The Merger

Chapter Two: Old Ghosts

There are things about Damian you deserve to know.

Elena stared at the text for eleven hours before she answered it, and even then, she only sent one word.

Where.

Sebastian picked a café two blocks from Wolfe Tower — careless or deliberate, and knowing the Wolfes, probably the second. He looked older than she remembered, the restless edge she used to know worn down into something quieter. He stood when she arrived.

"You look successful," he said. "It suits you."

"You look like a man who texted me out of nowhere to warn me off a business deal. Talk."

"Three years ago. Ashcombe." Sebastian turned his coffee cup a quarter turn — a tell she remembered. "You think Damian outbid you because he wanted the tower. He wanted you to lose it. There's a difference."

"He wanted the project. He told me that himself, an hour ago."

"Did he tell you why?" Sebastian's jaw tightened. "Your father's firm was two months from insolvency. I found the filing. I handed it to Damian myself, thinking I was protecting a client relationship. I didn't know what he'd do with it until it was already done."

The café noise seemed to recede. Elena's own firm's near-collapse that year was a fact she'd told almost no one — and now a stranger across a table was reciting it back to her like gospel.

"So it's true. All of it."

"It's true. What he hasn't told you is that he called me the moment your firm came up for Aldridge, and asked me to stay out of it. Told me he wanted to tell you himself, in his own time." Sebastian met her eyes. "I'm telling you anyway. Because I don't have anything to gain from how you react, and I think you deserve that, at least once, from someone in this family."

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

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

Sebastian read it upside down without apology. "That's fast. Even for him."

"Are you going to tell me not to go?"

"I'm going to tell you I'd want to know. Even if I hated the answer." He pushed his cup aside. "Especially if I hated the answer."

Elena stood, sliding her phone into her bag before he could see what she typed next.

Fine.

One word, sent before she could talk herself out of it — and the unsteady drop in her stomach, she told herself, was dread. Only dread. Nothing else at all.

She was three steps from the door when Sebastian said one more thing to her back.

"For what it's worth — I hope whatever he tells you tonight is enough. For your sake. Not his."

She didn't answer. She didn't trust herself to.

Priya was waiting at the corner with two coffees, and one look at Elena's face told her everything before Elena said a word.

"That bad?"

"We got Aldridge Riverside."

Priya's jaw dropped — then narrowed, fast, reading the rest of it in Elena's expression. "With him. The Ashcombe him."

"The Ashcombe him."

"And you said yes?"

"I said yes to the project." Elena took her coffee like a shield. "Not to him."

"Sure," Priya said, in the tone of someone who did not believe that distinction for one second and intended to bring it up again, probably often, possibly at her own wedding someday out of spite. "So what's the play? You're having dinner with a man who apparently sabotaged your firm on purpose?"

"I'm having dinner with a man who's about to explain himself. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

Elena didn't answer, because she genuinely didn't know — and that uncertainty followed her the entire drive home, sat with her through a shower and a change of clothes she second-guessed twice, and was still sitting in her chest, unresolved, when she pulled up outside the restaurant that night and saw Damian already waiting at the door.