Under a Borrowed Name

Chapter 6: Two Days in Chicago

"You're coming to Chicago," Damian said, not quite a question, the way most things out of his mouth were not quite questions.

Elena looked up from the quarterly report spread across her desk. "Is that an invitation or an order."

"Does it matter?"

"It might change my answer."

The corner of his mouth twitched, that small almost smile she had started noticing more than she wanted to admit. "The Whitfield board wants a face to face before they vote on the restructuring. You built the strategy. You're presenting it."

"You could present it yourself."

"I could." He leaned against the doorframe of her borrowed office, arms crossed, watching her with an attention that had stopped feeling purely professional somewhere around the third week, though neither of them had said so out loud. "But they trust numbers more when they come from someone who isn't a Kane. Given the current headlines."

The headlines. She had read the Financial Herald piece twice that morning, twice more than she should have, watching her father's name printed in black and white for the first time in five years, sandwiched between words like irregularities and unresolved questions. Nobody had connected it to her yet. Nobody had connected Elena Marchetti to Elena Voss. But the article had a shape now, a momentum, and momentum had a way of finding what it was looking for eventually.

"Fine," she said. "Chicago."

The flight was quiet in the particular way private planes were quiet, all soft leather and low engine hum and too much space to avoid conversation if you wanted to. Elena did not want to, or perhaps could not help herself, because somewhere over Ohio she found herself asking the question she had been circling for three weeks.

"Your sister mentioned your mother," she said carefully. "That she passed."

Damian did not look up from the report in his lap right away. When he did, something in his face had gone quieter than she had seen it before, stripped of the boardroom armor he wore like a second skin.

"Six years ago. Cancer, technically. Though I've always thought my father found other ways to kill her slower, long before that." He said it flatly, like a fact he had made peace with a long time ago and simply carried now without flinching. "She found out two months before she died that he'd been unfaithful for most of their marriage. Multiple times. She never told us, not directly. Sofia found the emails after she passed. That's when Sofia started running background checks on everyone who walks into our lives, in case you were wondering why she's like that."

"I wasn't going to ask, but now I understand a little better."

"She's not wrong to be suspicious of people. Our father taught both of us that trust is a transaction, not a feeling." He turned the report over in his hands without really looking at it. "I spent years telling myself I was different from him. That I built things honestly, that I didn't need to lie to get what I wanted. And then Halloway happens, and I find out I might have built half my career on top of something he did to a man I've never even met."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"I benefited from it. Is that so different?"

Elena looked out the window at the clouds sliding by beneath them, thinking about a version of this conversation where she could simply tell him the truth. I am the daughter of the man you're talking about. I have spent five years hating your family for exactly what you're describing. I came here to destroy you, and somewhere in the last three weeks I have started to lose track of why.

"I think," she said instead, choosing each word like it cost something, "that the people who benefit from something and never ask questions about it are different from the people who find out and can't stop asking questions until they get an answer. You're the second kind. That has to count for something."

Damian looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded and searching in his expression, like he was trying to memorize the shape of what she had just said.

"You always know exactly the right thing to say," he said quietly. "It's almost suspicious."

Her heart stumbled, just once, before she caught it. "Occupational habit."

"Is that all it is?"

The plane hummed on beneath them, and Elena did not have an answer that was entirely true, so she gave him the closest thing to it she could afford.

"Ask me again when this is over," she said, "and I'll tell you."

The Whitfield board meeting went well, better than well, Elena's numbers doing exactly what she had built them to do, calming a room full of frightened men who understood spreadsheets better than they understood people. Afterward, in a hotel bar overlooking the Chicago skyline, Damian ordered two drinks without asking what she wanted and got hers exactly right anyway.

"You did that on purpose," she said, nodding at the drink. "Trying to prove a point."

"Maybe I'm just observant."

"Maybe you're trying to make me trust you."

"Is it working?"

She studied him over the rim of her glass, this man she had spent five years hating in the abstract and three weeks slowly failing to hate in the specific, and felt something dangerous settle into her chest, something that had nothing to do with the plan she had built her whole rebuilt life around.

"More than it should," she admitted, and hated how much it felt like the truest thing she had said to him since the day she walked through his glass doors.

Outside the window, the city lights blurred and glittered, indifferent to the two people sitting quietly together, both of them carrying secrets heavy enough to end whatever this was the moment either one came fully into the light.