The Heiress They Failed To Kill

Old Ghosts, New Faces

Rocca Industries hosted the reception on the top floor of a building ,Bianca had once toured as a teenager, back when her father used to bring her to meetings like this one and call it an education.

She hadn’t expected Nathaniel to be in the room.

Sterling’s people had a standing invitation to anything involving Building 118 now — a courtesy neither Xander nor Bianca had wanted to extend and neither had found a way to avoid — and apparently Nathaniel had become useful enough to Sterling’s circle to warrant a seat at the smaller tables.

She saw him before Xander did. She always would.

“You’re quiet,” Xander said, close enough that only she could hear it, his hand finding the small of her back with the kind of casual authority that had become, somewhere in the last month, entirely unremarkable to both of them.

“I’m working.” She wasn’t. She was counting exits, the way she’d trained herself to, the way she hadn’t needed to in this particular kind of room in years.

Nathaniel crossed toward them with a drink in each hand and the easy confidence of a man who’d never once considered that a room might not want him in it.

“Rocca.” He offered his free hand. “Nathaniel Hale. I represent some of Mr. Sterling’s interests on the regulatory side.”

“I know who you are.” Xander’s tone gave away nothing. It rarely did.

Nathaniel’s gaze slid to Bianca with the mild, practiced interest of a man cataloguing a room. “And you’re the mysterious Ms. Hunters. I’ve heard a great deal and confirmed almost none of it.”

“Most people find that arrangement works out better for everyone.” She kept her voice light, pleasant — a register she hadn’t used in this specific way toward this specific man in six years, and hated, distantly, how easily it still came.

He didn’t recognize her. Six years, a new name, a different posture in every photograph that existed of her now — none of it an accident, all of it working exactly as designed. It should have felt like a win.

It felt like standing in a room with a ghost who didn’t know he was one.

Nathaniel moved on eventually, pulled toward someone louder, someone easier. Bianca exhaled for the first time in what felt like several minutes.

Xander was watching her when she turned back — not at the door Nathaniel had gone through, but at her.

“You knew him,” he said. Not a question this time.

“I know a lot of people in rooms like this.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She met his eyes and said nothing, and for once, he didn’t push past the silence to fill it. He simply filed it, the way he’d been filing everything about her for weeks now — one more piece of a shape he still couldn’t name.