CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Xavier’s POV

Ivanna closed my office door behind her with the specific care of a woman who understood that a slammed door was a card played too early.

I already read her face, quickly and diligently.

She sat down across from my desk without being invited to, which was not unusual, Ivanna had never waited for invitations in spaces she considered hers by proximity, and my office had fallen into that category long ago.

She set her bag on the chair beside her, crossed her legs and looked at me with the composed directness that meant she had been preparing for this conversation .

“Aria Ashford,” she said, maintaining my gaze.

“What about her,” I replied.

“You hired her.” Ivanna’s voice was even, almost conversational, which was always the more dangerous notice with her. “She was cleaning your building barely two weeks ago and now she’s sitting on your accounts floor with a permanent contract.”

“She’s qualified,” I said. “Her background in accounting is solid and we had a vacancy that had been open for that.”

“Xavier.” She tilted her head slightly. “I’ve known you for years. I have seen you in rooms where you made decisions that affected hundreds of people, and I have never once seen you make a hiring decision personally. That is what HR is for. That is what department heads are for.” She looked at me more steadily and intense. “You pulled a woman’s name from a contractor sign-in log and gave her a job. Just like that?”

“I pulled a qualified candidate from an available talent pool,” I said. “Which is also what hiring managers are supposed to do. What is bad or foreign in what I did.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, quietly. “Don’t patronise me with language. I’m not a board member you need to handle.”

I set my pen down.

The afternoon light came through the office windows at a low angle, catching the edge of Ivanna’s profile, composed, beautiful and underneath those things, tight with whatever she was working very hard to keep contained.

She may not be wrong about the facts of the situation. But she was simply drawing a conclusion from them that I wasn’t prepared to confirm.

“What exactly are you asking me, Ivanna?”

“I’m asking you to let her go,” she said. Simply and direct. “Find someone else for the position. Pay out whatever the contract requires.”

“No,” I said firmly.

She didn’t flinch. Maybe a part of her had been expecting the same answer, I could tell from the way she received it, without the surprise of someone who hadn’t prepared for it. She had simply wanted to hear it directly from me before she moved to whatever came next.

“She’s good at the job,” I said. “She was good at it on the first day. Marcus Webb has already flagged her for additional responsibilities, which he does not do with new hires in the first week. I’m not dismissing a competent employee because it makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable,” Ivanna said, with the precise calm of a woman who was, in fact, uncomfortable. “It makes me question your judgment. And your judgment is what the people around us are also watching.”

“The people around us,” I said, “can watch whatever they like.”

“Xavier.” Her voice shifted, more direct, the careful social register dropping slightly to reveal a more personal deed underneath it. “I have been patient with you. I have given you time and space and more understanding than most women in my position would extend, because I believed this was worth it. I still believe that.” She held my gaze. “But I need to know that I am not waiting for what is already moving away from me.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

I know she was an intelligent woman. That was the thing that made this harder than it might have been with someone who simply made demands without understanding what they were demanding.

Ivanna understood exactly what she was asking and exactly what it cost, and she was asking anyway, which meant she was genuinely afraid in a way she would never say out loud using that word.

“You are not being moved away from,” I said carefully.

“Then prove it,” she said. “Let her go.”

“No, Ivanna.”

Ivanna looked at me for a beat longer than comfortable, and in that beat I watched her expression. There was no visible shift in her expression, but the internal way of a woman reclassifying a situation and adjusting her approach accordingly.

She picked up her bag from the chair beside her and stood.

“I want you to understand something,” she said, her voice back to its most controlled register, smooth and even. “I have spent years building a future around this family. Around you. I have been accommodating and I have been patient and I have asked for very little in return.” She met my eyes one last time. “But I will not be accommodating indefinitely, Xavier. And I will not be patient about everything.”

She walked to the door, opened it with the same careful deliberateness she had closed it with, and paused in the frame without turning back.

“Think carefully,” she said, “about what you are actually choosing here.”

Then she was gone, the door clicked shut behind her with the finality of a conversation that had just changed shape permanently.

I sat at my desk and looked at the space she had left.

The problem wasn’t examining directly, it was that I understood exactly what I had chosen and wasn’t prepared yet to say it out loud.