50

Louis’s POV

The Gala for the Metropolitan Children’s Hospital was the first major public test of the new entity: Crowe & Crowe.

It was a fortress of silk ties, crystal champagne flutes, and softly gleaming wealth, but to Sierra and me, it was a tactical exercise. We had mapped it out in the war room: arrival time, key individuals to be “warmly engaged” (major donors, the mayor), those to be given “cool acknowledgment” (business rivals, gossip columnists), the precise moment for our joint, brief interview with the press line. The objective: project unshakable unity, forward momentum, and a focus on charitable legacy, not past trauma.

Sierra was a weapon honed for the occasion. She wore a column of emerald-green velvet, severe and elegant, her only jewelry the simple diamond studs I’d given her on our wedding day. A calculated choice. Her hair was swept up, exposing the clean, defiant line of her jaw. She looked less like a society wife and more like a sovereign.

“Ready?” she asked, checking her reflection one last time in the penthouse elevator’s brass doors. Her voice was cool, operational.

“Protocol is set,” I confirmed, adjusting my cufflinks. “Stick to the sectors we discussed. I’ll handle Prenderghast and the governor. You take the museum board and the foundation heads.”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Aye aye, Captain.”

The doors opened onto a wall of light and sound. Cameras flashed. The murmuring crowd pivoted as one. For a second, I felt the old, predatory calm of entering a boardroom takeover. Then I felt Sierra’s hand slide into the crook of my arm, not clinging, but anchoring. A signal. The flashbulbs intensified.

We performed flawlessly. We moved through the crowd as a single, coordinated unit. I would mention the hospital’s new wing; she would seamlessly detail the art therapy programs it would house. She would charm a donor with a story about Katie’s love of drawing; I would follow with a data point on childhood psychological outcomes. We were a duet, our lines rehearsed, our timing impeccable. The unified front was not a façade. It was a formidable display of engineering.

I watched her work. She was magnificent. Not the hesitant woman from the test kitchen, nor the shattered mother from the safe house. This was the other version of her, the one our pact had fully weaponized: poised, intelligent, radiating a steely grace that commanded the room. Men listened to her with a focus they usually reserved for balance sheets. Women regarded her with a new, assessing respect. She was no longer just my wife. She was my counterpart.

And something dangerous began to stir in my chest. It wasn’t the desperate, hungry love of before. It was hotter, sharper. Pride. Awe. Possession, yes, but of the most brutal kind—the desire to have this brilliant, armored creature at my side, not in my bed as a conquest, but in my war room as an equal. The tabled negotiation was no longer a distant concept. It was a live wire hanging between us, sparking with every shared glance, every finished sentence.

The first crack in the performance came during our press line.

A reporter from a tabloid web outlet, her voice sweetly venomous, asked, “Mrs. Crowe, given the ordeal your family endured, do you ever worry about the *kind* of world your husband’s business practices have helped create? One where such violence can reach your doorstep?”

It was a direct attack, dressed as a philosophical question. Sierra didn’t flinch. She turned her full gaze on the young woman, and the temperature around us seemed to drop.

“The world I worry about,” Sierra said, her voice clear and cutting, “is one where the victims of violence are asked to justify the actions of the criminals who target them. My husband’s work builds hospitals like this one. His ‘business practices’ employ thousands of families. We are here tonight to support healing. If your focus is on assigning blame rather than supporting that cause, you’ve mistaken the venue.”

A stunned silence, then a smattering of approving claps from other journalists. The reporter flushed. I felt a surge of raw, vindictive triumph. She had not just defended me; she had eviscerated the premise of the question with the precision of a surgeon.

Our eyes met. In that brief, electric lock, the professional mask slipped. I saw not my partner in a play, but my ally in a fight. And she saw, I think, the sheer, unfiltered intensity of my response to her. The look lasted a second too long before we turned, in unison, to the next question.

The second crack came later, on the dance floor. It was expected we would dance. Another part of the display. I took her in my arms, my hand on the cool velvet of her back. We moved with a natural, practiced rhythm we hadn’t possessed in years. The world narrowed to the space between our bodies.

“You were brilliant with that reporter,” I murmured, my voice low against her temple.

“She was following a script. I rewrote it,” she replied, her breath warm against my neck.

“You enjoy it,” I realized, the truth dawning. “The strategy. The combat.”

She leaned back just enough to look at me. The music swelled. “I’m good at it. You said it yourself. It’s the same muscle.” Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “It’s not the only muscle that’s been… neglected.”

The world stopped. The music, the chatter, the light—all of it receded into a muffled roar. Here it was, on the dance floor of a thousand watching eyes, the tabled negotiation placed squarely, audaciously, on the table.

“Is that a proposal to re-open discussions?” I asked, my grip tightening infinitesimally on her back.

“It’s an observation of tactical oversight,” she said, but her voice had lost its clinical edge. It was husky. “A weakness. An unaddressed variable in our merger.”

“And what’s the strategic remedy?”

“Integration,” she said simply. “Full integration of assets. To strengthen the whole.”

I pulled her closer, eliminating the last inch of ceremonial distance between us. Her body aligned with mine, firm and unyielding. The spark was now a conflagration.

“The foundation is holding,” I stated, a question in my words.

“It’s been stress-tested,” she confirmed. “By the press. By your mother. By Alvarez’s smoke. It holds.”

“Then perhaps,” I said, the words leaving me on a wave of long-suppressed need, “it’s time to discuss the terms of the merger’s… physical consolidation.”

She didn’t answer with words. She let her head rest against my shoulder again, a subtle, profound surrender. Her fingers curled tighter against my palm. The dance ended. We pulled apart, the public mask sliding back into place. But everything had changed.

The drive home was silent, thick with the unsaid. We walked into the penthouse, the echoes of the gala still clinging to us like glitter. Katie was asleep at the nanny’s apartment for the night. A planned variable. Had we subconsciously known?

I poured two glasses of water in the kitchen, my movements deliberate. She stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the city’s grid of lights, her silhouette a cutout against the glow.

“Sierra.”

She turned.

I crossed the room, stopping before her. I didn’t touch her. I let the offer, the raw need, hang in the air between us. This was her negotiation to conclude.

She searched my face, looking for the ghost of the manipulator, the liar. She found, I hoped, only the partner who had seen her power and would never again make the mistake of underestimating it.

“No more walls,” she whispered, echoing the first term of our pact.

“No more walls,” I vowed.

She reached up and slowly, deliberately, pulled the pin from her chignon. A cascade of dark hair fell around her shoulders. It was the most intimate gesture I had witnessed in years. It was the lowering of a final drawbridge.

I closed the distance. My hand came up to cup her jaw, my thumb brushing her cheekbone. She leaned into the touch, her eyes fluttering closed for a second before opening, clear and sure.

“Then let’s integrate,” she said.

The kiss was not an exploration. It was a claiming, and it was mutual. It was the collision of two fierce, damaged, formidable wills, no longer at war, but finally, terrifyingly, on the same side. It held the bitterness of the grave we’d built over, the sharp sweetness of our shared victory, and the furious, desperate hope for a future we were only now brave enough to try and build.

When we broke apart, breathless, foreheads touching, the world had rearranged itself. The armistice was over. The merger was complete.

“Welcome home,” I breathed against her lips, meaning it in every possible way.

She smiled, a real, unguarded, devastating smile. “It’s about time.”