Kneel For Me

Webb’s Move

My mother called at eight forty-seven Monday morning.

She never called before ten. She knew my hours. She had memorised my schedule the way she memorised everything — quietly, without making a production of it.

I picked up immediately.

“Mum. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, love.” Her voice was careful in the way it got when she was trying not to worry me. “I had a strange call this weekend. Saturday evening. A man who said he was from a financial consultancy. He asked about you.”

I went very still. “What did he ask?”

“About your work history. Your qualifications. Whether you’d ever had any — he called it — professional disputes.” A pause. “I told him I didn’t discuss my daughter with strangers and hung up. But he called back twice.”

My chest tightened. “Did he leave a name?”

“A company. Calder Advisory.” She paused. “Sera, is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said, forcing my voice even. “You did exactly right. Don’t answer if they call again.”

“Who are these people?”

“People who work for someone who’s having a dispute with my employer. It’s nothing serious.” I kept my voice steady. “I’ll handle it.”

I hung up and sat for a moment in the early morning quiet of my flat, heart hammering.

Calder Advisory. Webb’s subsidiary — I’d seen the name in the Luxembourg filings. He hadn’t just escalated. He’d gone outside the building, outside the press, outside the professional arena entirely.

He’d called my mother.

I was at my desk by eight fifteen. Lucian wasn’t in yet — unusual. I pulled up the Calder Advisory registration documents, confirmed the subsidiary link to Webb’s group, and had the documentation ready before I’d taken my coat off.

At eight fifty-one, Lucian arrived.

He passed my desk. Stopped. Looked at me with the particular attention that meant he’d already noticed something was different.

“What happened,” he said. Not a question.

“Webb called my mother. Saturday evening. Three times. Calder Advisory — it’s his subsidiary.” I kept my voice professional. Factual. “He asked about my qualifications and professional history.”

The change in Lucian was not dramatic. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t move suddenly. He simply went very still — a different quality of stillness from his usual control. Something colder. Something with an edge underneath it that I hadn’t seen before.

“Your mother,” he said quietly.

“She’s fine. She hung up. I’ve told her not to answer further calls.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Those dark eyes were doing something complicated — something I couldn’t fully read. Something deeper. Older.

“Come in,” he said.

In his office, he didn’t sit. He stood at the window — the thinking position.

I set the Calder Advisory documentation on his desk. “Registered 2021. Webb’s a director through a nominee structure. I’ve linked it to three other subsidiaries that appear in the Luxembourg filings.”

He didn’t look at the documents. He was still looking at London.

“When I was twenty-six,” he said, “Marcus Webb was my business partner. We built the first iteration of this firm together.” A pause. Long enough that I didn’t fill it. “He had access to everything. Every deal, every contact, every piece of information I’d spent six years building.” Another pause. “He sold it. Packaged it and sold it to a competitor for enough money to start Calder.”

I was quiet.

“I found out from a lawyer. Not from him.” His voice was flat, but underneath the flatness, something that had never quite healed. “He didn’t tell me because he knew I would have stopped him. And he knew I would have stopped him because he knew what it would cost me.”

“Irina,” I said quietly.

He turned from the window.

I hadn’t meant to say it. The name had been sitting in my chest since the call I’d overheard, and it had come out now without permission.

“You heard that call,” he said.

“I wasn’t trying to.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Not angry. Not closed. Just — looking, in that direct way that felt like being the only thing in the room.

“Irina was the competitor he sold to,” he said. “And she was — other things. Before that.” A pause. “Webb knew both facts when he made the deal.”

The office was very quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The only honest thing available.

He nodded once. Looked back at the documents on his desk.

“He’s escalating because he knows the Luxembourg filing destroys his case,” he said, back to the operational register. “This isn’t litigation strategy. It’s personal.”

“I know.”

“He went after your mother because he’s watched long enough to know—” He stopped.

The sentence hung in the air, unfinished.

I didn’t ask him to finish it.

But I felt the weight of what hadn’t been said — what he’d pulled back from, what was true underneath the operational language and the controlled stillness.

He’d watched long enough to know I mattered to him.

And Webb had seen it before either of us had said it.

“Greer needs the Calder Advisory link documented,” Lucian said. “Full subsidiary chain. By noon.”

“You’ll have it by ten.”

He nodded. Sat at his desk. Opened his laptop.

I walked to the door.

“Sera.”

I stopped.

“Your mother won’t receive another call,” he said. Quiet. Absolute. The tone of something already decided.

I didn’t ask how he’d ensure it.

I just said: “Thank you.”

And meant it in ways I couldn’t afford to examine.