Thirteen
1079 Words
Chapter 13 — The Other Side of the Table
Victoria
Daniel Cross agreed to meet me on the condition that Lorenzo wasn't in the room.
I understood why, even if Lorenzo hated it. Some conversations only happen when the
person with power isn't standing close enough to overhear them. I'd built an entire career
on knowing that.
We met at a diner three blocks from my office, the kind of place that hadn't changed its
booths since the eighties and didn't care who you were once you sat down. Daniel was
already there when I arrived, turning a coffee cup in slow circles, looking considerably less
threatening in daylight than he had in my lobby.
"You came alone,
" he said, when I slid into the booth across from him.
"You asked me to.
"
"Most people in your position would have brought security anyway.
"
"Most people in my position haven't read their father's old contracts.
" I set the folder on
the table between us, the one from the archive, and watched something shift behind his
eyes.
"Hayes Logistics. Page four. I want to know what it cost you.
"
Daniel was quiet for a long moment. Then he laughed, short and humorless.
"Everything,
Ms. Hayes. It cost me everything. My firm didn't survive the fallout. My marriage didn't
survive the eighteen months after that. My father died still asking me how I'd let it
happen, and I never had a good enough answer, because the truth is I didn't let it happen
— Marco Valentieri made a decision in a boardroom that protected his family's interests
and not mine, and your father signed off on the paperwork that made it legal.
"
"My father.
"
"Your father knew exactly what that contract did to the smaller partners. He wasn't a
villain. He was a man protecting his own company in a deal that had three losers and two
winners, and he made sure his wasn't one of the losing names.
" Daniel looked at me, and
for the first time I saw something closer to exhaustion than menace.
"I don't blame you for
any of it. I want to be very clear about that. You were eight.
"
"Then why the warnings? Why the photograph? Why work for a woman who's terrorizing
me?"
His jaw tightened.
"Because Isabella found my file before I even knew she was looking. She
knew exactly what Valentieri Maritime cost me, and she offered me something I'd stopped
letting myself want — a chance to be the reason Lorenzo lost something, the way I lost
everything. It wasn't about you specifically. You were just standing where I needed to
aim.
"
The honesty of it landed harder than any threat could have.
"And now?"
"Now I've watched her escalate from paying me to follow a man around a gala to planting
cameras in a stranger's office, and I don't recognize the job anymore.
" He pushed the
coffee cup aside.
"I took her money because I wanted to watch Lorenzo Valentieri lose
something the way I lost everything. I didn't sign up to help a woman stalk someone who
never did anything to either of us.
"
"Are you saying you'll help me?"
"I'm saying I'm tired, Ms. Hayes. And I'm saying Isabella doesn't know that I know she's
moved past surveillance.
" He hesitated, then reached into his jacket and slid a small drive
across the table.
"She's hired someone new. Not a photographer. I don't know everything
yet, but I know enough to tell you that whatever happens next, it isn't going to be another
photograph.
"
I stared at the drive for a long moment before taking it.
"Why give me this?"
Daniel stood, dropping cash on the table for coffee neither of us had finished.
"Because
somewhere between the gala and that folder you just showed me, I stopped being able to
pretend this is about an old contract.
" He paused at the end of the booth.
"Your father
cost me something. I'm not going to let Isabella cost you something worse to balance a
debt that was never really yours to pay.
"
He left before I could answer.
Lorenzo
She called me the moment she left the diner, and I listened to the entire account without
interrupting once, which cost me more discipline than any negotiation I'd ever sat through.
"He gave you a drive,
" I repeated.
"And you haven't opened it yet.
"
"I wanted you with me when I did.
"
Something in my chest loosened at that — not relief, exactly, but something close to it.
She hadn't had to say that. She could have opened it alone, the way she did everything,
and told me the results after the fact. She hadn't.
"I'm sending a car,
" I said.
"I have a car.
"I'm sending mine anyway.
"
She didn't argue, which told me more than her words would have.
While I waited, my phone buzzed with a message from an unfamiliar number. I knew before
I opened it who it was from. Isabella had never bothered hiding behind unknown numbers
before — she wanted me to know exactly who was speaking — but something about this
one felt different. Careful. Deliberate.
You used to tell me no one would ever know you the way I did. I wonder if she knows that
version of you exists at all, or if you've buried him so deep under her that even you've
forgotten.
I read it twice. Then a third time, trying to locate the lie in it, and finding, uncomfortably,
that there wasn't one — not entirely. I had said something like that to her once, in a
different life, before I understood that knowing someone and loving them weren't always
the same thing.
I typed a reply, deleted it, typed another.
Isabella. This ends. Whatever you think you're owed, it isn't her.
The reply came faster than I expected.
Everything is owed to someone, Lorenzo. You taught me that. I'm only collecting.
I set the phone down and stared at it until the screen went dark, and for the first time
since finding Victoria again, I let myself feel the full weight of what I'd started — not with
Daniel, not with the dispute, but years earlier, with a woman I'd left believing something
about us that had never been fully true.
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