Shattered crown

Chapter Two

The Man at the End of the Table

The Ashworth Group's New York offices smelled like money and ambition and fresh paint, which was fitting, because they were in the middle of a complete interior renovation and that was precisely why I was here.

I walked in with Marcus two steps behind me close enough that I could feel him radiating the particular energy he reserved for high-stakes situations, which was something between barely contained excitement and barely contained terror.

"You look like you're going to a funeral,"

he murmured as the elevator doors closed.

"I look professional."

"You look like professional armour. There's a difference. Soften the jaw, Aria. You're there to charm them, not outlast them."

"I'm there to win the contract."

"Same thing. Smile."

"Marcus."

"Just your mouth. You don't have to mean it."

I turned to look at him and he was already grinning that wide, ridiculous grin that had irritated me for the first six months of knowing him and then become one of my favourite things in the world. He had been with me through all of it. The pregnancy, the first lease, the first client, the first time Isla called him Uncle Marc and he'd had to pretend something had gone in his eye.

He was the only person alive who knew everything.

"Ready?"

"I've been ready for five years,"

I said, and I meant it as bravado, but it came out sounding like the truth.

The boardroom was on the forty-second floor. Floor-to-ceiling glass, Manhattan spread out below like an architect's rendering of itself, all clean lines and impossible scale. There were four people already seated around the table two I recognised from the briefing documents, two I didn't.

And then the door at the far end of the room opened.

I heard him before I saw him the particular cadence of that voice, low and unhurried, the kind of voice that assumed rooms would rearrange themselves around it, because they always had.

He was saying something to the man behind him, something about the structural report. He had a folder in one hand. He was wearing a dark suit, no tie, sleeves still buttoned but already I could see the shape of him and my body remembered before my mind had caught up the way physics is faster than thought, the way you flinch before you know you're afraid.

He looked up.

Dominic Ashworth, at thirty-four, was more devastating than he had been at twenty-nine. Time had done something unfair to him. It had stripped away whatever softness he'd once carried and replaced it with something harder and more deliberate, like a building that has been properly finished all the scaffolding gone, nothing left to hide.

He saw me.

I watched it happen. The recognition. The way his whole body stilled, mid-step, mid-sentence, like a clock that has abruptly stopped and then the careful, controlled re-assembly, the way he gathered himself back up in the space of two seconds. If I hadn't spent three years learning the geography of his expressions, I would have missed it entirely.

My presentation notes were in my hand. I felt them slip.

Marcus caught them before they hit the floor. He pressed them back into my fingers without a word, without looking at me. I loved him fiercely for that.

Dominic crossed the room. Unhurried. Deliberate. Every step measured in the way of someone who has learned that the approach is its own form of power.

He stopped two feet from me.

Up close, he was worse. He smelled the same something clean and expensive that I had apparently stored so deep in my memory it had calcified there and his eyes were exactly the colour they had always been and I hated myself for noticing.

"Ms. Voss."

Not Aria. Ms. Voss. A deliberate choice, that distance.

"Mr. Ashworth,"

I said, and my voice came out clean and level, which was nothing short of miraculous.

"I wasn't aware Voss Studio was submitting a pitch."

"We were added to the shortlist eight weeks ago. It would have been in your briefing materials."

Something moved across his face. Not quite amusing. Not quite painful. Something that had no clean name.

"It seems I missed that detail."

"It happens,"

I said pleasantly. I sat down, opened my portfolio, and looked at the men across the table as though Dominic Ashworth were simply part of the furniture.

Marcus sat beside me. Under the table, he pressed his knee briefly against mine.

You've got this,

the pressure said.

Don't you dare fall apart.

I didn't.

I gave the best pitch of my life. Forty-five minutes. I walked them through the full vision for the Ashworth New York flagship a reimagining that kept the bones of the original Beaux-Arts structure while pulling it entirely into the present, all clean geometry and warm materials, nothing sterile, nothing cold. I talked about light. I talked about the way a building makes people feel before they understand why. I talked about legacy.

I did not look at Dominic once.

I knew he was looking at me. I felt it the way you feel weather not with any one sense, but with the whole surface of your skin.

When I finished, the room was quiet for a beat.

Then the CFO said, "That's the most coherent vision we've seen for this space. In six pitches."

I smiled. The smile I meant.

"When can you begin?"

I looked at Dominic then. Just once. Just long enough.

"Immediately,"

I said.

He held my gaze for exactly three seconds. Then he looked down at the folder in front of him.

"Good,"

he said. "Welcome to the project."

I did not exhale until I was in the elevator.

Marcus waited until the doors closed, then turned to me with an expression that could only be described as barely functional.

"That was him. That was him, wasn't it. Aria. Tell me that was not…"

"Not here,"

I said.

"We are going to need an enormous amount of coffee.."

"Marcus."

"and possibly something stronger"

"Marcus."

He stopped. He looked at me. At the careful, brittle composure I was holding together with both hands.

"Okay,"

he said quietly. "Okay. We'll talk later."

The elevator opened onto the lobby. Manhattan streamed past the glass doors. Bright, indifferent, enormous.

I had the contract. I had walked back into the orbit of the man who had broken me, and I had been brilliant, and I had won.

Now all I have to do,

I thought, pushing through the doors into the noise of the city,

survives him.