Chapter 4

The Lion's Den

SOREN

The boardroom is on the thirty-eighth floor and the elevator ride up is forty seconds of silence.

I use it to observe.

Talia is standing straight. Chin level. Hands loose at her sides — not balled this time, which tells me she made a decision somewhere between the suite and the lobby and chose performance over panic. The dress helps. Mira always delivers. But the dress isn't doing the work her spine is doing right now.

She's terrified. I can see it in the slight tension at her jaw and the way she breathes just a fraction too carefully. But if you didn't know to look you wouldn't find it.

Interesting.

The elevator opens. I put my hand on the small of her back and feel her go rigid for exactly one second before she releases it. Adjusts. Falls into step beside me like she's been doing it for months.

Good girl.

I don't say it. But I think it.

 

 

The room is already full when we walk in.

Twelve chairs. Nine occupied. Three men standing by the window with coffee they're not drinking. The ambient temperature of the room is what I'd call hostile — the particular cold of people who've already agreed on something and are waiting for you to arrive so they can say it to your face.

Marcus Hale speaks first. He's been on this board eleven years and in that time has never once surprised me. "Soren. We weren't expecting —"

"My fiancée." I say it before he finishes. Cleanly. No preamble. "I assumed introductions were appropriate given the nature of tonight's agenda."

The word fiancée does exactly what I intended. It moves through the room like a current — heads turning, expressions recalibrating. Gerald Foss actually puts his coffee down.

Talia steps forward and extends her hand to Hale with the specific composure of someone who has decided to be unreadable. "Talia Jett." Her voice is steady. "I've heard a great deal about this board."

She hasn't heard anything. She learned their names in the elevator when I gave her forty seconds of briefing. But the way she says it lands like familiarity and Hale shakes her hand with the automatic reflex of a man who has just been slightly wrong-footed.

I watch the room recalibrate in real time.

There's something they weren't expecting in her specifically. She isn't polished in the way money produces polish — she has no socialite softness. What she has is a kind of stripped-down directness. A rags-to-something quality that reads in this particular room of inherited wealth as either offensive or compelling.

From the way Gerald Foss is sitting up straighter it's reading as compelling.

I keep my hand at her back throughout introductions. Not possessively — just present. Constant. The gesture of a man who reaches for someone without thinking about it. I've calculated exactly how that reads and I execute it without error.

We sit. The meeting begins.

For forty minutes, I let the room talk. Budget review. Expansion timeline. The Singapore deal which Cassandra thought she had leverage over, was actually restructured around her potential interference for the last two weeks. I answer questions with the particular calm that tends to unnerve people who came prepared for a fight.

Talia sits beside me and says very little. When she does speak, it's brief and precise. At one point, Foss asks her opinion — a test dressed as courtesy — on the optics of the Asian market expansion and she says it depends whether you're entering as a partner or a conqueror and then stops talking.

The table is quiet for a moment.

I don't look at her. But I want to.

Then Arthur Sterling leans forward.

Sterling has been on this board for four years. He was placed here by a competing interest group I've been managing carefully since his appointment. He is the only person in this room who came tonight not to be convinced but to find a crack.

"Congratulations are in order." His tone is flat. Pleasant in the way that isn't. "Though I have to say — the timing is rather sudden. An engagement announcement the same night as — what was it — some scene with a socialite in the penthouse corridor?"

"The scene you're referencing was a former acquaintance behaving erratically." I meet his eyes. "The announcement timing was mine. I don't schedule sentiment around board convenience."

Sterling smiles. "Of course not." He lets a beat pass. "Then you won't object to a proper celebration. The Masquerade Ball is in ten days. A vow exchange is symbolic and natural in front of the relevant witnesses. Proves the union is in good faith." He spreads his hands. "Just good optics. You understand optics, Soren."

The room is very still.

Every person at this table knows what Sterling is doing. Some of them are hoping it works. I run a quick count — votes if this goes sideways — and then I do the thing that clearly nobody expects.

I smile.

"We'd be delighted." I turn to Talia. My hand finds hers on the table. "Ten days is plenty of time."

Talia looks at me and her expression doesn't break. But her hand under mine is ice cold.

—

We make it to the elevator before I feel the shift.

She holds it together through goodbyes. Through the lobby. Through the revolving door and the night air and the moment the limo door closes behind us.

Then she tells me.

Not dramatically. Not falling apart. She says it the way someone speaks when they've been holding something so heavy for so long that putting it down looks almost like nothing.

We have your brother. Pay now. Tonight. Or he's a ghost by morning.

The limo moves through the city. I look at her face — pale now under Mira's careful work. The composure she carried through that boardroom was cracking at the edges.

My jaw tightens.

I pick up my phone. One contact. Two rings.

"Clean it up." My voice comes out low and even. "All of it. Use whatever force is necessary."

I end the call.

Talia is watching me with an expression I can't fully categorize. Fear. Relief. Something else underneath both.

I hold her gaze.

"You're safe now Talia." I let the words land. Then: "But remember — you belong to me. Not the sharks."

She doesn't answer.

Outside the city moves past in streaks of cold light as we head to ma mansion and I look away first.

This time I let her have it.