THE DEVIL I LOVE

Chapter Nine — His Side of the Wall

Damien Voss did not talk about his personal life.

This was not unusual in his world — men in his position kept their private selves carefully separated from their professional ones, understanding that vulnerability was a language that translated easily into leverage. He had learned this early, from a father who treated warmth as weakness and from a business environment that confirmed the lesson at every turn.

His closest friend — if the word applied — was Ronan Cole, who had been with him since university and now served as his Head of Strategy. Ronan was sharp, loyal, and perceptive enough to be occasionally inconvenient.

"You've been distracted," Ronan said on Thursday morning, dropping a file on Damien's desk without ceremony.

Damien didn't look up from his screen. "I'm in the middle of a seven-figure acquisition."

"You're always in the middle of something seven-figure. You're never distracted." Ronan sat down across from him uninvited. "What's going on?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"Everything that affects your focus concerns me." A pause. "Is it the Sinclair situation?"

Damien looked up then. "What about the Sinclair situation?"

Ronan studied him with the particular attention of someone who had known him long enough to read what wasn't being said. "The board is expecting you to move on Meridian by end of quarter. That positions you perfectly against Sinclair's holdings by Q1 next year." He paused. "It's what we planned."

"I know what we planned."

"Then why do you look like a man reconsidering the plan?"

Damien leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Outside his floor-to-ceiling office windows the city moved through its morning, enormous and indifferent.

He thought about a gallery on a Tuesday afternoon. Blue paint and a thread of gold.

"The plan stands," he said. "Get the Meridian documents finalized by Friday."

Ronan watched him for a moment, then nodded and stood. At the door he paused.

"Whatever it is," he said, without turning, "just make sure it doesn't cost you more than you're willing to pay."

Damien said nothing.

After Ronan left, he sat alone in the quiet of his office and turned his phone over in his hands. Aria's last message was still on the screen — something about a bookshop, about things worth looking for. He had read it four times since she sent it.

He understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had spent years being strategic about everything, that what was happening between him and Aria Sinclair was the single most strategically indefensible decision he had ever allowed himself.

His father would call it catastrophic.

The plan he had spent two years building would call it a liability.

He looked at her message one more time.

He typed: Free Saturday morning?

He sent it before the part of his brain that had built an empire could weigh in.

Her reply came within minutes: I can be.

He set the phone down and looked out at the city and felt, beneath the complexity of everything he knew was coming, something uncomplicated and quiet that he hadn't felt in longer than he could remember.

It scared him more than any business rival ever had.

That probably meant something.

He chose, for now, not to examine what.