: I Will Think About It

Chapter Four: I Will Think About It

"Let's talk about your debt."

Derek doesn't sit back down. He hangs half out of the chair, one hand braced white-knuckled on the armrest, staring at me like the floor under him has changed shape.

It has.

"Ro—"

"Ghost."

One word. I don't raise my voice to say it. I don't need to. He stops like a leash has caught him mid-stride, jaw still open around the rest of a name that doesn't belong to him anymore.

He recovers the way desperate men always do — badly, and too fast.

"Ghost. I meant Ghost." He drags a hand down his face, and for a second the mask of a man who once owned every room he walked into slips, showing me something closer to the truth underneath it. "I know I don't have the right to ask anything of you. But I'm asking anyway."

I open the file on the desk. Let him watch me read instead of watching him talk.

He leans forward. His voice drops into that register I remember too well — the one he used when he wanted something and knew charm would get it to him faster than an order.

"You're still my mate. That doesn't just disappear because you're angry."

I look up.

"It disappeared the night you finished inside another woman while looking me in the eye." My voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "Do not use that word in this room again."

He flinches like I've reached across the desk and struck him. Good. That's the first honest thing that's happened between us in this office.

He tries a different door.

"I'm ready to drive Rachel out tonight. Take you back as Luna." He says it like an offer, like a gift, like five years of my life spent invisible in his house was a debt he's finally prepared to repay. "We can be a family again. Like we used to be."

Like we used to be.

I think of the training barn floor. My knees against the wood. My son running past my open arms into another woman's. I think of every night I built myself a lie so I could sleep next to a man who'd already left the marriage in every way that mattered.

I say nothing. I let the silence do what words can't — let him watch it stretch, watch his own offer curdle in the air between us because nothing is coming to save it.

His throat works. He swallows around the shape of his own name for me.

"Ghost. I'm sorry. Please."

I turn the file around and slide it across the desk until it's directly under his hands, until he has nowhere left to look but down.

"Eighty percent." I let each word land separately, like coins dropped one at a time onto glass. "That's how much of Blackwood Holdings I currently own. Six shell companies. None of them traced back to me, because none of your people ever thought a woman built anything worth investigating." I tap the second page. "The remaining twenty is collateralized against a loan you signed without reading. It defaults in eleven days. Whether I lift a finger or not."

His eyes drop to the numbers and stay there, pinned, the way a man stares at an X-ray he already knows is bad news.

"You've owned this the whole time?"

"Long before you ever walked in here."

I close the file with two fingers, the sound small and final in the glass room.

"But I might decide to be kind."

It's the cruelest sentence I've said all day, and I watch it work exactly the way I built it to. Hope moves across his face — ugly, immediate, the same hope I spent five years chasing down every hallway of that house, back when I still believed kindness from Derek Blackwood meant something.

"For now," I say, "get out."

"Rose—" The whole name, out before he can stop it this time, and I watch the terror land in his own eyes a half-second after his mouth betrays him. "Ghost. Please. I need to know what you're going to do."

I stand. I don't give him my face while I answer. I walk to the window and put the city between us, because he doesn't get to watch me decide anything ever again.

"If you keep pestering me, I will call security." The glass throws his reflection back at me, small and pale behind my own. "If you keep pestering me after that, I will decide not to help at all. Which means your board finds out everything tonight, from a source that isn't me."

Silence behind me. Long enough that I know he's running the math, weighing whether that's a bluff. It isn't, and some buried, functioning part of him still remembers the difference between my bluffs and my promises. He learned it once, back when it cost him nothing to know.

"Fine." The Alpha voice comes back into his throat, low and commanding, the one that used to turn a room without him lifting a hand. It doesn't turn this one. "Fine. I'll leave. But when am I going to hear from you? I don't have time to—"

He stops himself. Recalculates again, faster this time, and I watch him try one more angle before the door — the only one he has left that isn't begging.

"Jay asks about you." He says it quietly, almost gently, like it costs him something to hand it over. It doesn't. I know exactly what it costs him, because I taught him how to spend it years ago, back when I still thought he loved our son more than he loved being right. "More than you'd think. He's old enough now to ask why his mother left and never came back."

It's a good line. It's the best one he's tried all afternoon, aimed exactly where he thinks I'm softest.

I don't answer it. I let it fall into the same silence as everything else he's said today, because giving him a reaction is the only currency he has left to negotiate with, and I am done paying him in anything.

"When I'm done deciding."

The chair scrapes. I hear him find his feet, hear the particular silence of a man swallowing every word he actually wants to throw at my back because some part of him has finally understood none of them will help him now. When I turn, his hands are fists at his sides, knuckles bone-white, and I let myself have one private second of it — not triumph, nothing so warm. Just an accounting. Five years. This is what five years buys.

He doesn't look at me again on his way out.

The door hasn't fully shut before Priya pushes through it from the other side, and I know before she speaks that something has moved, because her hands aren't steady on the folder she's carrying.

"Boss."

"Speak."

She sets an envelope on my desk instead of handing it to me, like it might do something if she holds it a second longer. Cream stock, heavy enough to have weight, sealed in wax the color of dried blood.

"Kai Moreau's people delivered this an hour ago." Her voice has gone thin. "It's not addressed to the firm. Not to Ghost Zero. It's addressed to you. By name."

I break the seal.

Precise handwriting. No wasted words. A date. A time. My real name, spelled correctly — which tells me more than anything printed underneath it.

"Boss, I don't think you should go." Priya's hands twist around the empty folder now. "Men like that don't send invitations. They send warnings dressed as invitations. And you talked back to him. In front of witnesses. That's not the kind of thing men like him forget."

I set the card down, square with the edge of the desk, and I don't answer right away. Behind Priya, through the glass wall, the city has gone dark enough to swallow the horizon, lights stacked all the way to the water like something on fire from a distance.

I'm thinking of a man who studies a room the way I do — measuring exactly how much trouble someone is worth before he decides they're worth it. I'm thinking that Kai Moreau doesn't extend invitations. He extends verdicts, and calls them something softer so people show up anyway.

Priya is still watching me, waiting for the version of this conversation where I agree with her.

My nails tap once against the cream paper.

A smile finds my mouth. Slow. Nothing warm underneath it.

"Get the designer on the phone."

"Boss—"

"How about," I say, already reaching for my own phone, already finishe

d discussing it, "I show him exactly who's more ruthless."