The Merger

My Place

He knocked eleven minutes later, which meant he'd been driving before she'd even hit send.

Elena opened the door with her father's letter still creased in her back pocket, and for a moment neither of them said anything — just stood there, the hallway light throwing shadows across a face she'd spent a week learning to distrust and one night failing at it completely.

"You read it," Damian said. Not a question. He could see it in her face.

"I read it."

"And?"

"And I don't know what I'm supposed to do with a dead man's blessing for a relationship I haven't even decided I'm having."

Something flickered across his face — hope, quickly buried under caution, like a man who'd learned not to trust good news. "What did he say?"

"That you're not your father. That legacy is what you build after, not what was taken." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it. "He knew, Damian. Somehow, from four years in the ground, he already knew this would happen."

Damian stepped inside without being asked, closing the door behind him with a quiet click that felt, in the small space of her apartment, unbearably loud.

"I need you to know something," he said. "Whatever happens with the leak, with the board, with all of it — none of that is why I'm standing in your doorway right now."

"Then why are you?"

"Because I've spent a week trying to prove I'm not my father, and I just realized I've been doing it the same way he did everything. Alone. Deciding things without asking." He was close now, close enough that she could hear the change in his breathing. "So I'm asking. Elena — can I kiss you?"

She didn't answer with words.

Her hands found his collar before her mind caught up to the decision, and when his mouth finally met hers, it wasn't careful or slow the way she'd imagined it in the parking lot outside the tea room — it was hungry, certain, three years and one very long week collapsing into a single unguarded moment neither of them tried to stop.

He pulled back first, breathless, forehead against hers. "That was supposed to answer a different question."

"Which one?"

"Whether I still have a chance of losing you before Thursday."

Her phone buzzed on the counter behind them — sharp, insistent, breaking the moment before she could answer him.

Priya: Emergency. Turn on the news. Now.