chapter 9

Heir to Skyfall

Chapter 9 — The Interview

Alexander made it through the night.

The surgeon came at six in the morning with better news than she'd had twelve hours earlier — stable, responding, still in the ICU but no longer on the edge of it. Lydia sat with that for a moment, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, and let herself feel the relief all the way through instead of just at the surface.

Salvador was asleep in the chair beside her, head back, arms crossed. She let him sleep. He'd been awake longer than she had and she'd only gotten ninety minutes herself, head on his shoulder somewhere around three, waking to the buzz of his phone and settling back down when he silenced it.

She looked at him for a moment in the early hospital light. The tension he carried in his jaw when he was awake had released in sleep. He looked younger. He looked like someone who had earned the right to rest and rarely let himself take it.

She got up quietly to find the bathroom, and found Brooke instead — coming through the waiting room doors with two cups of actual coffee and a paper bag, wearing yesterday's clothes with the expression of someone who'd driven fast the moment she got the call.

Lydia crossed the room and let Brooke pull her into a hug that didn't require anything to be said.

"Tell me everything," Brooke said against her shoulder. "Leave nothing out."

"Later," Lydia said. "I have somewhere I have to be first."

The morning show interview had been Margaret Osei's idea, floated the previous evening in a text that was three sentences and one clear strategic point: Victor controls the boardroom narrative. You need to control the public one. I know a producer.

Lydia had said yes while sitting in the ICU waiting room at nine at night. She hadn't told Salvador until morning because she knew he'd want to prepare her and she didn't want to be prepared. She wanted to be exactly what she was — unscripted, exhausted, real.

The crew set up on the hospital steps. Nothing elaborate — two cameras, a seated format, a host she recognized from Sunday mornings. The segment was live, eight minutes, and would run at the top of the hour. She sat in the chair in her day-old clothes with her blazer back on and her hair loose and let them put a microphone on her lapel.

She hadn't written anything down. She had nothing prepared except the truth, which she'd found was usually enough if you weren't afraid of it.

The host led with the obvious. The photograph. The board vote. The viral video that had started all of it a week and a half ago.

"I'm not going to pretend the last two weeks have been easy," Lydia said. Her voice was even. She looked directly at the camera rather than the host. "I found out on Valentine's Day that the man I had trusted for eight months had been married the whole time — nine years of a wife I had absolutely no idea existed. I was publicly humiliated in a room full of people and that footage followed me everywhere I went." She paused. "Three days after that, I found out I have a father. That I have a family. That there is a company that bears my bloodline that I had no idea existed." She paused again, shorter this time. "So yes. It has been a complicated two weeks."

The host smiled carefully. "And the photograph from the gala — the board's concerns about your judgment—"

"I'm a twenty-seven-year-old woman who kissed someone she's falling for at a party," Lydia said simply. "If that disqualifies me from running a company, then I think we should have a broader conversation about what we actually expect from the people in power, because I promise you the board members raising those concerns have done considerably more at considerably more exclusive parties." She held the camera. "I am not going to perform a version of myself that fits a smaller box. Alexander Voss built Skyfall Empire without apology. I intend to lead it the same way."

Eight seconds of silence on live television, which was seven seconds longer than usual.

The host recovered. "Your father — how is he this morning?"

"Stable," she said. The word came out softer than the rest. "He's fighting. That's what he does."

Salvador was watching from the edge of the hospital steps, hands in his pockets, far enough back to be out of frame. She could see him in her peripheral vision without looking directly. She didn't look. She kept her eyes on the camera and finished the segment and let them take the microphone off her lapel.

When she turned around he was right there. The expression on his face was one she hadn't seen before — pride and desire in equal measure, tangled up with something deeper that he hadn't named yet and she wasn't going to name for him.

"You didn't prepare anything," he said.

"No."

"That was better than anything you could have prepared."

"I know." She allowed herself a small smile. "I went to find Brooke and I suddenly had eight minutes and a camera and nothing to lose. Seemed like the right time to just be honest."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he shook his head slightly, the way people do when something has genuinely surprised them. He reached out and tucked her hair back from her face — a gesture she was starting to recognize as his default expression of something he didn't have words for — and she leaned into his hand briefly before straightening.

"How's he doing?" she asked.

"I checked twenty minutes ago. Resting. Asking for you."

"Let's go."

They went back inside. Her phone was already filling up — alerts, messages, clips of the interview being shared. She turned the screen face down in her pocket. The numbers could wait. Right now she had a father in a hospital bed and four floors of stairs to climb.

She was almost at the elevator when her phone buzzed with a push notification that made her stop.

Salvador glanced at her face. "What is it?"

She turned the screen toward him. The headline read: LEAKED VIDEO SURFACES — SALVADOR REYES ALLEGEDLY USING HEIR RELATIONSHIP FOR CORPORATE INFLUENCE.

Below it, the same blurry photograph from the gala — but this time accompanied by what appeared to be a private email chain, selectively cut, implication stacked on implication, Victor's fingerprints all over every word choice.

Salvador looked at it without expression. Then he pressed the elevator button.

"He's getting louder," he said quietly. "That means he's getting worried."

"Good," she said, and stepped inside.