SAY MY NAME

CHAPTER TWO

Lucian didn't usually think about people after they left a room.

It was a useful skill, one he'd built on purpose over years of board meetings and donor dinners and family dinners that were really just board meetings with better food. People came, people asked for things, people left, and Lucian moved on to the next name on the list. It kept his head clear. It kept him from wasting time on things he couldn't use.

He was failing at it now, standing at the window of his office at eleven the next morning, looking down at a city he owned more of than he sometimes liked to admit, thinking about a woman in a black dress who had looked him dead in the eye in a hallway and told him, essentially, to get out of her way.

Nobody talked to him like that. Not anymore.

"You wanted the gala numbers," said his assistant, Priya, setting a folder on his desk. "Final total's in. Twelve point one million. Best year the foundation's had."

"Good."

"Evelyn wants to know if you're serious about the spring gala."

Lucian turned from the window. "I am."

"She also wants to know," Priya added, with the particular careful tone she used when she was about to say something she suspected he wouldn't love, "why you're serious about it, since you've never once cared who runs the foundation events before."

Lucian didn't answer that. He picked up the folder instead, flipped through numbers he already knew, and let the silence do the work of ending the conversation for him.

Priya, who had worked for him for four years and understood exactly how far she was allowed to push, took the hint and left.

He sat down at his desk and did not, for the first ten minutes, look at any of the actual work waiting for him. He looked instead at the small stack of papers Priya had left at his request that morning — the standard background pull his office ran on any new vendor before a contract renewal, nothing unusual, except that he'd asked for it himself instead of letting his events team handle it, which was, as far as he was willing to admit, the first strange thing he'd done in this entire situation.

'Smith & Daughters Events. Founded eighteen years ago by Robert Smith.'

He'd known the name the second Valerie Smith said it to him in that hallway. He just hadn't known why it mattered until he saw it printed on the page in front of him, next to a founding date that put it almost exactly where he expected, and a note in small type near the bottom that made him go very still.

'Company originally registered as Smith-Wood Hospitality Partners. Name changed eighteen years ago following dissolution of partnership.'

Lucian read the line three times.

He didn't remember much from when he was thirteen. He remembered his father coming home later than usual for a stretch of months, remembered raised voices behind a closed office door that he wasn't supposed to be listening at, remembered one dinner where his mother had asked, very carefully, whether "the Smith situation" was resolved, and his father had said, in a voice that ended the conversation before it started, that it was handled, and that it wasn't a subject for the dinner table.

He hadn't thought about it in years. He'd had no reason to. It was one line in a childhood full of closed office doors and conversations that stopped when he walked into a room.

Now there was a name on a folder in front of him that traced a straight, uncomfortable line from that dinner table to a hallway last night, and a woman who had no idea, standing in that hallway, that her company's original name had once had *Wood* in it too.

His phone buzzed. Evelyn.

"Well??? Are we keeping her for spring or not, I have donors asking already"

Lucian looked at the folder for a long moment.

He could pull the contract. Quietly, without explanation, the way he handled anything he decided was a complication rather than an asset. Evelyn would be annoyed for a week and then move on to another vendor, and Valerie Smith would never know that Wood Group had ever been anything other than a client she'd impressed for one night.

That would be the correct decision. The controlled one. The one his father would have made without a second thought, twenty years ago, when a name like Smith had first become a problem worth solving quietly.

"Keep her," he typed back. "Spring gala. Full budget."

He set the phone down before he could think better of it, and told himself it was because Smith & Daughters had genuinely earned the business — which was true, and also, he understood with a kind of cold clarity that he didn't enjoy, not remotely the whole reason.

---

Margaret Wood arrived at his office unannounced twenty minutes later, which was not unusual. His grandmother had never once in her life waited to be invited anywhere.

"You look like a man who found something he wasn't looking for," she said, settling into the chair across from his desk without asking.

"I'm fine, Grandma."

"I didn't ask if you were fine. I said you look like you found something." She glanced at the folder still open on his desk, upside down from her angle, and something in her face changed so fast he almost missed it. "Smith & Daughters. That's the company from Evelyn's gala."

"You know them?"

Margaret's hands went still in her lap, just for a second. "I know the name."

"That's not an answer."

"No," she agreed, and there was something careful in the way she said it, something that told him this was a door she wasn't ready to open, not yet, not until she understood exactly how much he already knew. "It isn't."

Lucian watched her for a long moment, the same way he watched a boardroom when he could tell someone was holding back a number they didn't want on the table. "Grandma. What happened between Dad and Robert Smith?"

Margaret stood up. Smoothed her skirt. Looked at him with an expression that was equal parts love and warning, the way she'd looked at him his whole life whenever he got too close to a subject the family had spent decades agreeing not to discuss.

"Ask your father," she said. "Though I'll warn you now, he won't give you a real answer. He never has, not to anyone, not in twenty years."

"Then ask you."

"When you're ready to hear it," she said, already moving toward the door, "you'll ask me the right way, and I'll tell you. But not today, sweetheart. Not while you're looking at that girl's company file like it's a puzzle instead of a person."

She left before he could ask what that meant.

Lucian sat alone in his office for a long time after that, the city moving beneath him the way it always did, indifferent to whatever was happening four floors up. He thought about a hallway, and a woman who hadn't been impressed by him, and a name on a folder that connected them in a way she didn't know about yet.

He thought, too, about the particular look on his grandmother's face — not shock, not confusion, but something closer to grief, twenty years old and still fresh enough to change her expression in half a second.

Whatever had happened between Edward Wood and Robert Smith, it wasn't handled. It had never been handled. It had only ever been buried.

And Lucian, for the first time in longer than he could remember, found that he badly wanted to dig it back up — not because it was smart, not because it served the company, but because somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, without meaning to, he had started keeping a woman named Valerie Smith in a part of his mind he didn't usually let anyone occupy.

He picked up his phone and opened a new message to Priya.

'Pull everything we have on the old Smith-Wood partnership. Everything. I don't care how old it is.'

He hesitated over the send button for exactly as long as it took to remember the look on his grandmother's face, and sent it anyway.

Three minutes later, his phone rang. Not Priya.

His father.

Lucian looked at the screen for a long moment, at the name *EDWARD WOOD* lit up against the glass, and felt, for reasons he couldn't yet explain to himself, a cold drop of dread settle low in his stomach — the specific dread of a man who has just, without meaning to, tripped a wire that someone spent twenty years building in the dark.

He answered.

"Lucian." His father's voice was level. It was always level. It was the voice he used right before he said something designed to end a conversation for good. "I hear you're asking questions about an old file."

Lucian went very still.

He hadn't told anyone but Priya. Which meant his father had eyes on his own son's private requests — or someone in this building was reporting back to Edward Wood the second Lucian's curiosity turned in the wrong direction.

"Should I not be?" Lucian said carefully.

The silence on the line stretched just long enough to answer the question before his father finally did.

"Come to the house tonight," Edward said. "We should talk. Before you learn the wrong version of this from someone who wasn't there."