hungry. Deep and thorough and making very clear what the last five days of gym sessions and terrace evenings and held-back half-seconds had been building toward.

She kissed him back with everything she had.

His hands slid down to the hem of her blouse and under it, palms warm against her bare skin, thumbs brushing slow circles just below her ribs and moving up. She breathed his name against his mouth, fingers working the buttons of his shirt, her whole body leaning into the heat of him —

His phone vibrated. Not a notification buzz. An emergency alert — sharp, repeating, insistent.

He pulled back. Looked at the screen. The color left his face.

"It's Alexander," he said. "He's collapsed."

She was already moving toward the door.