Inheritance Clause

Chapter Five

Julian Cross picked a restaurant with a view, because of course he did.

Ines arrived exactly on time, which felt like the only piece of armor she had left after a week that had refused to make sense in any direction. She’d told Priya where she was going. She’d told Sofia, too, mostly because Sofia had threatened to have her tracked by satellite if she didn’t. Neither of them liked it. Neither of them had a better idea.

Julian stood when she approached the table, which she noted, filed away the way she filed everything lately — not as charm, necessarily, but as data. He had the Cross bone structure, the same sharp jaw as his mother, softened by something easier in his eyes that Vivienne had never once let show in public.

“You came,” he said. “I half expected a lawyer-shaped excuse text an hour before.”

“I’m good at excuses when I want to use one.” She sat. “I didn’t want to use one tonight.”

“High praise.” He smiled, easy, unbothered, and signaled the waiter without looking away from her. “Wine, or are we keeping this purely professional?”

“Depends what this turns out to be.”

“Fair.” He ordered for both of them anyway, something she let slide only because she was curious what he’d pick. “I heard you’re back at Caldwell Tower. Divorce lawyer, no less. That’s either extremely brave or extremely petty, and I respect both options equally.”

“I didn’t choose the assignment. My firm did.”

“Convenient. Very deniable.” His eyes flicked over her face, warm, assessing in a way that didn’t feel dangerous so much as familiar — the particular attention of a man used to being underestimated because he’d never had to try very hard for anything. “Damian tell you I’m awful yet? He usually leads with that.”

“He said you’re not as simple as you look.”

“That’s Damian’s version of a compliment.” Julian laughed, and it sounded real, which unsettled her more than if it hadn’t. “He’s not wrong, for what it’s worth. Neither of us grew up simple in that family. You don’t get that luxury when your mother’s Vivienne Cross.”

Ines watched him carefully over the rim of her water glass. “What’s it like? Growing up in that house.”

“Competitive in ways that would sound insane if I described them out loud at a normal dinner table. My mother doesn’t believe in unstructured affection. Everything’s a transaction, even the nice parts.” Something flickered behind his easy expression — quick, then gone, the way Damian’s had in his office, and Ines felt her stomach drop slightly at the resemblance. “I used to think Damian had it easier, being the direct heir. Took me a long time to realize he just had a different, quieter version of the same weight on him.”

“You sound like you feel sorry for him.”

“I feel sorry for both of us, honestly. Just in different amounts on different days.” He leaned back as the wine arrived, waited until the waiter had gone. “Can I be blunt with you, since you clearly appreciate bluntness?”

“Please.”

“I don’t actually know what happened between you and Damian three years ago. I was overseas for most of it, and my mother’s version of the story changes slightly depending on who’s asking and why. But I know enough about how that family handles things to guess it’s not as simple as he got cold feet.”

Ines held very still. “Why would you say that?”

“Because nothing in that family is ever as simple as it looks from the outside. You’d know that better than anyone by now.” He studied her a beat too long. “You didn’t come here tonight to have a nice dinner, did you. You came here to figure out whether I’m dangerous.”

The bluntness of it caught her off guard enough that she didn’t immediately deny it, and his smile shifted slightly, less easy now, more careful, like he’d learned something from her silence he hadn’t fully expected to learn.

“I came here,” she said finally, choosing the words the way she chose them in depositions, “because you reached out, and I’m trying to understand a family I apparently never understood in the first place.”

“That’s a very lawyer answer.”

“I am a lawyer.”

“Fair enough.” He turned his glass slowly on the tablecloth, not drinking from it. “For what it’s worth — and I know this isn’t worth much, coming from someone you’ve known for exactly forty minutes — whatever my mother’s involved in, I’m not automatically part of it just because I share her last name. I’ve spent a long time trying to be the version of this family that doesn’t need watching.”

“Everyone says that about themselves. It doesn’t mean much until it’s tested.”

“No,” he agreed, quiet now, something more serious surfacing under the charm. “It doesn’t. I know that.”

They talked for another hour about smaller things — his time overseas, a gallery he was thinking of investing in, nothing that mattered, the kind of conversation designed specifically to lower a guard rather than raise one. And it worked, a little, despite everything she knew, despite the folder sitting in her bag with his mother’s name written across it in Marcus’s careful handwriting. That was the unsettling part. Not that Julian was obviously dangerous. That he wasn’t, and that the not-obviousness was exactly the kind of thing Damian had warned her about.

When the check came, he reached for it before she could argue.

“Let me guess,” he said, sliding his card across without looking at the total. “Damian already told you not to trust me.”

“Something like that.”

“And what do you think?”

Ines considered the question longer than she meant to, aware of him watching her think about it, aware that whatever she said next would matter more than she wanted it to. “I think I don’t know you well enough yet to trust or not trust you. I think that’s probably the most honest answer I have.”

“I can work with that.” He smiled again, softer this time, less performance in it. “Same time next week?”

She should have said no. She thought about the folder, about Marcus’s warning, about Damian’s face when he’d said you don’t go near him without me knowing — and some contrary, exhausted part of her, tired of being managed by every man in this story, decided she wanted to find out the truth about Julian Cross on her own terms, not Damian’s.

“Same time next week,” she said.

Outside, the night had turned cold enough that her breath showed in the streetlight, and as she walked toward the corner to catch a cab, her phone buzzed once in her coat pocket. Damian.

How was dinner.

Not a question. A statement dressed up as one, the kind he used to make when he already knew the answer and wanted to hear how she’d phrase it. She stood on the corner a long moment, thumb hovering, deciding exactly how much of the truth she owed a man she was supposedly divorcing.

Fine, she typed back finally. He’s not what you think.

The reply came almost instantly, three dots appearing and disappearing twice before the message finally landed.

He never is. That’s the problem.

She put the phone away without answering and got into the cab, watching the city blur past the window, aware for the first time in three years that she had absolutely no idea which of the Cross men she should actually be afraid of.