Chapter 15 — Market Share
1209 Words
POV: Seraphina Vale
Present Day — The Meridian Convention Center, one week later
The press release went out at nine in the morning. By nine-fifteen, my phone hadn't stopped ringing.
Vale Industries had just signed a five-year exclusive contract with Solvane Automation — the same client Blackwood Industries lost eighteen months ago, the one I still remembered Adrian mentioning to his lawyer in that hospital hallway like a wound he hadn't let heal. I hadn't gone after them out of nostalgia. I'd gone after them because they were the best automation firm in the region, and because taking them fully, permanently, off Blackwood's table felt like exactly the kind of quiet, devastating math I'd built an entire company to be good at.
I stood at a podium at ten that morning in front of forty reporters and told them, in the calmest voice I owned, that Vale Industries intended to become the design and automation partner of record for half the firms currently locked into outdated contracts with legacy providers.
Nobody asked me to name the legacy provider. Everybody in that room already knew.
"Bold claim," one reporter said, "given Blackwood Industries has held that automation contract space for over a decade."
"Held it," I agreed. "Past tense seems to be doing a lot of work in your question already."
Laughter rippled through the room. Another reporter, undeterred, tried again. "Some are calling this personal, given your history with the Blackwood family. Care to comment?"
"I'd call it good business. Blackwood Industries built an excellent legacy system a decade ago and then stopped updating it. That's not personal. That's a company resting on its name instead of its product."
"And if Adrian Blackwood responds publicly?"
"Then I imagine we'll both be very busy," I said, and let the room laugh again before moving to the next question, before anyone had time to turn it into a headline that made me look cruel instead of simply accurate.
A junior reporter near the back, younger than the rest, raised her hand almost apologetically. "What would you say to critics who think you built Vale Industries specifically to hurt him?"
"I built Vale Industries to survive him," I said. "Hurting him was never the goal. It's simply been an unusually satisfying byproduct."
That one, I noticed, made it into three separate headlines by lunch.
By noon, Blackwood Industries stock had dropped four points. By two, I had three more meeting requests from firms who'd apparently decided watching a giant flinch was reason enough to consider switching partners. By four, a business analyst on a cable segment I refused to admit I'd watched twice was calling it "the most aggressive market maneuver Meridian City has seen in a decade," which felt, if I was honest, like an understatement.
Patrice called around three, business as usual, but I could hear something almost like admiration under her flat legal tone. "You do understand you just picked a very public fight with the father of your children."
"Allegedly not the father, according to a certified lab report."
"Right. That." A pause, weighted. "You know I don't ask questions I don't want honest answers to. But if there's ever a version of this where the paperwork stops matching reality, I'd prefer to hear it from you before I hear it from a courtroom."
"Noted."
Neither of us said anything else about it. We both understood, by then, exactly how much weight that piece of paper was actually carrying, and exactly how little either of us trusted it to hold.
I hadn't told her about Alex. I hadn't told anyone. The lie sat where I'd left it, quiet and useful, doing exactly the job I'd let it do.
My assistant found me in my office a little after five, unusually flustered. "Blackwood Industries just announced they're hosting the keynote at next month's Meridian Tech Summit."
"That's not unusual. They host it every year."
"They've added you to the speaker list. As a rebuttal panel, apparently. Same stage, same night." She hesitated. "It's already trending.
Someone's calling it 'the reunion tour.'"
"Charming."
"Do you want me to decline?"
I sat with that for a moment, turning it over. It was, I understood immediately, exactly the kind of move Adrian would make — public, deliberate, forcing me into a room I couldn't gracefully avoid, because avoiding it would look like weakness in front of every investor who mattered in this city. He'd learned that particular lesson from me, whether he realized it or not. I'd built half my empire on refusing to let anyone see me flinch first.
"Confirm my attendance," I said.
"You're going to be on a stage with him. In front of everyone."
"I'm aware."
"Are you sure that's wise?"
I thought about the restaurant. I thought about the boardroom, and the hospital hallway, and every room I'd stood in with Adrian Blackwood since the night I came back to this city, each one somehow leaving me more unsettled than the last, in ways I hadn't fully let myself examine.
"No," I said honestly. "But I'm not going to let him think I'm afraid of a stage."
She left with a look I couldn't quite read, somewhere between concern and reluctant respect, and closed the door behind her.
That night, after the twins were asleep, I sat alone in my kitchen with a glass of wine and the press coverage still scrolling past on my phone — my face next to his, side by side, two rival CEOs the business press had already started calling "Meridian's most expensive divorce." I should have felt triumphant. I'd landed exactly the blow I'd spent five years planning to land.
Instead I found myself thinking about the way he'd looked at me outside that restaurant, furious and unguarded, jealous over a man he had no right to be jealous of. I thought about Julian's steady, uncomplicated warmth, and how easy it would be to simply choose that instead — the safe option, the kind one, the man who had never once made my chest tighten the way a single unguarded look from his brother still could.
Alex wandered into the kitchen around eleven, unable to sleep, and climbed onto the chair beside me without asking permission, the way he always did when something was bothering him and he wasn't ready to say what.
"You beat him today," he said. "The stock thing. I saw it on your phone earlier."
"I did."
"Are you happy about it?"
I considered the question more seriously than a five-year-old probably intended it. "I think so."
"You don't sound sure."
"I'm working on it." I brushed his hair back from his forehead, still faintly marked from where the ice pack had sat weeks ago. "Go back to bed. You have school."
He went, eventually, and left me alone with a glass of wine gone warm and a phone still lit up with headlines I'd spent years wanting to read.
I finished the wine and told myself, without much conviction, that the summit was purely business.
I was becoming very good, I noticed, at telling myself things I no longer entirely believed. It seemed to be something of an epidemic lately, among everyone connected to that family.
- Writer
