A Wrong Love

Chapter 1 Selena Cross had hated Damian Vale for exactly ten years, four months, and the eleven days since her father's funeral. She'd never admit to counting, but some numbers just stayed with you. So when her father's lawyer called at seven in the morning, before she'd even had coffee, and said the words "automatic merger clause" in the same breath as "Vale Industries," she laughed. It wasn't a good laugh. It was the kind that came right before crying, thin and a little unhinged, the kind she hadn't let herself do since the day they lowered her father's casket into the ground. "Say that again," she said. "Slowly." "Your father and Damian Vale's father signed a survival clause fifteen years ago," the lawyer said, gentle in the way people got when they were about to ruin your morning. "If either company's revenue falls below a set threshold for two consecutive quarters, the two firms merge automatically. No board vote required. No opt out. Cross Textiles fell below it last quarter." "That's not possible. I would have known." "You would have known if you'd had time to read fifteen year old paperwork instead of trying to keep three hundred employees paid," the lawyer said. "I'm sorry, Selena. It's done. The merger activates in ninety days." She hung up and sat very still at her kitchen table, staring at the wall where her father's photo hung, the one from the ribbon cutting the year the company opened its second factory. He was smiling in it. He hadn't smiled like that in years by the time he died, not since the scandal that gutted the company's credit line and left him convinced, right up until his last breath, that his oldest friend had betrayed him on purpose. Selena had believed it too. She still did. That was the problem. She'd promised herself, standing at his grave, that she would sooner burn Cross Textiles to the ground than hand a single share of it to a Vale. And now the universe, or the law, or fifteen year old fine print, had decided her promise didn't matter. She showed up at Vale Tower the next morning wearing the sharpest suit she owned, because if she was going to walk into enemy territory she was at least going to look like she belonged there. The lobby alone cost more than her father's entire first office. Glass and steel and a fountain that probably ran up a water bill bigger than her monthly payroll. Damian Vale was already in the boardroom when she arrived, one hand braced on the table, jacket off, sleeves rolled, looking like a man who'd been up all night and didn't care who noticed. He looked up when she walked in and something flickered across his face too fast to name. "Selena," he said. Her name in his mouth still sounded like an accusation, the way it had since she was nineteen and screaming at him across her father's driveway that his family had destroyed hers. "Damian." She dropped her folder on the table harder than necessary, just to hear the sound of it. "Let's not pretend either of us wants to be here." "I never said I wanted this." His eyes moved over her, unreadable, cataloguing something she couldn't identify. "You look like you haven't slept." "I don't need commentary. I need to know what happens to my company's name, my employees' jobs, and whether I still have a say in anything once this clause finishes swallowing what's left of my father's life's work." "You'll have a say," Damian said. "Equal voting shares, per the original agreement. That was the point of the clause. Not a takeover. A forced partnership." "Our fathers wrote a forced partnership into a contract fifteen years ago? Why would either of them do that?" Something shifted behind his eyes, there and gone in the space of a breath. "I don't know," he said, and it was the first thing he'd said all morning that sounded almost honest. "I've been trying to figure that out myself." She wanted to believe he was lying. It would have been so much simpler if he was lying. "We'll need legal to draft the transition timeline," he continued, all business again, the mask sliding back into place. "HR consolidation. Brand strategy. I've already had my team start pulling the original partnership file for reference." "You have the file?" "I sent someone to the archive this morning. It should be on my desk by this afternoon." Selena didn't answer right away. She was thinking about her father's face in that photograph, the year before everything fell apart, and the strange, cold feeling crawling up the back of her neck that had nothing to do with Damian Vale at all. "Something's wrong," she said finally. "With the merger?" "With the timing." She met his eyes properly for the first time since walking in, ten years of practiced hatred momentarily forgotten in favor of something sharper. "You just said the file's coming up this afternoon. Damian, I got that phone call about the merger seven hours ago. Nobody outside this building should have known Cross Textiles fell below the threshold before I did." He straightened slowly, the color draining a little from his face as the implication landed. "Someone knew this was coming," Selena said. "Someone made sure it happened. And I think whatever's actually in that file is the reason why." His phone buzzed on the table between them, a single sharp vibration against the glass. He looked down at the screen and went very still. "What," Selena said. "What is it." He turned the phone around so she could see it. A security alert from the archive floor, timestamped four minutes ago. Unauthorized access detected. Partnership file: Cross-Vale Confidential. File removed from system. Someone had already taken it.