Bound By The Billionaire’s Rules

Isolde

The name arrived before the woman did, the way storms sometimes announce themselves in the pressure of the air before the first drop falls.

“Isolde Beaumont is coming to dinner tonight,” Noemi said, appearing in Sera’s doorway with a garment bag and an expression Sera had learned to read as trouble. “Which means we need to talk about what you’re wearing, and also possibly your general emotional preparedness.”

“Who’s Isolde Beaumont?”

Noemi’s laugh had no humor in it. “Depends who you ask. Ask her, she’ll tell you she’s Caius’s future wife. Ask Caius, and he’ll tell you nothing at all, which honestly tells you more than an answer would.”

“They’re engaged?”

“They were, once, briefly, years ago. Some arrangement between their families, old money doing what old money does.” Noemi hung the garment bag on the closet door and unzipped it to reveal a deep emerald dress, simple and severe in a way Sera suspected was deliberate. “It ended. Isolde’s version of ended is different from everyone else’s version, though. She’s decided the engagement is merely paused, not over, and she’s been unpausing it by force of will for about six years now.”

“And Caius allows this?”

“Caius doesn’t allow anything. Isolde simply doesn’t ask.” Noemi smoothed the dress with careful hands. “Her family’s worth eleven billion. Beaumont Holdings, mostly shipping and real estate, some overlap with Vale Dominion’s own shipping division. If they merged, it would be the largest private consolidation in the industry’s history. That’s the version everyone at these dinners pretends to care about.”

“And the version you actually care about?”

Noemi met her eyes in the mirror. “She’s dangerous, Sera. Not in a dramatic, movie villain way. In a quiet way. She’s very beautiful, and very patient, and she has never once, in six years, accepted that Caius doesn’t want her. People who don’t accept reality tend to try to reshape it instead. Be careful tonight. Say very little. Watch everything.”

Sera wore the emerald dress and felt, walking down the staircase that evening, more like armor than fabric, which she suspected had been exactly Noemi’s intention.

Caius was waiting at the base of the stairs, and something in his expression, when he looked up and saw her, made her steps falter slightly. He didn’t say anything about the dress. He didn’t need to. The way his jaw tightened, the way his eyes lingered a fraction too long before he composed himself, told her everything Noemi’s careful styling had been aiming for.

“You look ready for battle,” he said quietly, offering his arm.

“Isn’t that the point of tonight?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Something almost like an apology crossed his face. “I would spare you this if I could. Isolde does not make dinners easy for anyone she considers competition.”

“I’m not competition. I’m your employee.”

“Isolde has never been able to tell the difference between the two, where I’m concerned.” He led her toward the dining room, and Sera felt the weight of the evening ahead settle heavier with every step.

Isolde Beaumont was already seated when Sera entered the dining room, and Noemi’s warning proved, if anything, understated. She was beautiful in the specific, engineered way of someone who had spent a fortune making beauty look effortless, pale hair swept into a knot that showed off a long throat wrapped in emeralds that made Sera’s dress look like a costume by comparison. Her eyes found Sera the moment she entered, and did not warm.

“You must be the new hire,” Isolde said, before Caius could make introductions, her voice pitched exactly between polite and dismissive. “Caius mentioned he’d brought someone new into the house. I confess I expected someone more, how shall I put this, established.”

“Seraphina Ashcroft,” Sera said, taking her seat with a composure she didn’t entirely feel. “I’m a chemist.”

“How practical.” Isolde’s smile was flawless and entirely without warmth. “Caius does love practical things. Efficient. Useful. Disposable when their usefulness ends.” She turned to Caius, her hand finding his forearm with an ease that suggested long practice, or the assumption of a right no one had actually granted her. “Darling, I heard about the Roth situation. How clever of you to catch it in time.”

“It wasn’t me who caught it,” Caius said, and Sera felt rather than saw his gaze flick briefly toward her.

Something shifted in Isolde’s expression, fast and cold, gone before it fully surfaced. “Oh?”

“Miss Ashcroft has a talent for chemistry,” Caius said simply, and returned to his plate, as though he hadn’t just handed Isolde Beaumont a reason to look at Sera the way one looks at a weed suddenly discovered growing in a carefully tended garden.

The rest of dinner proceeded like a chess match Sera hadn’t agreed to play. Isolde asked pointed questions about Sera’s background, her family, her finances, each one delivered with a smile that made the interrogation sound like polite interest, and each one designed, Sera realized, to establish precisely how little she belonged in this house.

“And your father,” Isolde said, near the end of the meal, swirling wine with a lazy, deliberate elegance. “What did he do, before?”

The question landed harder than Isolde could have intended, or perhaps exactly as hard as she’d intended, Sera couldn’t tell which. “He passed away. When I was ten.”

“I’m so sorry.” Isolde didn’t sound sorry. “What did he do, before that?”

“I don’t actually know,” Sera admitted, and hated how small the admission felt at this table, surrounded by people who seemed to know everything about everyone. “He worked in research. My mother’s never talked much about the specifics.”

Something crossed Caius’s face at that, so brief Sera nearly missed it, a stillness that went beyond his usual composure into something closer to shock, quickly smoothed away. He said nothing, but his eyes stayed on her a beat longer than the moment required, and Sera filed the reaction away alongside every other unexplained thing in this house.

Isolde, apparently satisfied with whatever conclusion she’d drawn, changed the subject to the upcoming Meridian Gala, an event Sera gathered was significant enough that its mere mention made Edmund, hovering near the sideboard, straighten slightly.

“You’ll attend, of course,” Isolde said to Caius, not quite a question. “As always.”

“As always,” he agreed, noncommittal in a way that seemed to satisfy her regardless.

“Wonderful. I’ll have my people coordinate with yours.” Isolde’s gaze slid back to Sera, assessing, calculating. “Will your new hire be attending as well?”

“Miss Ashcroft attends what I require her to attend,” Caius said, which was not, Sera noticed, actually an answer.

Isolde smiled, slow and satisfied, as though she’d gotten exactly the confirmation she wanted regardless of the words used to deliver it. “How lovely. I do enjoy meeting Caius’s staff.”

The word landed with surgical precision, and Sera understood, watching Isolde’s manicured hand tighten fractionally on the stem of her wineglass, that whatever role Sera occupied in this house, Isolde Beaumont had already decided it was one she intended to eliminate.

Later, after Isolde’s car had pulled away down the long drive, Sera found Caius alone in the study, tie loosened, the exhaustion she’d glimpsed once before written plainly across his face now that no one else remained to witness it.

“She doesn’t like me,” Sera said, leaning in the doorway.

“Isolde doesn’t like anyone who isn’t useful to her.” Caius didn’t look up from the papers he wasn’t reading. “You survived dinner. That’s more than most manage.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s an observation.” He finally looked up, and something in his expression, tired and unguarded in a way she hadn’t seen before, made her chest tighten unexpectedly. “Be careful of her, Seraphina. She has ruined people for less than existing in a room she considers hers.”

“Is this room hers?”

“No,” he said, quiet and certain, and something about the way he said it, simple and immediate, without the usual careful distance, made Sera’s pulse quicken in a way she didn’t examine too closely as she said goodnight and left him alone with his unread papers.