CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SELENE’s POV

Damien Laurent’s private office sat on the thirty-second floor of a building that didn’t carry the Laurent Group name publicly. That detail alone says it all, men with nothing to hide didn’t need separate addresses.

I had kept him waiting until the following morning. Not long enough to seem avoidant but long enough to make clear that Selene Arden doesn’t rearranged her schedule for nobody, including a Laurent.

His assistant met me at the elevator with a practiced smile and led me through a corridor that was noticeably different from Laurent Group headquarters. Darker wood, lower ceilings, art on the walls that looked chosen for meaning rather than impression. Everything about Damien Laurent seemed deliberate.

He was standing when I entered, which seemed surprising to me. Standing was a different kind of signal, either respect or performance, and with Damien I suspected the line between both was permanently blurred.

“Miss Arden.” He smiled, and it was exactly the smile I had prepared myself for. Easy, and warm, the kind that made people feel immediately at ease. “Thank you for coming.”

“You said it was personal,” I replied as I sat on the chair across from his desk without being invited to. “That was interesting enough to warrant the trip.”

He laughed softly and sat down. “Straight to it, I appreciate that.”

“I have a full schedule.” I replied dryly.

“Of course.” He leaned back in his chair with the relaxed confidence of someone entirely comfortable in their own space. He was handsome in a way that was different from Adrian, easier and more accessible. The kind of face people trusted before they had reason to.

“I’ll be direct then,” he said shortly

“Please.” I replied.

His eyes held mine steadily. “You’ve been in this city for just over six weeks and you’ve managed to do what most corporations spend years attempting to, you’ve made Laurent Group genuinely nervous.” He paused. “I find that fascinating.”

“Corporations built on unstable foundations tend to become nervous when the market shifts,” I replied evenly.

“That is true.” He tilted his head slightly. “But this doesn’t feel like a market shift. It felt personal.”

I kept my expression neutral. “Business is rarely personal, Mr. Laurent.” I paused for a bit.

“What exactly did you want to discuss?” I asked.

Damien folded his hands against the desk. “I want to discuss why Selene Arden specifically chose Laurent Group’s supply infrastructure as her entry point into this market.” He paused. “Most corporations entering this city target public assets first. Visibility, headlines, momentum. But you went underneath instead, quietly and precisely.” Another pause. “That requires a very specific kind of knowledge about how Laurent Group is structured internally.”

I held his gaze. “Or simply good research.”

“Research takes time,” he said. “The kind of precision you demonstrated in six weeks suggests the research was done long before you arrived.”

He was sharper than he performed in public settings, which was exactly what I had expected but still worth noting clearly.

“You’re suggesting I had prior knowledge of Laurent Group’s vulnerabilities,” I said.

“I’m observing that you behaved as though you did,” he answered.

“And what conclusion did you draw from that observation?”

Damien smiled again, slower this time. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

The room fell into a brief silence. I let the silence sit without filling it, which was its own kind of answer.

Then his phone lit up against the desk. He glanced at it and his expression changed slightly. Small and barely visible, the kind of flicker that only appeared when information arrived that the body registered before the mind decided how to respond.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said, standing.

He turned slightly away from me before answering the call, but the office wasn’t large enough for real privacy. I kept my eyes on the documents spread across his desk…and listened to the fragments that reached me.

“When was that?” A pause. “How long ago?” Another longer pause. “Don’t release anything yet.”

He ended the call and stood with his back to me for precisely three seconds before turning around. By the time he faced me again, his expression had been fully reassembled. But his hands, I noticed, were no longer relaxed.

“I apologize,” he said, returning to his chair. “Where were we?”

“You were trying to determine how I knew what I knew about Laurent Group,” I said, studying his countenance more carefully.

“Yes, I was.” His voice was flatter than before. Whatever that call contained, it had changed the tone beneath the surface of this conversation.

“Tell me something, Miss Arden. Do you believe in coincidence?”

“Rarely.” I said.

He studied me carefully. “Because it strikes me as quite a coincidence that Victor Hale attended your investor meeting days before turning up unconscious at the Hargrove Summit.”

I kept my face exactly still. “I heard about that. It was quite unfortunate.”

Damien’s eyes stayed on mine. “Yes, very unfortunate, especially now.”

The way he said those two words made the back of my neck feel cold.

“What happened?” I asked carefully.

Damien picked up his phone from the desk and turned the screen toward me without a word.

A news alert, barely twenty minutes old.

VICTOR HALE CONFIRMED DEAD. HOSPITAL SOURCES CITE UNEXPLAINED CARDIAC FAILURE. CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER INVESTIGATION.

I read it once, then I looked up at Damien. His expression was composed and attentive. The easy warmth from the beginning of the meeting had been packed away somewhere and what remained was considerably more dangerous.

“Cardiac failure,” I said evenly.

“That’s what they’re calling it,” he replied. “You don’t believe that too. Do you?” He asked again.

The question sat between us like a weighty substance.

Victor Hale had been drugged at a public summit. Five days later he was dead from unexplained cardiac failure in a hospital bed. It literally meant one thing. Someone had finished what they started and done it cleanly enough to obscure the method.

Whoever was eliminating threads was moving faster than I had anticipated. I kept my breathing steady and my hands still against my lap.

“Victor Hale was an investor,” I said cautiously. “Our interaction was professional. His death is concerning because unexplained deaths always are, not because of any personal connection.”

Damien watched me for a long moment without speaking. Then he said something I hadn’t prepared for.

“Investigation said he called someone the morning before the summit,” Damien said quietly. “All they know is the call lasted for four minutes and that it was placed to a number registered to a private server.” He paused. “They’re still tracing the server, but the interesting thing is the location the call was placed from.”

I held his gaze without saying nothing.

“Twelve blocks from Arden Tower,” he finished.

I looked at Damien Laurent and understood with complete clarity that this meeting had shifted from being a casual conversation. That was even if it was from the onset. It seemed to be a structured approach, organized and executed by someone who had prepared carefully before I walked through the door.

He wasn’t asking questions, rather, he was showing me what he knew. And what he knew was too specific to be accidental.

“That’s an interesting piece of information,” I said, keeping my voice smooth. “Though proximity proves very little in a city this size.”

“It doesn’t,” he agreed pleasantly and leaned forward slightly. “But it raises questions. The kind that, once raised, become difficult to put back down.”

I held his gaze for a measured second before reaching for my bag.

“Thank you for having me, Mr. Laurent,” I said, standing. “I hope whatever questions you’re carrying find useful answers.”

He stood too, and the easy smile returned as though it had simply been waiting offstage.

“I’m sure they will,” he said. “These things have a way of resolving themselves eventually.”

I walked toward the door at an unhurried pace.

“Miss Arden.” Damien called.

I stopped but didn’t turn fully.

“Victor Hale wasn’t the first person connected to Laurent Group’s past to die under convenient circumstances,” Damien said behind me. “I thought that might be worth knowing. As one person with an interest in the truth to another.”

I turned just enough to look at him over my shoulder. His expression was open, calm and entirely illegible. Then, I walked out without responding.

The elevator doors closed in front of me and I stood inside the empty carriage while it descended, watching the floor numbers drop in silence.

Victor Hale was dead. Someone had placed a call from twelve blocks away from my building the morning before his death. Damien Laurent had gotten that information first and had chosen to share it with me, in a private meeting rather than through any official channel.

Which meant one of two things: Either Damien was warning me because he genuinely wanted the same truth I was searching for. Or he was the one who had it and had just spent the last forty minutes measuring exactly how much I knew.

The elevator reached the ground floor.

I stepped out into the morning and walked toward the car, my mind moving faster than my feet, turning over every word and carefully placed detail from the last hour.

Damien Laurent was not what he performed. That much I had always known. What I hadn’t known until this morning was precisely how far beneath the performance the real version of him went.

And how long he had been watching before he decided to let me see a clue of it.