MR. STERLING'S TERMS

Chapter Five

NOVA

Velour was the kind of restaurant that didn't put prices on the menu.

I'd walked past it twice before finding the entrance — a black door set into a Mayfair-adjacent street called Harlow Lane, no sign except a small brass plate that said *V* and nothing else. Inside it smelled like truffle oil and aged wood and the particular hush of a room where important things were decided over wine that cost more than my monthly rent.

I arrived at twelve twenty-eight.

The maître d' led me through the room to a corner booth. Dark leather, low lighting, white linen.

She was already there.

I knew it was her before he introduced us because she looked exactly like him — same strong jaw, same dark eyes that moved across a room like they were cataloguing everything and deciding what mattered. Blonde hair pulled back. Sharp. Twenty-three and already carrying herself like someone who had figured out most rooms before she walked into them.

She was looking directly at me when I arrived.

Not at the entrance in general. At me specifically. Like she'd been watching for me.

She smiled.

Slow. Knowing. The smile of someone who already had the answer and was waiting to see if I'd give it to her honestly.

"So you're the one," she said.

Dominic stood. "Nova, my daughter Sienna. Sienna—"

"Nova Adelyn." She said my full name. Precisely. Like she'd practiced it. "Economics. First class honours. Three weeks in." She picked up her water glass. "He's never once mentioned you. Which tells me considerably more than if he had."

I sat down.

"It's lovely to meet you," I said.

"Is it." She tilted her head. Assessing. "You're composed. I respect that. Most people he brings around try too hard." She opened her menu. "You're not trying at all."

"Sienna." Dominic's voice. Warning register. Minimal.

"I'm complimenting her, Dad." She didn't look up from the menu. "Composed is the highest thing I give anyone."

I looked at my own menu and absorbed nothing on it.

The restaurant moved around us — quiet conversation, the soft clink of crystal, a pianist somewhere near the entrance playing something low and unhurried. Dominic sat across from me and gave absolutely nothing away and I felt his attention on the side of my face like a second temperature.

"What brings you back to Harlow City?" I asked Sienna.

"Him." Simple. She turned a page. "He offered me the foundation position. Very unlike him to offer anything charity-adjacent." She glanced at Dominic. "Which means there's a reason he wants me close that he hasn't said yet."

"The foundation position is legitimate," Dominic said.

"Everything you do is legitimate. That's not what I said." She looked at me again. Sharp eyes. Genuinely curious rather than cruel. "How long?"

I looked at her steadily. "How long what."

"Don't do that." She set her menu down. "You're not the type to play dumb and it doesn't suit you. How long have you been sleeping with my father?"

The table went very quiet.

I looked at Dominic. He looked back — direct, steady, no rescue coming. Just: *this is who she is, here is the situation, handle it however you choose.*

I looked at Sienna.

"Three weeks," I said.

Something shifted in her expression. Not surprise. Recalibration. She looked at Dominic. "Three weeks and you're already doing lunch." She picked up her fork. "You've never done lunch."

"I do lunch regularly," he said.

"Not like this." She looked between us. Read something in the space between us that I wasn't aware we'd left visible. Then back to me. "Are you in love with him?"

"Sienna—"

"Reasonable question, Dad." Still looking at me. "You're both twenty-three. The dynamic has a particular gravity. I've seen it before." A pause. "Well. Tried to."

"I've known him three weeks," I said.

"Not an answer."

"It's the only accurate one I have right now."

She held my gaze. One beat. Two. Then she nodded — small, decisive, the nod of someone filing a response that passed some private test — and looked back at her menu.

"Fair," she said.

The food came. We ate. The conversation found safer ground — the foundation, the city, a gallery opening Sienna had attended the previous night in a neighbourhood called the Vellum Quarter that she described with precise, unsentimental observation. She and Dominic fell into an easy combative rhythm — she challenged, he answered, neither of them backed down, both of them clearly accustomed to this and quietly sustained by it.

I watched him with her.

Different. Not unrecognisable — still controlled, still precise — but something in him that was usually sealed had come slightly open. He listened to her differently than he listened to anyone in a boardroom. Let her finish. Came back with something real rather than something strategic.

Halfway through the main course she looked at me again.

"He's difficult," she said. Conversational.

"I've noticed."

"Works constantly. Decides what people need without asking. Explains nothing." She glanced at Dominic. "He'd call it efficiency."

"It is efficiency," he said.

"It's control." Back to me. Matter-of-fact. Not an attack. "Just so you know the full picture."

"I appreciate the briefing," I said.

Something moved across her face. Warmer now than when I'd arrived — the sharpness still there but something underneath it that was less assessment and more genuine. She picked up her wine. "I like you." Slightly surprised by it. "You haven't flinched once."

"I don't flinch," I said.

"No." She looked at her father. "She doesn't flinch."

"I noticed," he said quietly.

The table went still in a specific way. Sienna looked between us and saw something she hadn't expected to see — something in the particular quality of the air between Dominic and me, something that had nothing to do with employment — and she set her wine down and looked at her plate.

Then: "Don't hurt her."

Dominic said: "Sienna—"

"Talking to her, Dad." She looked at me. The sharpness had something real underneath it now — old and protective and completely serious. "He won't say what he needs. Constitutionally incapable. So I'm saying it for him." Her jaw set. "He's controlling and impossible and he works too much and he is also the best person I have ever known. So don't hurt him."

The restaurant hummed around us.

I looked at Dominic.

He was looking at his daughter with something completely unmanaged in his expression — an openness I hadn't seen from him once in three weeks — and then his eyes came to mine and he said nothing and didn't need to.

"I won't," I said.

Sienna held my gaze. Three seconds. Then she sat back and picked up her dessert menu and said: "Good. Now I need something chocolate. I've been in Harlow City for six hours and the drive from Caldwell was terrible."

I looked at my menu.

Felt Dominic's foot press against mine under the table.

Steady. Warm. Deliberate.

I didn't move.

*Stay still.*

I stayed still.