CHAPTER TWO: The Account I Didn’t Know I Had

Sofia

The Castellano building looked exactly like you’d expect, all glass and certainty, the kind of architecture built specifically to remind visitors they were small. I stood across the street for a full minute before I made myself walk in, smoothing down a blazer that suddenly felt ten years out of date, rehearsing a version of calm I wasn’t sure I actually had in me.

I gave my name at the desk and watched the receptionist’s expression shift, just slightly, the way people’s faces do when a name they’ve been told to expect finally walks in. She didn’t ask me to confirm it. She simply reached for the phone, said two words into it, and smiled at me with the particular politeness reserved for people about to have a very different afternoon than they expected.

“Fourth floor,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

The elevator ride felt longer than it should have, long enough for me to run through every possible reason a man like Damian Castellano would summon a restaurant owner he’d never met, and short enough that I hadn’t settled on one by the time the doors opened onto a floor so quiet it felt deliberate, like sound itself had been priced out of the building.

Damian Castellano stood when I walked in, which surprised me more than it should have, given everything I’d heard about him. He was taller than his photographs suggested, dark haired, dressed like money that had stopped needing to prove itself decades ago, and he looked at me the way you’d look at the final piece of something you’d been assembling slowly, carefully, for a very long time. It unsettled me, that look, the sense that I’d walked into the middle of a story he already knew the ending to.

“Ms. Reyes.” He didn’t offer his hand, which I appreciated, because I wasn’t sure mine wouldn’t shake. “Thank you for coming on short notice.”

“Your assistant said I have an account with you. I don’t know what that means.” I kept my voice level, the same voice I used on vendors who tried to renegotiate terms mid delivery, the one that didn’t let anyone see what the numbers were actually doing to me underneath.

“It means,” he said, and gestured for me to sit, “that every dollar your father owes the bank, he actually owes me, has owed me for some time, and that in nine days I intend to either collect it in full or offer you something considerably more interesting than foreclosure.”

The room went very quiet, the particular silence of a floor dropping out from under a life you thought you understood. I sat because my legs made the decision before the rest of me agreed to it, and I stared at a man I’d never met who apparently held my family’s entire future in a folder on his desk, close enough that I could see my father’s name printed on the tab.

“How long,” I asked, “have you owned my father’s debt?”

“Long enough that the answer wouldn’t help you right now,” Damian said, which wasn’t a no, and we both understood that it wasn’t.

“Why would a man like you spend years quietly buying up a struggling restaurant’s loans. That’s not an investment. That’s a project.”

Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone before I could name it, the first honest thing I’d seen on his face since I’d walked in.

“What kind of something,” I said, because some part of me already knew I wasn’t going to like the answer, and an even smaller, more dangerous part of me was already leaning forward to hear it anyway.

He didn’t answer right away. He stood instead, unhurried, and walked to the window behind his desk, the entire city laid out beneath him like something he’d already priced and purchased piece by piece. I watched his shoulders, the careful stillness of a man choosing his next sentence the way other people chose chess moves, three steps ahead of whatever I thought I was prepared for.

“Tell me something, Ms. Reyes,” he said, without turning around. “In three years of running that restaurant alone, has anyone ever offered you a way out that didn’t cost you something you weren’t willing to give.”

“No.”

“Then you already know how this conversation is going to end. I’d rather you hear the terms from me directly than spend the next nine days imagining something worse.”

“You think I can imagine something worse than losing my father’s restaurant.”

“I think,” Damian said, finally turning back to face me, “that you’ve spent three years imagining exactly that, every single night, and that the only thing worse than losing it would be owing the rest of your life to the man who could have stopped it and chose, instead, to make you an offer.”

My pulse was doing something unsteady and I didn’t like what it suggested about the part of me that was listening too closely, leaning toward whatever he was about to say instead of standing up and walking out while I still had the choice.

“Then make the offer,” I said. “Stop deciding how worse I’m imagining it and just say it.”

He studied me for a long moment, long enough that I felt the weight of it settle somewhere under my ribs, and for the first time since I’d walked in, I had the strange, unwelcome sense that he wasn’t simply negotiating. He was watching to see whether I’d flinch, the way you’d watch someone cross a bridge you already knew could hold their weight, already certain of the outcome and still, somehow, invested in how they got there.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I won’t make you wait any longer than you already have.”