Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER FIVE

AVA

I was still turning it over in my head the next morning — what he hadn't said, what silence like that was supposed to mean — when the elevator chimed at an hour no one had warned me to expect visitors.

I was in the kitchen, still in yesterday's leftover exhaustion, watching a member of the household staff arrange a fruit bowl with more precision than the task seemed to require. Her name was Nadia. She'd told me so the night before, the only person in this apartment who'd bothered to introduce herself.

The doors opened, and a man I didn't need introduced walked out like he owned the floor beneath his feet, because in every way that mattered, he did.

He was older than I expected. Silver hair combed back with the same precision as everything else in this building, a cane in one hand that he didn't lean on so much as hold, like a prop he'd decided suited him. His eyes were the same pale blue as Ethan's, except where Ethan's held something guarded, this man's held nothing at all. No warmth to withhold in the first place.

"You must be Arthur," I said, because someone had to say something, and no one else in the room seemed inclined to.

He looked at me the way you'd look at a line item on a report you hadn't finished reading yet. "Ava. Yes. I've heard a great deal."

"All good things, I'm sure."

"I wouldn't go that far."

Nadia set the fruit bowl down and moved to pour him coffee without being asked, her hands quick and practiced. She got the ratio wrong — too much cream, not enough of it — and Arthur's mouth tightened at the first sip.

"This is unacceptable," he said, not to her directly, but loud enough that there was no version of the room where she didn't hear it. "I've told Ethan a dozen times the staff here needs proper training. It's not complicated. Cream to coffee. Anyone with functioning hands should manage it."

Nadia's face didn't change. That was the part that unsettled me — not his tone, which was almost bored, but the fact that she didn't react at all, like this was simply weather she'd learned to dress for.

"I can remake it," she said quietly, already reaching for the cup.

"Don't bother. I'll have it at the office, where it's done correctly."

He said it like her effort had been the inconvenience, not his complaint. Nadia nodded and disappeared toward the kitchen without another word, and something in my chest went tight and airless in a way I didn't examine too closely, because examining it would have meant admitting how much it reminded me of every time my father had apologized for asking too much of anyone.

"You didn't need to say that to her," I said, before I could stop myself.

Arthur's gaze slid to me slowly, like he was recalculating something. "You have opinions about how I speak to my staff."

"I have opinions about how anyone speaks to people who are just trying to do their job."

"How refreshing." His voice carried no heat, which somehow made it worse. "Ethan didn't mention you had spirit."

"Ethan doesn't know most things about me yet."

"No," Arthur agreed, setting his cup down without finishing it. "I imagine he doesn't."

Ethan appeared then, from the direction of his office, still buttoning a cuff, his expression settling into the same careful neutrality I recognized from the wedding — the face he wore when he needed to manage a room instead of exist in it.

"Father. I didn't know you were coming."

"I don't schedule visits to my own building, Ethan."

"It's not your building anymore."

Something flickered across Arthur's face — brief, cold, gone. "A technicality."

They spoke for a while after that, mostly business, mostly words I didn't have the context to follow — stock movements, a board meeting, some reference to Julian Vance's name that made Ethan's jaw tighten in a way I filed away without understanding why. I stood at the edge of it, aware that I was being tolerated rather than included, until Arthur said something that landed strangely enough that I remembered it word for word.

"Sentiment is a liability, Ethan. It always has been. Don't let this—" a small, dismissive gesture in my direction, like I was a line item too "—confuse you about that."

Ethan didn't answer him. He didn't defend me either.

I told myself it didn't matter what a stranger's father thought of me. I told myself that all the way until Arthur turned to leave, cane tapping once against the marble floor, and stopped at the elevator doors before they closed around him.

He looked back at me. Just once. Just for a second.

It wasn't the look of a man assessing a stranger, or even a man disapproving of his son's choices. It was something else entirely — something that made the back of my neck go cold in a way I couldn't explain and didn't want to try to. Recognition, maybe. Or the specific kind of dread that comes from seeing something you thought you'd already buried.

Then the doors closed, and he was gone, and the penthouse went quiet in a way that felt different from before he'd arrived.

"What was that?" I asked Ethan.

"What was what?"

"The way he looked at me. Just now."

Ethan's expression didn't change, but something behind it did — some door closing that I hadn't even known was open.

"I don't know," he said, and I didn't believe him, and worse, I don't think he entirely believed himself either.

"He doesn't like me," I said. "That much I understood."

"My father doesn't like anyone. Don't take it personally."

"That wasn't dislike, Ethan. Dislike doesn't look like that."

He didn't ask what I meant. That, more than anything else, told me he already had some idea, and had decided not to share it with me.

I thought about Nadia, disappearing into the kitchen without a word of complaint, absorbing an unkindness she hadn't earned because it was easier than pushing back against a man who clearly expected no resistance from anyone beneath him. I thought about my own father, soft-spoken and passive, apologizing to creditors for problems he hadn't caused. I understood, suddenly and uncomfortably, exactly what kind of household had built the man standing in front of me — and exactly how much of himself Ethan had learned to keep locked away just to survive it.

"Does he visit often?" I asked.

"Not often enough to matter," Ethan said, which wasn't really an answer, and we both seemed to understand that and let it go anyway.

He went back to his office without another word. I stood by the window for a long time afterward, watching the city do whatever it did below us, and I couldn't shake the cold, specific feeling that Arthur Van Doren hadn't looked at a stranger in his son's kitchen that morning.

He had looked at someone he recognized.