Hate Me Closer

Chapter 5: Cracks

Chapter 5: Cracks

The storm hit just after ten.

Aria had stayed late again — the gala was four weeks out, and the "Beautiful Ruin" concept demanded a hundred impossible details: cracked-marble table runners, florals that looked wild but weren't, lighting that could make broken glass glow like embers. She loved it and hated it in equal measure. It was the best work she'd ever done.

It was for him.

Rain lashed the windows. Thunder rolled somewhere over the river. The thirty-eighth floor was dark except for her desk lamp and the thin line of light under Dorian's office door.

He was still here. Of course he was.

She told herself she was just stretching her legs. She told herself a lot of things lately.

His door was ajar. She knocked lightly — and froze.

Dorian sat at his desk with his jacket off and his tie loosened, something she'd never seen. Before him lay an old framed photograph: a younger Dorian, maybe twenty, standing beside a severe older man with the same gray eyes. And beside the photo, yellowed newspaper clippings. She could read the headline on the top one: HALSTON & COLE SOLD.

Her father's company. In his hands. At ten o'clock at night.

"Do you make a habit of lurking, Ms. Cole?" He didn't look up.

"I make a habit of working." She stepped inside before she could think better of it. "Who's in the photo?"

"My father." A pause. "Reginald Vale. Dead three years. The clippings are his greatest hits."

She moved closer, careful, like approaching something wounded. "You keep them on your desk?"

"I keep them where I can see them." He finally looked at her, and the mask was gone — not slipped, but set aside, deliberately. His eyes were raw. "He built Vale by burying people, Aria. Competitors, partners, friends. He called it strategy. I was twenty-six when he took Halston and Cole, and I sat in a boardroom and watched him do it, and I couldn't stop him."

"Couldn't?" The word escaped before she could catch it. "Or didn't try?"

A humorless smile. "I tried. God help me, I tried. I voted no. I threatened to resign." He looked down at the clippings. "Six to one. My father collected board seats the way other men collect cars. Afterward he told me sentiment was a luxury." A pause. "He was right about one thing. It is a luxury. I've just never learned to live without it."

Her heart hammered against her ribs. A no vote. A threatened resignation. It didn't fit the monster in her head — the man who'd signed the papers without looking up. But grief made people rewrite history, including their own. She couldn't afford to believe him. Not yet.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you asked if I'd ever lost everything." He turned the photograph face-down, gently. "I lost the man I wanted him to be. That's a quieter kind of ruin."

Thunder cracked. The lights flickered. In the half-dark, he looked younger — not the CEO, not the adversary, just a man carrying something too heavy.

"My father died two years after he lost the company," she heard herself say. The words came from somewhere deeper than strategy. "Not right away. He just... faded. Like a clock winding down. The last year, he'd sit in his study and stare at nothing. I used to think if I'd been older, smarter — if I'd done something—"

"You were nineteen."

"I know." Her voice cracked. "Knowing doesn't help."

He stood and came around the desk. For a moment she thought he'd touch her — his hand lifted, hovered near her cheek — and every nerve in her body leaned toward him.

His phone rang.

They sprang apart like guilty teenagers. He answered with a rough "Vale," listened, and his face hardened back into the mask. "Tell Ward I'll call him back."

Ward. The board chairman. Aria filed the name away even as her pulse raced.

"I should go," she said.

"Aria." He caught her wrist — gently, but she felt it everywhere. "What you told me. About your father. Thank you for trusting me with it."

She looked at his hand on her wrist, at his eyes, at the face-down photograph of the man who'd destroyed her family.

She'd come here to find his weakness. She'd found it.

So why did she feel like she'd just handed him hers?

---

At home, she opened her laptop and stared at the draft of her next move — an email to Simone Park, ready to send, containing a rumor about a major donor pulling out of the gala. Phase two, step two. Keep the pressure on. Bleed him slowly.

Her finger hovered over send.

She thought of Dorian turning the photograph face-down. Gently. Like it hurt him.

She thought of her father in his study, staring at nothing.

She closed the laptop.

Then she sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the rain — and opened it again.

One more, she told herself, and hit send. Then done.

But as the email vanished into the dark, she pressed her hands to her face and wondered when "done" had started feeling like a lie she told herself to sleep at night.

Her phone lit up. Unknown: "Rumor's out. Park will run it tomorrow."

Aria stared at the words until the screen went black. Somewhere across the city, Dorian Vale was probably still in his office, staring at a photograph he'd turned face-down. She wondered if he slept any better than she did.

She doubted it. That was the trouble with cracks — once you'd seen them, you couldn't unsee them. In him. In herself.

---

End of Chapter 5