NOT LETTING GO

THE WEIGHT OF GHOSTS - II

The Madison conference room occupied the northeast corner of the forty-eighth floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A marble table. Leather chairs arranged with the precise geometry of a power imbalance—one seat at the head, slightly elevated, the others arrayed below like supplicants.

Jas chose the side chair.

She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of watching her scramble for the throne.

The door opened.

She'd rehearsed this moment ten thousand times. In the shower. In traffic. Lying awake at 3 AM while Aanya's breathing drifted through the baby monitor, she still couldn't bring herself to unplug. She'd imagined every possible version of this reunion—the anger, the explanations, the impossible conversation about a daughter he didn't know existed.

None of her rehearsals had prepared her for reality.

Alistair Sasha Volkov walked through the door like he owned the building.

The first thing she noticed was the suit. Not the off-the-rack Brooks Brothers he'd worn in his twenties, the ones she used to tease him about, telling him he dressed like a handsome accountant who'd wandered into the wrong movie. This was bespoke. Charcoal cashmere that probably cost five figures. Cut close to his body in a way that suggested the tailor had been given explicit instructions: Make me look like a weapon.

The second thing she noticed was his shoulders.

They were broader. Heavier. Like the weight of whatever he'd become had physically reshaped him, pressing down until his frame had no choice but to expand to accommodate it.

The third thing—

His eyes.

And that was when Jas's carefully constructed composure cracked right down the middle.

Because for one blinding, catastrophic second, she didn't see the man who'd walked through the door. She saw Sasha—her Sasha—the one who used to wake her up with terrible off-key singing, who cried at dog commercials, who held her face in both hands and told her she was the only real thing in his entire f*****g life.

You came back, she thought, and the relief was so overwhelming she almost said it out loud. You came back. I knew you would. I knew you'd find your way back to me. Sasha. Sasha, I'm so sorry, I had to, I had to protect—

Then he looked at her.

And she understood that she was looking at a stranger wearing her dead lover's face.

The warmth was gone. Not hidden. Not buried. Gone. Those grey eyes—Aanya's grey eyes—held nothing but a cold assessment. The way a butcher examines a carcass. The way a predator evaluates prey.

Alistair Volkov didn't sit. He stood at the head of the table, hands in his pockets, and let the silence stretch until it became a physical weight pressing against her chest.

"Ms. Mathis." His voice was different too. Deeper. Flatter. The accent she'd once found charming—that slight Slavic roll to his R's—now sounded like a threat. "Thank you for making time."

Ms. Mathis.

Not Jas. Not God, I've missed you. Not, how could you leave me when I was drowning?

Ms. Mathis.

She'd spent eight years building a fortress around herself. Eight years, becoming someone who couldn't be touched, couldn't be hurt, couldn't be reached by anyone except the small person who shared her apartment and her DNA.

That fortress crumbled in three seconds.

But Jas Mathis hadn't climbed to the top of a male-dominated industry by letting people see her bleed.

She stood. Smoothed her blazer. Extended her hand across the marble table.

"Mr. Volkov." Her voice was steady. Professional. The voice she used to fire people. "I'd say it's good to see you, but I've never been much for lying."

Something flickered in those grey eyes. There and gone so fast she might have imagined it.

He didn't take her hand.

Instead, he pulled a leather portfolio from inside his jacket and tossed it onto the table. It slid across the marble and stopped six inches from her fingertips.

"Blackthorn Capital," he said. "Founded 2008 by Richard Blackthorn. Current valuation: four-point-two billion. Primary revenue streams: mergers and acquisitions consulting, private equity management, and strategic restructuring." His head tilted slightly. "Your specialty, I understand. Taking struggling companies and streamlining them."

The way he said streamlining made her skin crawl.

"I'm aware of what my firm does."

"Are you aware that over the past eighteen months, a holding company called V&A Acquisitions has been purchasing Blackthorn shares through seventeen different intermediaries?"

Her blood stopped moving.

"Seventeen," Alistair continued, "is excessive. I told my people to keep it under ten. But my brother's old associates are... enthusiastic." He said brother like it was a curse word. "The result is the same. As of nine-thirty this morning, V&A Acquisitions—which is to say, I—own thirty-four percent of Blackthorn Capital's voting shares."

Jas's fingers found the portfolio. Opened it. Scanned the documents inside with the speed of someone who'd spent her entire career reading between the lines of hostile takeovers.

It was real.

It was all real.

SEC filings. Transfer documents. A paper trail so immaculate it could only have been constructed by someone who understood exactly how to hide in plain sight.

Someone who'd learned from the best.

Someone who'd learned from her.

"Thirty-four percent isn't a controlling interest," she heard herself say.

"No." Alistair finally sat down. The leather chair creaked under his weight. "But Richard Blackthorn's estate holds another twenty-two percent. His widow is... amenable to selling. My lawyers expect the paperwork to clear by Monday."

Fifty-six percent.

Game over.

Jas closed the portfolio. Her hands were steady. She'd trained them to be steady during her father's funeral, during Aanya's emergency C-section, during every nightmare she'd woken from with the phantom taste of Alistair's mouth on hers.

"Why?"

The question escaped before she could stop it. Too raw. Too honest. The kind of question that revealed exactly how much power he still held over her.

Alistair's expression didn't change. But something shifted in the air between them. A charge. A current. The ghost of every night they'd spent tangled together in his shitty apartment, whispering promises neither of them had kept.

"Why," he repeated. Not a question. A statement of disbelief.

Then he leaned forward.

"I buried my brother," he said. "Did you know that? Dmitri died three years ago. Bullet to the throat. I held pressure on the wound while he bled out in the back of a Mercedes. Do you know what he said to me in those last moments?" His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "He said, 'Sasha. Where is your woman?'"

Jas's stomach turned to ice.

"He was dying. His vocal cords were shredded. And he was asking about you. Because even Dimitri—cold, cruel, competent Dimitri—knew that you were the only thing that had ever made me weak." Alistair's jaw tightened. "And where were you, Jas?"

I was here, raising our daughter. Protecting her. Missing you. Longing for you. She bit back the urge to scream. Seven years.. Seven years of working, building, surviving. Seven years of careful, quiet life with Aanya.

Aanya

Oh God. Oh God, does he know about—

"The thing about you, Jas, is that you're predictable." Alistair's lips curved into something that might have been a smile on anyone else. On him, it looked like a wound. "You think you're complicated. You're not. I know that you make jokes when you're scared. I know that right now, behind those expensive eyes, you're running calculations."

He was right.

She was.

How much did he know? How much had he seen? Aanya's school. Aanya's face. Had they photographed her? Had they—

"I'm not here to talk about the good old days, Ms. Mathis." Alistair stood. Adjusted his cuffs. "I'm here to strip your assets. Every deal you've built. Every client relationship you've cultivated. Every ounce of professional credibility you've accumulated. I'm going to dismantle it piece by piece, and then I'm going to sell the scraps to the highest bidder."

He walked toward the door.

Stopped.

Turned back.

"And when there's nothing left of Blackthorn Capital but a nameplate and bad memories, I want you to remember that you could have stopped this. Seven years ago. All you had to do was stay."

The door clicked shut behind him.

Jas stood alone in the Madison conference room, surrounded by forty-eight floors of glass and steel and everything she'd built to prove she didn't need him.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

A text from her mother: Aanya wants to know if Mr. Buttons gets TWO kisses tonight or THREE. Please advise.

Jas pressed the phone to her forehead and breathed.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

When she finally lowered it, her hands were shaking.

But her eyes were dry.

He doesn't know, she told herself. If he had known about Aanya, he would have used her. He would have walked in here and said her name like a weapon. He doesn't know.

She held onto that thought like a life raft.

And somewhere beneath the terror and the grief and the impossible weight of seeing him again, a smaller, uglier thought surfaced:

He came back.

He came back, and he looked at me like I was nothing.

He came back, and I still wanted him.

---

Across the city, in the back of a black Escalade with bulletproof windows, staring at the building he had just walked out of.

His driver knew better than to speak.

His security detail knew better than to breathe.

He replayed the moment over and over—the way she'd looked at him when he first walked in. That split second before her face shuttered. That raw, naked hope.

She'd looked at him like he was still Sasha.

Like she'd been waiting for him to come home.

You left me, he thought, and the words were acid in his throat. You left me with a note and a lie, and you never looked back. You left me to become this. You made me into this.

He pulled out his phone.

Texted his head of acquisitions:

Proceed with Blackthorn Capital. Full dismantling.

I want her personally ruined within a week.

---