The Merger Clause

Chapter Six: Cracks

She found him on the terrace an hour later, alone, tie loosened, looking out at the garden like it owed him an answer to a question he hadn't asked.

"Shouldn't you be inside working the room?" Wren asked, coming to stand beside him at the railing.

"I've worked it enough for one night." He didn't look at her, but he didn't move away either. "You handled Rhys well."

"There was nothing to handle."

"Wren." Just her name, the way he said it when he wanted her to stop pretending. "I know what I saw."

She let the silence sit a moment, because there wasn't a version of this conversation she wanted to have standing on his father's terrace in a dress she hadn't chosen. "What did you see?"

"History. The kind that doesn't fully leave, no matter how long it's been buried." He finally turned to look at her, and something in his expression had shifted from the ice she was used to into something rawer, more tired. "I'm not asking you to explain it to me."

"Then what are you asking?"

"Nothing." He looked back out at the garden. "I don't have the right to ask you anything. That's rather the joke of this whole arrangement, isn't it. My father built me a wife and forgot to build me any claim to actually being wanted."

The honesty of it surprised her, coming from him, this man who guarded every word like it cost him something to release it. "Sebastian."

"Don't. I don't need the sympathy face. I've had a version of it my whole life, people looking at me like I'm the cold one, the difficult one, while Rhys gets to be the warm brother who left and still somehow gets forgiven for it." He said it without heat, more like an old bruise he was pressing on purpose to check if it still hurt. "I stayed. I ran the company our father was too busy dying slowly to run himself. I built the thing that's supposedly saving your family right now. And somehow I'm the villain in this story."

"I don't think you're the villain."

"You fight every clause I write like I am."

"I fight because I don't know who you are anymore," she said, and it was the truest thing she'd said to him since this had started. "You used to teach me to sail. You used to be the one who noticed when I was upset before I said anything. And then you disappeared into whoever this is, and I don't know how to reconcile the two."

Something in his shoulders dropped, just slightly, just enough that she noticed. "I had to become someone who couldn't be hurt. It seemed like the safer option, after everything."

"After what, exactly?" She'd been waiting for someone, anyone, to actually answer that question in ten years, and she watched him consider it, watched the calculation happen behind his eyes.

"Ask your mother," he said finally, quiet, careful. "She knows more than she's told you."

Before she could push further, he straightened, the wall going back up as visibly as if she'd watched him build it brick by brick. "We should go back inside. People will talk."

"Let them."

That, at least, earned her a real smile, brief and unguarded and gone almost as fast as it arrived. "There she is," he said, and she didn't ask him what he meant, because for the first time all night, she thought she understood.