Chapter Six — The Weight of a Name
542 Words
She told no one.
That was the first indication that she already understood, on some deep and instinctive level, that what was happening between her and Damien Voss was not something the world around her would receive with anything other than alarm.
She went about her week normally. Foundation work. Lunch with Lydia. A conference call with her father's legal team that lasted two hours longer than it needed to. She smiled in the right places and said the right things and all the while something quiet and private lived in the back of her mind like a room she kept returning to when no one was watching.
They texted every day.
Nothing dramatic. Small things — observations about their respective days, recommendations exchanged, an argument about whether a particular film was brilliant or overrated that spanned three days and ended in a draw they both refused to concede. It was easy in the way that few things in Aria's life were easy. Natural in the way that even fewer things were.
It frightened her a little.
On Thursday her father called her into his study.
Richard Sinclair's study was a room designed to communicate authority — dark wood, floor-to-ceiling shelves, a desk that belonged in a museum. He was standing when she entered, looking out the window with his hands clasped behind his back.
"Close the door," he said.
She did.
"I had an interesting conversation with an associate this morning," he said, without turning. "About the Voss acquisition attempt on Meridian Holdings."
Aria kept her expression neutral. "I heard something about that."
"Damien Voss is making a move." Now he turned, and his eyes were sharp. "He's been quiet for two years — building, positioning. Now he's ready to strike. And Meridian is just the beginning." He paused. "He's coming for us eventually, Aria. The way his father always intended."
"You don't know that."
"I know that family." His voice hardened at the edges. "I know what they're built from. Marcus Voss spent twenty years trying to dismantle everything I built and his son is cut from the same cloth, whatever face he shows the world." He looked at her directly. "I need everyone in this family clear-eyed right now. No complications."
No complications.
"Of course," Aria said.
She left the study and stood for a moment in the hallway, her hand flat against the closed door, and listened to the silence of a house full of people performing certainty about things they had already decided.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Terrible day, Damien had written. Tell me something good.
Aria stood in the hallway of her father's house and looked at the message for a long moment.
The bookshop next to the restaurant, she typed finally. I went back today. Found something I've been looking for for months.
What was it?
A reason to believe some things are still worth looking for.
She sent it before she analyzed it too carefully.
His reply came after a pause that felt considered.
That's a very good something, he wrote. Thank you.
Aria put her phone away and walked back through her father's house with her chin level and her heart quietly, stubbornly refusing to do what sense demanded of it.
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