One Night with the Forgotten Heir

CHAPTER 4 — CASIMIR REYVAHL

Vaultbreaker's top floor was glass on three sides. Ottoline felt the height of it the moment she stepped out of the elevator, like the whole building had been built to remind visitors how far down the ground really was. Even the air felt different up here, colder, thinner, like it had been filtered through money before it reached her lungs.

Casimir Reyvahl stood when she entered his office, and every photo she'd studied online had lied about him. Photos made him look severe. In person he was worse. Controlled. Deliberate. The kind of stillness that made a room rearrange itself around him without him lifting a finger. He didn't smile. He didn't need to.

"Ms. Vasser." His hand closed around hers, warm and certain, a beat too long. Something in her chest reacted before her mind caught up to why, some old, unplaceable recognition that made no sense at all for a man she was meeting for the first time.

"Mr. Reyvahl." She pulled her hand back first, and made herself hold his gaze instead of looking away. "You reviewed a case I lost. That's not usually how recruitment works."

"I don't recruit the usual way." He gestured her into a chair and sat only after she did, watching her the whole time like he was already three moves into a conversation she hadn't started. "The Bramfield evidence log was tampered with two days after you filed it. Timestamps don't lie, even when people do."

Her pulse spiked. She kept her face still, the way she'd trained herself to in depositions, and let nothing of it show.

"That information was never public."

"I make it my business to know things other people bury."

"Then you know I was fired for something I didn't do."

"I know you confronted your partner directly and demanded an investigation he refused to give you." His voice stayed level, but his eyes didn't leave hers, and something underneath the calm felt less like admiration and more like recognition. Like he wasn't just impressed by her file. Like he already knew her, had known her for a while, longer than one meeting could explain. "That's rare. Most people fold. You didn't."

"You're offering me lead counsel on a hunch about my temperament?"

"I'm offering you lead counsel because Vaultbreaker's largest merger is about to face exactly the kind of sabotage that ended Bramfield, and you're the only lawyer I trust to see it coming." He leaned forward slightly, close enough that she caught the low note of his cologne, close enough that the pull in her chest sharpened into something she didn't want to name in a business meeting. "Full autonomy. Triple your last salary."

"And if I say no?"

"You won't." Not arrogance. Certainty. Worse than arrogance, like he'd already watched this exact conversation happen once before and knew exactly how it ended, down to the words she'd use.

Ottoline held his gaze and let the silence stretch a beat longer than comfortable, testing whether he'd fill it. He didn't.

"You're very sure of a woman you just met."

Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and controlled, gone before she could name it. A flicker, there and then folded away, like a door someone had almost forgotten to close.

"I don't hire people I'm not certain about."

She should have let it go. Instead she glanced past him at the desk, at a small dark cufflink sitting loose near the edge of it, engraved letters catching the light from the window. Recognition pulled at the back of her mind again, sharp and wordless, gone as fast as it came, the same feeling she'd had holding his hand a moment ago.

"That's an unusual piece," she said, nodding at it, keeping her tone light, curious, nothing more. "Engraved initials. Family heirloom?"

For half a second, he didn't answer. His jaw tightened, almost nothing, the kind of reaction a man trained himself out of and still couldn't fully suppress when caught off guard.

"Something like that."

"Mine, or does everyone in this building own one?"

"I'm not sure I understand the question."

He understood the question perfectly. She could see it in the stillness that came over him, too controlled to be casual, too careful to be nothing. She let it sit unanswered and stood instead, extending her hand to close the meeting on her own terms, before he could steer it anywhere else.

"I'll need the offer in writing. Full scope, full authority, no surprises."

"You'll have it tonight." He took her hand again, and this time she felt his grip tighten a fraction before he let go, like letting go cost him something he hadn't planned on it costing. "Welcome to Vaultbreaker, Ms. Vasser."

She walked out with the job, and the growing certainty that she'd just agreed to work for the one man who might already know exactly what happened to her three months ago. Some part of her recognized him, even without a face to put to it, and that recognition had nothing to do with any case file, and everything to do with something she couldn't yet let herself believe.

Behind her, alone in his office, Casimir Reyvahl picked up the cufflink from his desk and closed his hand around it, exhaling slowly for the first time since she'd walked in.

Three years of planning, and she'd almost caught him in the very first meeting.