First Look

She put it on the shelf.

I sat in the back of my car on her street and watched through tinted glass as the ring I had sent — the ring that had taken my jeweler four days to design and that had cost more than most people's annual salary — was carried into the sitting room and placed on a shelf above the fireplace like an ornament.

Not on her finger.

A shelf.

I looked at my phone. Typed four words. Watched the window.

Her head had snapped up immediately, searching the street with sharp, suspicious eyes, and even from this distance I could see the set of her jaw. The deliberate stillness she had forced over herself a second later. As if she had decided in real time not to give me the satisfaction of seeing her rattled.

Too late. I had already seen it.

Her response had come back fast. Direct. No hesitation.

Stop having me watched.

I almost smiled. Almost.

Get used to it, I had typed back, because it was true and because I wanted to see what she would do with it. She had put her phone face down on the table. A small act of defiance, quiet and pointed, the conversational equivalent of closing a door in someone's face.

Interesting.

"Take us back," I said to my driver.

Marco was waiting for me at the penthouse, standing at my desk with the particular expression he wore when he had information I wasn't going to enjoy receiving.

"Talk," I said, loosening my tie as I walked past him to the window.

"We have a problem with the Esposito account." He set a folder on the desk. "They've been skimming. Small amounts, spread across six months, but the pattern is clear. Someone on the inside."

I turned. "How far inside?"

"Far enough that it had to be authorized at a certain level." Marco paused. "We think it's Caruso."

Caruso. I let the name sit for a moment. Benedetto Caruso had been handling our financial operations for three years. Trusted. Vetted. Brought in on a personal recommendation from my uncle. Which meant this was either a betrayal or a setup, and neither option was without serious consequences.

"Find out which," I said. "Quietly. I don't want him spooked before we know the full extent of it."

"Understood." Marco picked the folder back up. "There's something else."

I waited.

"Your mother called this morning. She wants to meet the Sinclair girl before the engagement dinner." He kept his voice perfectly even. "She said, and I am quoting directly here, that she refuses to sit across a dinner table from a stranger and perform civility without having been given the basic courtesy of an introduction first."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "When has my mother ever performed civility?"

"I relayed a version of that sentiment. She was not receptive."

Of course she wasn't. Gabriella Vitale had built her entire identity on being the immovable object in a family of unstoppable forces. She had outlasted my father, outlasted two attempted coups on our family's power, and outlasted every person who had ever made the mistake of underestimating her. She was also, when she chose to be, the most terrifying woman I had ever encountered in a life full of terrifying people.

And she wanted to meet Aria Sinclair.

I thought about this for a moment. Thought about Aria's jaw set against the window. Her phone placed face down on the table.

"Fine," I said. "Set it up for tomorrow. Neutral ground — the restaurant on Mercer Street. Lunch."

Marco nodded and made a note. "Should I inform Miss Sinclair directly or go through her father?"

"Directly." I walked to my desk and sat down, pulling the first of the evening's files toward me. "Her father has no authority over her schedule anymore. She should start understanding that now."

Marco left without another word. I worked through the next two hours with the focused efficiency that had always come naturally to me — the ability to compartmentalize, to move between problems without carrying the weight of one into the next. It was a skill my father had tried to teach me and that I had eventually learned not from him but from watching what happened to men who couldn't do it.

They drowned. Every time.

It was nearly nine when my phone buzzed with a message from an unknown sender.

I don't recall agreeing to lunch tomorrow.

I set down my pen.

She had gotten Marco's message then. And instead of confirming or declining through any normal channel she had gone to the effort of acquiring my personal number — which was not a simple task, given that I kept it deliberately difficult to find — and contacted me directly.

I picked up my phone.

You didn't need to agree. Be there at one.

Her response took four minutes. I noticed that I noticed.

I have plans at one.

Cancel them.

Another pause. Longer this time.

You are the most arrogant person I have never met.

I read that twice. Something shifted in my chest, brief and unfamiliar, like a door opening in a room I had kept locked for a long time.

You haven't met me yet, I typed back. Reserve your judgments.

Her response this time was immediate.

I have everything I need to judge you already, Mr. Vitale. You sent a ring with a four word instruction and had me watched from the street. I think my assessment is well founded.

I leaned back in my chair and read it again.

In thirty four years of conducting business and managing people and navigating a world that ran on fear and obligation, very few people had spoken to me the way Aria Sinclair spoke to me through a phone screen. Without calculation. Without the careful self-censorship that came from knowing who I was and what that meant.

Either she didn't fully understand the danger of it.

Or she understood it perfectly and had decided it didn't matter.

I wasn't sure which possibility was more compelling.

Be there at one, I typed finally. My mother is not a patient woman. You don't want to meet her for the first time having already made a poor impression.

A long pause. Long enough that I had picked my pen back up before the reply came.

Fine. One o'clock. But I'm ordering whatever I want.

I looked at that last line for a moment.

Then I did something I rarely did alone in my penthouse at nine o'clock at night with a problem on my books and a company to run and a wedding in six weeks.

I smiled.

It lasted approximately four seconds before I put it away and went back to work. But it had been there. Real and unbidden and inconveniently genuine.

Aria Sinclair was going to be a problem.

The kind I suspected I wasn't going to mind having.