Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Rory

“Rory,” Damian said again, and even through the static he sounded exactly the way I remembered, controlled, clipped, like every word had been weighed before it left his mouth. “I need you to explain to me why my brother authorized an unscheduled dive last night without running it through legal first.”

“Good morning to you too, Damian.”

“I’m not interested in pleasantries. I’m interested in why there’s an incident report on my desk with your company’s name on it and my brother’s signature underneath a decision that could have gotten someone killed.”

I opened my mouth to answer, already bracing for the fight, and that’s when I heard the cabin door behind me, boots on the deck, and I turned around to find Kian standing in the doorway with his hair still damp from a shower, a mug of coffee halfway to his mouth, frozen completely still the second he heard his brother’s voice filling the small space between us.

He heard it. All of it. The clipped tone, the way Damian said my name like he had every right to it, like ten years hadn’t passed at all.

“Rory,” Damian continued, oblivious to his brother standing right there listening, “effective immediately I’m pulling direct oversight of this contract back under my office. Kian’s authority on this account is suspended pending review.”

“You can’t do that,” I said, sharper than I meant to, glancing at Kian, watching something close down behind his eyes in real time.

“I can, and I am. This is my company.”

“It’s a salvage contract, Damian, not a hostile takeover. Your brother has done nothing but handle this professionally from day one.”

“Professionally,” Damian repeated, and something in the way he said the word made my stomach drop, because it didn’t sound curious, it sounded like a man who already knew more than he was letting on and was deciding exactly how much of it to say out loud. “Is that what we’re calling it.”

Kian set his coffee down on the small table so carefully it made almost no sound at all, which somehow scared me more than if he’d slammed it, and he crossed the cabin in three steps and grabbed the radio receiver right out of my hand before I could stop him.

“You want to talk to someone, talk to me,” Kian said into it, voice tight and controlled in a way that didn’t match the look on his face at all. “This contract was mine. I handled it. If there’s a problem, it’s with me, not her.”

“Kian.” Damian’s voice shifted, surprised, maybe even a little thrown to hear his brother on the line at all. “I didn’t realize you were there.”

“Clearly.”

“We’ll discuss this properly. In person.”

“No, we’ll discuss it right now, because apparently you’ve had something to say about Rory this entire time and decided the best way to handle it was assigning me a job blind instead of just telling me the truth like a normal person would.”

Damian didn’t answer that right away, and in the gap I watched Kian’s jaw work, watched him piece something together in real time that I hadn’t had the chance to explain yet, and when he finally spoke again his voice had dropped into something quieter and much more dangerous than the anger before it.

“How did you find out,” Kian said, looking straight at me now instead of the radio. “About last night. About her. How exactly did that information land on your desk, Damian, because it sure as hell didn’t come from me.”

There was a pause on the line, just long enough to be its own kind of answer, and I felt my face go hot with the particular kind of shame that comes from being caught in the middle of something you didn’t create but couldn’t stop either. “The insurance paperwork,” Damian finally said. “Her name crossed my desk this morning attached to the incident report. I recognized it immediately.”

“Of course you did,” I said, mostly to myself, closing my eyes for a second. “It was never a secret waiting to happen, Kian. My name was always going to end up in front of him eventually. Insurance, invoices, contracts, it was only a matter of time.”

Kian turned to look at me, and for a second I thought maybe he understood, maybe this could still be something we talked through instead of something that broke us apart right there in that small cabin.

Then I watched him remember the morning before, my voice telling him he was a kid, my hand pulling away from his on the deck, and something in his expression hardened over like ice forming fast across open water.

“Right,” he said, quiet, almost to himself. “Well. Guess you don’t have to worry about pretending anymore.”

“Kian, that’s not.”

“It’s fine, Rory.” He wasn’t looking at me now, he was looking somewhere past my shoulder, out the small window at the gray water beyond it.

“You can go back to hating both Ashcroft brothers equally. Saves you the trouble of sorting out which one deserves it more.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Do I?” He finally looked at me again, and there was nothing soft left in it at all, nothing like the man who’d pulled me out of black water three weeks ago laughing about it afterward, nothing like the man who’d asked me to tell him to stop and actually would have if I’d said it.

“Because from where I’m standing, you told me last night was a mistake before the sun even came up, called me a kid on my own contract, and now I find out you’ve spent this entire morning letting my brother talk to you like none of that even happened. So forgive me if I’m having a little trouble figuring out which version of you is the real one.”

“There’s only one version of me, Kian.”

“Then which one told me to stop being a kid about all of this,” he said, voice rising now, finally cracking open into something raw, “and which one is standing here right now looking like she’s about to cry over losing my attention. Because those don’t feel like the same person to me.”

I didn’t have an answer for that, not one that would have come out sounding like anything other than an excuse, and he seemed to read the silence exactly the way I was afraid he would. He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair, moving fast, the kind of fast that comes from needing to be anywhere except where you currently are, and he was at the cabin door before I even managed to get my feet moving to stop him.

“Kian.”

“I’ll have someone from the office reach out about the contract transition,” he said, not looking back, voice gone flat and professional in a way that hurt worse than the anger had. “You’ll be dealing with Damian directly from here on out. Since apparently that was always where this was headed anyway.”

The door shut behind him harder than the rain outside, and I stood there in the small cabin with Damian’s voice still crackling faintly through the abandoned radio receiver on the table, calling my name, asking if anyone was still there, and I didn’t answer him either. I walked out onto the deck instead, rain soaking through my shirt in seconds, and watched Kian’s motorcycle peel off the dock and disappear down the coast road without a single glance back toward the water.

My phone buzzed in my pocket a few minutes later while I was still standing there, and I pulled it out expecting a message from Talia asking what the yelling had been about, since sound traveled easily across a dock this quiet. It wasn’t Talia. It was something way worse than I expected.