BOARDROOM ENEMIES BEDROOM LOVERS

Chapter 2 Dinner with the Devil

Roman Castellan bought out the entire restaurant. I couldn't decide if it was to threaten me or kiss me. By the end of the night, I still wasn't sure which one scared me more.

The restaurant sat on the fiftieth floor of the building. I didn't recognize all soaring ceilings and hand-blown chandeliers that dripped light across white tablecloths like something out of a memory I hadn't lived with. It should have been full reservation for a place like this, but tonight it was empty except for a single table by the window, and yeah, it was him.

He stood when I walked in, black shirt, top two buttons undone like he wanted me to look and didn't much care whether I admitted it. Miss Vance, you came. I was summoned to mediate. I lied, sliding into the chair across from him before he could pull it out for me; I wasn't going to give him that.

Of course you were, a faint curve at his mouth gone before it fully formed. He reached for the wine, poured without asking. We ate almost entirely in silence. The steak I barely tasted, the city spread out fifty floors below us in a smear of gold and red lights and between us a tension so thick I could have cut with the knife I was using.

Every few minutes I caught him watching me instead of his plate, and every time he didn't look away first. I made myself hold his gaze; my eyes started to water from not blinking, and even then I counted it a draw at best. Finally, he set his glass down with a small deliberate click against the tablecloth. ‘Last offer: ten million drop, Meridian and I will make sure the transition doesn't touch the ground-floor employees’.

That was my father's company. My voice came out sharper than I meant it to be. He built it from a two-room office in Queens. He used to bring me there on Saturdays when I was seven, let me sit in his chair and pretend I was the boss while he did payroll by hand because he didn't trust the software yet.

And it's failing. Roman’s voice stayed level. I'm restructuring it before it collapses entirely and takes four thousand jobs with it. I'm saving it.

You are erasing him!

His hands came down against the table, not hard enough to be violent but hard enough that the silverwave jumped and my heart did something complicated in my chest. You think I wanted this? His voice dropped. You think my father…

He stopped himself. I frowned. What about your father? Nothing, he leaned back, smoothing the moment away as if it had never happened. Sign the papers, Miss Vance. I stood, chair scraping against the floor. I'm done!

Sit! That wasn't a request, but in a way he said it; my knees obeyed before my pride could object. I hated that, but I sat anyway. Roman watched me for a long moment, something unreadable working behind his gray eyes, and he said You have his eyes. I went still. You knew him?

I did; him and my father were partnered once a long time ago, that's a lie the world came out before I’d even processed them. My father had never mentioned a Castellan in thirty years of bedtime stories about the early days of Meridian. Is it? He pulled his phone from his jacket, tapped through to a photo, and turned the screen towards me.

Two young men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of a chain-link fence, arms slung around each other, grinning like the world hadn't caught up with them yet. One was mistakenly my father, younger than I’d ever seen him, dark hair, a laugh line starting to form on my cheek; the other man beside him could have been Roman's twin if Roman had been born twenty years earlier.

The caption underneath read Elias & Julian 2008. My hands started to shake; I set them in my lap so he wouldn't see them. Why are you showing me this? Because someone betrayed them both. Something dark moved through his eyes, old and unhealed, and I intend to find out who.

Before I could push further, his phone rang, the screen lighting up with a name I couldn't read from across the table. He answered, and whatever warmth had crept into his voice a moment ago vanished entirely. Get out of the building, he snapped low and lethal and hung up without waiting for a response.

He looked at me, walk me out, he asked. It had started to rain the kind of sudden, heavy New York rain that turns the sidewalks into rivers. A black Rolls Royce parked at the curb, a driver already holding the door.

I have a car, I said.

Get in; I will drive you. I have… Get in, Miss Vance

I do not know why I did; I told myself later it was the wine or the photograph still burning behind my eyes. Whatever the reason was, I got in anyway, and the driver drove us through the rain-slicked streets in a silence that felt less like tension and more like two people who’d run out of things they were willing to say out loud.

The driver pulled up outside my house. I reached for the door handle, thank you for dinner. His hand caught my wrist not hard, but firm, warm even through the rain, damp fabric of my sleeve. Miss Vance, " do not make me ruin you. Too late, I whispered and meant it more ways than I wanted to admit. He let go.

I ran inside without looking back, my heart slamming against my ribs the entire elevator ride up, and I told myself it was fear. I told myself for a long time.

The next morning, an email from the court arrived before I’d even finished my coffee. Both parties ordered 30 days of forced meditation, same office space, commencing Monday.

I stared at it until the coffee went cold; a second text came in from the same unknown number as before just as I was about to leave for the office. “Your sister is ten minutes from campus, tick-tock, Miss Vance”. My blood went to ice.