A Wrong Love

TOO CLOSE

Chapter 7

The old Cross Textiles warehouse hadn't been touched in over a decade, sealed the year her father's finances first started collapsing and never reopened since. Selena had the only remaining key, inherited along with everything else that mattered and most things that didn't. Dust hung thick in the air when she finally forced the door open, disturbing twenty years of silence in a single breath.

"This is the last place they were photographed together," she said, stepping inside, flashlight cutting through the gloom. "My father and yours. There's a picture in an old company newsletter, both of them standing right about here, the year before everything fell apart."

Damian moved through the space slowly, running a hand along a dust-covered shelf. "They look happy in that photo."

"They were happy," Selena said. "That's what I never understood. Something broke that fast and that completely, and for years I just assumed it meant the friendship had always been a lie. But if Reyes is who we think he is, maybe none of it was ever a lie at all."

They split up to search the loading dock's remaining files, boxes stacked in careful rows that nobody had opened since the warehouse closed. Selena worked one wall, Damian the other, both of them keeping a distance neither fully wanted anymore, some fragile new honesty between them still too new to trust with too much closeness.

"Selena." Something in his voice made her cross the room immediately.

He was holding a ledger, leather bound and water damaged at the corners, her father's handwriting alternating with his father's across page after page of numbers that matched nothing in either company's official records. A shared account. Funds moving quietly between both families for years, all of it routed through the name they'd already learned to recognize.

Halcyon.

"They were building this together," Selena breathed, moving closer to read over his shoulder, close enough to catch the clean warmth of him even through the dust and stale air. "Not fighting. Building a case."

"Against Reyes," Damian said. "Look at this entry. Dated two months before your father's credit line collapsed. A note in his handwriting: M.R. suspects we know. Accelerate before he moves first."

"He knew," Selena said, throat tight. "My father knew someone was coming for him and he didn't run. He kept building the case anyway."

Damian turned to look at her then, and whatever careful distance either of them had been maintaining collapsed in an instant, the ledger forgotten between them. "Your father was braver than either of us gave him credit for."

"So was yours," Selena said quietly. "I spent ten years hating a man who was trying to protect the truth right up until it cost him everything."

Her hand had found his without either of them quite deciding it should, fingers curling together over the edge of the old ledger, and when she looked up his eyes were already on her, steady and unguarded in a way she'd never once seen from Damian Vale in a decade of watching him wear armor in every room he entered.

"Selena." Her name in his mouth didn't sound like an accusation anymore. It sounded like something closer to relief.

"Don't," she whispered, though she didn't step back, didn't let go of his hand, didn't do a single thing that would have actually stopped what was clearly about to happen.

"Don't what?"

"Don't make this harder than it already is."

He reached up slowly, giving her every chance to pull away, and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, his thumb grazing her cheek with a gentleness that undid something she'd been holding tight for ten straight years.

"It's already impossible," he murmured. "I just didn't expect it to also feel like this."

She rose onto her toes without deciding to, and he met her halfway, and for one unguarded, breathless moment in a warehouse full of their fathers' buried secrets, Selena Cross kissed the man she'd spent a decade calling her enemy like he'd never been anything of the kind.

A floorboard creaked somewhere behind them, sharp and deliberate in the settled dust.

They weren't alone.