The Merger

Chapter Two: Old Ghosts

Elena didn't text Sebastian back that night. She told herself it was strategy — let him wait, the way she'd learned to make everyone wait since the Ashcombe deal taught her that eagerness was a weakness men like the Wolfes knew how to use. The truth was closer to fear. Whatever Sebastian wanted to tell her, she wasn't sure she wanted six months of proximity to Damian Wolfe complicated by it before she'd even signed the paperwork.

She lasted eleven hours.

Coffee. Tomorrow. Somewhere public, she typed, and hit send before she could talk herself out of it.

Sebastian chose a café two blocks from Wolfe Tower, which struck Elena as either careless or deliberate, and knowing him, it was probably the second. He looked older than she remembered — not in a bad way, just settled, the restless edge she used to know worn down into something quieter. He stood when she arrived, which was more courtesy than she'd expected from a man who'd once let an entire year go by without a word.

"You look good," he said. "Successful. It suits you."

"You look like a man who texted me out of nowhere to warn me off a business deal." Elena didn't sit yet. "Start talking, Sebastian."

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "It's not that simple."

"It rarely is with your family."

"That's fair." He gestured to the chair across from him, and after a moment, she took it. "Look — I'm not here to sabotage anything. I don't even want anything from this, which I know sounds hard to believe given how we left things. I just think you deserve to know what you're walking into before you're in too deep to walk back out."

"Then walk me into it."

Sebastian turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, a habit she remembered from years ago, the tell he'd never quite shaken. "Three years ago. Ashcombe. You think Damian outbid you because he wanted the tower."

"He did want the tower."

"He wanted you to lose it." Sebastian said it plainly, watching her face. "There's a difference. Damian's board found out your father's firm was two months from insolvency before you ever walked into that bidding room. Cross Architecture wasn't losing that contract to a better bid, Elena. It was losing it because Damian made sure the numbers worked out that way — to protect Halden from signing with a firm that might not survive the year."

The café noise seemed to recede. "That's not—" she started, and stopped, because some small, cold part of her was already doing the math, already remembering how close the firm actually had come to folding that year, a fact she'd told almost no one. "How would you even know that."

"Because I was the one who found the insolvency filing. I handed it to him myself." Sebastian's jaw tightened. "I thought I was helping protect a client relationship. I didn't know what he'd do with it until it was already done. That's part of why we stopped speaking, if you're wondering. I didn't like the man he became during that deal. I'm not sure I like him now, either, and he's about to have you in a room with him five days a week for six months."

Elena sat back, her coffee untouched, her pulse loud in her own ears. Three years of believing she'd simply lost — outmaneuvered, outbid, out-negotiated by a better business mind — and now the ground underneath that story was shifting into something far uglier. Not a loss. A mercy she'd never asked for and never would have accepted, dressed up as a defeat so she'd never have to know how close her father's legacy had actually come to collapsing.

"Why didn't you tell me this three years ago?"

"Because I thought it would destroy you faster than losing the tower would," Sebastian said quietly. "I was wrong to make that choice for you. I'm not making it twice."

"And now? Why tell me now, right before I sign a contract to work beside him?"

Sebastian's silence lasted a beat too long, and when he finally answered, it wasn't the answer she expected.

"Because he asked me not to."

Elena went very still. "What?"

"When he found out you were being considered for Aldridge — before Halden was even fully absorbed — he called me. Told me if this ever came up, he wanted to be the one to tell you himself, in his own time. He asked me to stay out of it." Sebastian met her eyes, and for the first time since she'd sat down, he looked almost sorry. "I'm telling you anyway. Because I think you should hear it from someone who doesn't have anything to gain from how you react."

Elena's phone buzzed on the table between them, face-up, impossible to ignore.

Damian Wolfe: Dinner tonight. There's something about Ashcombe I should have told you three years ago. I'd rather you hear it from me before Monday.

She looked up slowly to find Sebastian watching the screen too, his expression unreadable.

"He's already texting you," he said. "That's fast, even for him."

Elena stared at the message, at the careful, deliberate wording of a man who chose his words the way he chose his buildings — for maximum effect, minimum wasted space — and felt the ground shift again, twice in one conversation, in two entirely different directions.

She had no idea, sitting in that café with her coffee going cold, which version of the truth she was more afraid of hearing.

"Are you going to go?" Sebastian asked.

"Would you?"

"Honestly?" He gave a short, humorless laugh, an echo of the one she'd given Priya the day before. "I'd want to know. Even if I hated the answer. Especially if I hated the answer."

Elena turned the phone face-down, as if that might buy her a few more minutes before she had to decide anything. "You realize what you've just done, don't you? You've made it impossible for me to hear whatever he says tonight without wondering if it's the truth, or just the version of the truth he thinks will make me forgive him faster."

"I know." Sebastian didn't look proud of it. "I told you — I'm not doing you any favors here. I just didn't think you deserved to walk into that dinner blind, the way you walked into that boardroom three years ago."

She almost thanked him for that. She didn't, because gratitude felt like the wrong shape for what she was actually feeling, which was something closer to fury — at Damian, for a lie three years deep; at Sebastian, for waiting this long and then choosing tonight of all nights to unravel it; at herself, most of all, for the small, humiliating fact that underneath the anger, she still wanted to go to that dinner.

She wanted to hear him say it.

Elena stood, leaving her coffee untouched, and slid her phone into her bag before Sebastian could see the reply she hadn't sent yet.

"Thank you," she said, and meant at least part of it. "For telling me. Even if I wish you'd done it differently."

"For what it's worth," Sebastian said as she turned to go, "I hope whatever he says tonight is enough. For your sake. Not his."

She didn't answer. She was already three steps toward the door, already typing a single word back to the message burning a hole in her bag.

Fine.

She hit send before she could change her mind, and told herself the unsteady drop in her stomach was dread, and nothing else at all.