He's Getting Under My Skin
849 Words
Chapter 15
(Sophia's POV)
Common enemy.
I'd said it plainly in the back of Dax's car and Xander had confirmed it without hesitation. Those two words had quietly dismantled something I'd been holding onto for fifteen years.
The clean simplicity of my hatred.
It was considerably harder to hate a man who was handing you evidence against the person who'd actually destroyed your family.
I was finding that out the inconvenient way.
Izzy was waiting in my office at eight-fifteen with coffee, croissants and the expression of someone who had opinions she'd been saving up overnight.
"The Beaumont dinner photographs are already circulating," she said, sliding her tablet across the desk. "Someone in the building had a camera. You look..." she paused, selecting her word carefully, "...natural together."
I looked at the photograph.
Xander and I leaving the building side by side, his hand at my lower back, my face turned slightly toward him mid-conversation. We looked like people who belonged in the same orbit.
"It's called acting," I said.
Izzy said nothing.
Which was somehow louder than if she had.
The morning moved efficiently. Design approvals for the autumn collection. A call with the Paris atelier about fabric delays. A thirty-minute meeting with Claire about the restructured financials we were quietly arranging for Theo Grant's inevitable review.
Claire had the documents ready, clean, strategic, every number technically accurate and deliberately arranged to show exactly what we wanted Victor's loyalist to carry back.
"If Grant pulls the thread we've left him," Claire said, "he'll spend three weeks following it to nowhere."
"Good," I said. "Make sure the trail is convincing enough that he doesn't question it."
Claire gave me the look she reserved for moments when she thought I was underestimating her.
"Sophia," she said flatly. "I've been doing this since before you could read a balance sheet."
Fair enough.
Xander texted at noon.
"Grant submitted a formal data request this morning. Richard is managing the response. Your documents need to be accessible by Thursday.''
I forwarded Claire's confirmation without commentary.
His reply was immediate: "Efficient."
One word. And yet somehow I read the entire thing three times.
That was a problem I was choosing not to examine directly.
He came to Laurent Luxe at two.
Not announced. Not performed. He walked into my office like a man who'd decided the layout of whose building they were in was irrelevant and settled into the chair across from my desk with a Laurent Luxe financial report he'd apparently already read.
I looked up from my own work.
"You could have called," I said.
"I was in the building." He turned a page. "The Elysium Tower contractors want a joint statement by Friday. Something that positions the merger as a strategic strength rather than a defensive maneuver."
"It was a defensive maneuver," I said.
"The public doesn't need to know that," he responded.
I leaned back in my chair and studied him.
Dark suit today, no tie, reading my company's financials with the focused ease of someone completely at home in rooms that didn't belong to them. The afternoon light came through the office windows and caught the grey of his eyes, making them look almost silver.
I looked away.
"How did your father actually die?" I asked.
The question came out before I'd fully decided to ask it.
He looked up slowly.
"Heart failure," he said. "Eight months ago."
"Was it natural?"
A pause.
Longer than it should have been for a straightforward answer.
"The official cause was natural," he said carefully.
The distinction landed quietly between us.
"Victor," I said.
He didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either. He simply held my gaze with an expression that said the question wasn't yet fully answerable but that I wasn't wrong to ask it.
I thought about Henri Laurent dying on courthouse steps.
About Reginald Voss dying of heart failure eight months ago.
About Victor still standing, immaculate and strategic, at the center of both.
"He removes people when they stop being useful," I said.
"Or when they start developing a conscience," Xander replied quietly.
The words carried weight he hadn't intended to show.
I filed it carefully, not to use against him, which would have been my instinct six weeks ago. But because it mattered. Because it told me something real about what Xander Voss was carrying underneath the ruthless, controlled exterior he showed every room he entered.
His father.
His inheritance.
A legacy built on someone else's destruction that he hadn't chosen and was only now beginning to fully see.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He looked at me. "For what?"
"For whatever it cost you to start pulling those files."
Silence.
He looked back down at the report in his hands.
But not before I saw something move across his face that he hadn't managed to contain in time.
Raw, Unguarded and Gone in an instant.
He was getting under my skin.
I could feel it happening and I had absolutely no remaining architecture to stop it.
The wall wasn't just cracking anymore.
It was losing entire sections.
- Writer
