Chapter 4: Montague Blood

Sera slept nine hours straight and woke up to the smell of bacon.

Not the kind that came from a hotel kitchen or a caterer running late. Real breakfast, made by someone who knew she was home. She lay still for a moment, listening. Footsteps in the hallway, unhurried. Rosa's voice somewhere below giving quiet instructions. A door closing. The ordinary, living sounds of a house that expected her.

She had forgotten what that felt like.

She showered, dressed, and came downstairs to find the dining table already set. Fresh flowers in the center. The good china, not the everyday set. Orange juice in the glass pitcher her grandmother had brought from Lisbon forty years ago. Nobody had told Rosa to do any of it. She had just done it because Sera was home, and this was what home looked like.

"Ms. Sera." Rosa looked up from the sideboard, and her whole face shifted into the kind of smile that didn't need to announce itself. "You're back."

"I'm back," Sera said.

Rosa squeezed her hand once, warm and brief, and went back to the kitchen without making anything more of it. That was the thing about this house. People saw you without turning it into a production.

Her father was at the head of the table with his newspaper.

Savio Montague was sixty-three years old and looked like a man who had never once been in a hurry. Silver hair, good posture, a dark jacket he had probably put on out of habit before seven in the morning. He had the kind of face that made new people underestimate him, which had always suited him perfectly. He read the physical paper every morning, the kind with ink that came off on your fingers, and he did not look up when she walked in.

Then he folded it. Set it aside. And looked at her the way only he ever really looked at her.

He reached over and poured her coffee himself.

"You look tired, Sera," he said.

She sat down and pulled the cup toward her. The coffee was the right strength. It was always the right strength here. "I'm fine."

He picked up his own cup. "I know." He took a slow sip. "That's what worries me."

She didn't answer. There was no good answer and they both understood that. She drank her coffee and let the silence settle between them the way silences do when they don't need filling.

Rosa brought eggs and toast. Savio passed the butter without being asked. Neither of them said Roman's name.

…

By the second cup they were working.

It had always been this way. Breakfast in this house was also a briefing. It had been that way since Sera was sixteen and started asking questions her father decided deserved real answers. She had been sitting at this same table, with this same coffee, managing pieces of the Montague portfolio while Roman ate whatever Isabella's assistant had ordered for his office and never thought to ask what Sera's morning looked like.

She slid a folder across the table. "Devlin closed Friday. Announcement went out this morning."

Savio looked over the summary sheet. He read it the way he read everything, not quickly, but completely. "Resistance?"

"Their CFO got nervous toward the end and tried to stall. I had a conversation with him Thursday." She picked up a piece of toast. "He stopped being nervous."

Savio made a small sound that landed somewhere between approval and amusement. He turned to the financials page. "The eastern properties are the real asset here."

"Yes. The rest is packaging. We'll hold the logistics arm for eighteen months and then decide." She had been running this deal for four months. Quietly, from a distance, while attending Roman's work dinners and sitting through his events and being the kind of wife who didn't take up too much space. It was not the first deal she had closed that way. It would not have been the last, if things had gone differently.

Savio set the folder down and looked at her again. That specific look. The one that meant he was about to say something she already knew but needed to hear from him anyway.

"The press will start paying attention now. This deal is too large to stay quiet."

"I know."

"You'll need to be visible, Sera. Not just the name on the paperwork. Your face. Your voice in the room."

She turned her cup slowly in both hands. For three years she had trained herself to stand at the edge of photographs, to let other people take the center, to walk into rooms and not be the reason anyone looked up. It had started as a practical choice and become something closer to a habit. She was not sure yet how to reverse it, or whether she was ready to.

"Give me a few weeks to settle back in," she said.

"You've been settling for three years." No sharpness in it. Just the plain truth, delivered the way he always delivered things that mattered. "The company doesn't need you in the background anymore. And neither do you."

She looked at her coffee cup.

The difference between her father and Roman was simple. When Roman didn't hear her, it was because he wasn't listening. When her father pushed, it was because he was paying attention and loved her too much to look away.

She pulled the next folder from the stack beside her plate. "The Harrow Group reached out last week about a joint venture. I want to table it. Their financing structure is unclear."

"Agreed." Savio took the folder. "Second quarter."

They worked through two more items. Rosa refilled the coffee. The morning light moved slowly across the tablecloth, and Sera felt something loosen in her chest that she had been carrying tight for longer than she wanted to count.

The dining room door opened.

Dante came in without knocking. He carried a thin manila folder and his face had that particular stillness it got when he was delivering something he didn't enjoy delivering. He crossed the room and put the folder on the table between her and her father.

"Roman Ashford's company has a problem," he said. "Someone tried a quiet takeover last night. Small position acquisitions spread across three separate holding accounts. Clean enough to look like normal market movement if you aren't watching for the pattern."

Sera looked at the folder. She did not pick it up.

She looked at Dante. "That's not our problem anymore."

Dante looked back at her. Steady. Patient. "It might become one."

…