THE ASHWOOD LEGACY

OLD WOUNDS, NEW LEVERAGE

Chapter 4 — Old Wounds, New Leverage

"You cannot be serious." Sable paced the length of Elena's office like a caged animal, which — given the circumstances — was probably close to accurate. "El, you have twelve VPs who could run this negotiation blind. Why would you walk back into that man's boardroom personally?"

"Because I want to see his face when he realizes who he's negotiating with."

"That's not a business reason. That's a revenge reason."

"Maybe it's both." Elena didn't look up from the merger documents spread across her desk. Cross Enterprises was in worse shape than she'd expected — overleveraged real estate holdings, a board losing patience, a CEO whose public composure was apparently masking a company on the verge of real trouble. "Solaris has the capital and the market position to make this acquisition on our terms. I'm not going to pretend that possibility doesn't interest me."

Sable stopped pacing. "This isn't about the acquisition and you know it."

Elena finally looked up. "I know exactly what this is, Sable. I've had three years to think about it." She closed the folder in front of her, precise and controlled, the way she did everything now. "I'm not the girl who walked out of that clearing anymore. I want him to see that. I want them all to see that."

"And if seeing you again messes with your head? With—" Sable hesitated, glancing at her with an expression Elena recognized and hated. "With the bond?"

The bond. They rarely spoke about it directly — the tearing sensation Elena still felt sometimes, phantom-limb pain for a connection that had barely existed before it was severed. Three years, and it had never fully faded, just gone quiet, banked down like the rage that had replaced it.

"The bond was rejected," Elena said flatly. "It's done. It doesn't come back just because I'm sitting across a table from him."

Sable didn't look convinced, but she let it drop, because that was another thing Elena loved about her — she knew which battles weren't worth fighting.

That night, alone in her apartment, Elena had the dream again.

She stood in a clearing much like the one where everything had ended three years ago, except this one was empty of watching wolves, empty of torches and judgment. Just moonlight, pouring down in a column so bright it looked solid, and at the center of it, resting on a stone pedestal that hadn't existed a moment before, sat a crown.

Not gold. Not silver. Woven, somehow, from the moonlight itself — strands of pale light braided into something that looked simultaneously ancient and unfinished, waiting.

Waiting for her.

She woke gasping, her sheets soaked through with sweat, her heart hammering against her ribs like it was trying to escape her body entirely. She sat up in the dark and pressed a hand flat against her sternum, right over the spot where the bond had torn three years ago, and for one impossible second she could have sworn she felt something pulse back.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from Sable, sent at 2 a.m., because apparently neither of them could sleep tonight.

Same dream?

Elena typed back with unsteady hands.

Same dream. It's getting closer. The crown feels closer every time.

Closer to what?

Elena stared at the question for a long time before she answered, because she genuinely didn't know — and that terrified her more than the rejection ever had.

I don't know. But I think I'm about to find out.

She set the phone down and sat in the dark for a long time, knees drawn to her chest, listening to the city hum faintly beyond her window — sirens somewhere distant, the low rumble of a delivery truck, the ordinary noise of a world that had no idea what she might actually be. Three years ago she would have called this anxiety and left it at that. Now she wasn't sure anxiety was the right word for a feeling that came with a physical pull behind her sternum, insistent and directional, like a compass needle trying to point her somewhere she hadn't chosen to go.

She thought about calling in sick to the merger meeting. She thought about it for almost a full minute before dismissing the idea entirely, because Elena Marsh did not build an empire out of nothing by running from rooms she was afraid to enter.

He rejected you once, she reminded herself. He doesn't get to make you flinch a second time.

By morning, the fear had folded itself back into something more useful — the same cold, precise focus she brought to every negotiation, every board meeting, every moment in the last three years when the easier choice would have been to disappear. She dressed with more care than the meeting strictly required, chose the sharpest blazer in her closet, and told herself, checking her reflection one final time before leaving for the office, that whatever waited for her inside Cross Enterprises' walls, she would meet it standing upright.