The CEO’s Hamster

Twelve

Chapter 12 — Old Debts

Victoria

I spent the morning after in the car outside Jamal's building doing something I hadn't done

in over a decade: going through my father's old files.

Hayes International kept a records archive in the sub-basement of the Park Avenue office,

climate-controlled and mostly forgotten, full of boxes nobody had digitized because

nobody had thought they mattered anymore. I'd asked my assistant to pull everything

from the years my family had spent in America overlapping with the Valentieris —

shipping contracts, correspondence, anything with an Italian letterhead.

It took three hours to find what I was looking for.

A single folder, unlabeled except for a date. Inside it, a contract between Hayes Logistics

— my father's company, before it became Hayes International — and a European shipping

consortium that included, in small print on page four, Valentieri Maritime.

And beneath that, a termination letter. Abrupt. Unexplained. Dated three days after the

summer I'd spent chasing a boy around a garden for stealing my cookies.

My father had been involved. Not peripherally. Not as a bystander watching a dispute

unfold around his daughter's playdate. He'd been a party to the contract that fell apart.

I sat on the cold concrete floor of the archive room with the folder open on my knees and

felt something shift in how I understood my own childhood. My parents' marriage had

started unraveling that year. I'd always assumed it was simply the slow ordinary collapse

marriages sometimes have. I had never once considered that it might have started with

money — with a deal that went bad and never fully recovered, with whatever guilt or

blame my father carried out of that boardroom and into our house.

I called Lorenzo before I'd even finished reading.

"My father's company was party to the contract,

" I said, without preamble.

"Hayes

Logistics. It's right here — Valentieri Maritime, Daniel Cross's firm on the other side. It

ended three days after you left.

"

Silence on the line. Then, quietly:

"I didn't know that.

"

"How could you not know that? Your father was in the room.

"

"My father was in a great many rooms I wasn't allowed into, Victoria. I was nine. I knew

there'd been a dispute. I didn't know whose names were on the paper.

" A pause.

"If your

father's company took losses in that collapse — if Daniel blames mine for what happened

to his career — then he may have blamed yours too, somewhere underneath it. That would

explain more than jealousy ever could.

"

"Explain what?"

"Why finding you again wasn't only sentimental for me. Why it might never have been only

sentimental for him, either.

"

I closed the folder. Outside the small archive window, Manhattan went on not knowing any

of this, the way it never knew anything about the people inside its buildings until it was

printed somewhere.

"I want to meet Daniel,

" I said.

"Properly. Not in a lobby. Not as a warning. I want to know

what my father cost him.

"

"Victoria—

"

"You don't get to protect me from my own father's mistakes, Lorenzo. I've spent my whole

life cleaning up after people who wouldn't tell me the truth. I'm not doing it blind this

time.

"

He didn't argue. That, more than anything he could have said, told me he understood.

Matteo

I found Jamal Carter exactly where Lorenzo had warned me I would — sitting in the lobby

of Hayes International like he owned the marble, scrolling through his phone with the

particular stillness of a man who looked relaxed and was absolutely not.

"You're the brother,

" he said, without looking up.

"You're the best friend.

"

"Emergency contact,

" he corrected.

"Occasional therapist. I have a business card now. It's

very official.

"

I sat down beside him, uninvited, which earned me the faintest flicker of a glance.

"Lorenzo wants eyes on anyone who's recently done work for a woman named Isabella

Conti. Security firms, private investigators, anyone who takes cash and asks no

questions.

"

"And he sent you to tell me this because—?"

"Because you apparently know people who know people. According to Victoria.

"

Jamal finally looked at me properly, assessing, the way I imagined he assessed everyone

— quickly, thoroughly, and with very little patience for being impressed by money.

"I know

people who know people in fashion, in media, occasionally in finance when someone owes

someone a favor. I don't typically run in circles that hire surveillance teams.

"

"Typically.

"

"I said typically.

" A beat.

"I know one person. He does due diligence work for a firm

Victoria's used before. If Isabella Conti hired anyone legitimate enough to leave a paper

trail, he'll know where to look.

"

"Then I suppose I owe you something.

"

"You owe me nothing. I'm doing this for Victoria, not for your brother's love life, however

dramatically it's currently unfolding.

" He stood, straightening his jacket with more care

than the gesture strictly required.

"Although I'll admit, watching the Ice Queen fall for a

man who still carries a childhood photograph in his breast pocket is objectively the best

thing that's happened to me all year.

"

"He kept it in a wooden box, actually. Not his pocket.

"

"Even worse,

" Jamal said, and for the first time, something like a real smile broke through.

"That's practically a shrine.

"

I found myself smiling back before I'd decided to.

"You say that like it's a flaw.

"

"I say that like it's the most romantically unhinged thing I've heard this quarter, and I watch

a great deal of unhinged romance for a hobby.

" He glanced at me sideways, something

assessing again, though softer this time.

"Does it run in the family?"

"Does what?"

"The unhinged devotion. The waiting twenty years for someone. Carrying photographs in

wooden boxes.

"

I thought about it longer than the question probably warranted.

"I wouldn't know yet,

" I

said.

"I haven't found anything worth waiting for.

"

Jamal held my gaze a beat too long for the comment to land as casually as I'd meant it.

"Yet,

" he said, echoing Victoria's word back at me from some conversation I hadn't been

part of, and then he was walking toward the elevators, already texting his contact, leaving

me standing in the lobby wondering why I'd said that out loud to a stranger in a cream

jacket who had, within ten minutes, made me feel more unsettled than any boardroom

ever had.

Kindly like, vote, comment and share