Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter 6

I found Freya in the study two mornings later, surrounded by more paper than I remembered a company needing, her laptop open beside three different folders, a pen behind her ear that she’d clearly forgotten was there.

“You look like Dad used to,” I said from the doorway. “Right before a board meeting he’d already decided the outcome of.”

She glanced up, and something in her face had softened slightly since the kitchen table three days ago, not fully, but enough that I noticed. “He negotiated the same way he argued with you. Decide first, let everyone else catch up.”

“I remember.”

I sat down across from her without asking, the way I hadn’t earned the right to yet but did anyway, and she let me, which felt like its own small permission.

“What are you working on?”

“Quarter reports.” She turned one of the folders toward me, more out of habit than invitation. “We’re being courted. Politely, so far.”

“By who?”

“Calloway Holdings.” She watched my face when she said it, careful, gauging. “They reached out last week. Before the scandal broke, actually. I assumed it was routine until I saw who signed the letter.”

I looked down at the folder without really seeing it, my stomach doing something slow and unpleasant. “His father.”

“His father.” Freya closed the folder gently, like she was handling something that might still be sharp. “I didn’t respond. I wanted to talk to you first, whenever you were ready. I didn’t know if you’d want anything to do with that name again, in any capacity.”

I thought about the six months of empty visits, the container going cold on a curb, the way Marcus had looked more irritated than caught. I thought about the porch, three nights ago, my father’s hand around mine, telling me I wasn’t disappearing anymore.

“Why would his father reach out to us now,” I said, “when the scandal’s about to make his family look like liars in front of half the city.”

“Because of the scandal, I’d guess. Not despite it.” Freya leaned back in her chair, studying me the way she used to when we were younger and she was deciding whether I’d earned an honest answer. “A company that just publicly humiliated itself needs an alliance that makes them look respectable again. The Ashworth name still means something. Maybe especially now, with you back.”

Something cold and clear moved through me, the same feeling I’d had in Marcus’s office when Wren laughed at me, heartbreak curdling into something with edges.

“They want to use us to clean up his mess.”

“I think so, yes.”

I sat with that for a moment. Two years ago, I would have found some way to make that not my problem, would have let Freya handle it and gone back to whatever version of myself Marcus needed that week. I noticed the absence of that instinct now, the way you notice a tooth that’s finally stopped aching.

“I want to be in the room the next time they reach out,” I said.

Freya’s eyebrows lifted slightly, the closest thing to surprise I’d seen from her since I got home. “You haven’t set foot in a boardroom in two years, Selene.”

“I know.”

“You gave me everything specifically so you’d never have to.”

“I know that too.” I met her eyes, steady, and felt something in myself that I hadn’t felt in longer than I wanted to admit, not grief, not shame, something closer to the girl our father said used to argue about everything. “I’m not asking for it back, Freya. I’m asking to help you carry it. There’s a difference, and I’d like the chance to show you I understand that now.”

She studied me for a long moment, weighing something I couldn’t quite read on her face, the same careful nothing she’d worn at breakfast three days ago, though it didn’t feel as guarded now.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” A small, real thing moved at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, but its nearest relative. “I’ve been running this alone for two years, Selene. I’m not going to pretend I don’t want the help.”

Something in my chest loosened that I hadn’t realized was tight.

“There’s something else,” she said, more carefully now, sliding a second folder across the table. “You should probably see this before we go any further.”

I opened it.

It was a photograph, printed, the kind you’d pull from a business article rather than a gossip page, a man in a dark suit stepping out of a car in front of a building I didn’t recognize, caught mid stride, unposed.

“Who is this?”

“You don’t recognize him?”

I looked closer. Something familiar tugged at the edges of the face, older now, sharper somehow, a version of a boy I hadn’t let myself think about in years.

“Damian,” I said, and heard my own voice do something strange around the name.

“He’s back,” Freya said. “Word is his family’s expanded into three new markets while he was abroad. He’s worth more than the Calloways and the old Ashworth holdings combined now, if the reports are accurate.” She watched me carefully. “He’s also been asking about you. Quietly. To people who’d think to mention it to me.”

I stared at the photograph, at a face I hadn’t seen in years, and felt something shift in my chest that had nothing to do with Marcus, nothing to do with grief, something I didn’t have a name for yet and wasn’t sure I was ready to.

“He asked about me,” I repeated.

“He did.” Freya closed the folder again, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite place. “I didn’t tell him anything. I thought that should be your choice to make.”

I nodded slowly, my eyes still on the closed folder, on the space where his face had just been.

Outside, I could hear our father moving around the kitchen, humming something tuneless the way he always did on the mornings he felt, for whatever reason, lighter than usual.

I thought about the Calloway letter sitting on the desk between us, about the boardroom I hadn’t stepped into in two years, about a boy who’d apparently never stopped asking after me even from another continent.

For the first time since I’d walked through that office door, I felt something that wasn’t grief at all.

I felt ready.