THE RUTHLESS BILLIONAIRE

Chapter 3

The words hung in the air between us, and I couldn't make sense of them.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." Damian didn't repeat himself, didn't soften it. He just watched me, that same steady, unreadable attention, like he was waiting to see what I'd do with what he'd said.

I opened my mouth to deny it, to give him the same automatic *I'm fine* I'd given Eli last night. But something about the way he looked at me made the words stick in my throat.

The elevator chimed. The doors slid open on the executive floor, and whatever moment had just happened between us dissolved into the noise of a Monday morning—phones ringing, someone laughing too loud near the coffee station, the hum of a dozen conversations layered on top of each other.

Damian stepped out first. He didn't wait for me or offer a parting comment. He just walked, and the entire floor seemed to shift around him, people straightening at their desks, voices dropping half a register.

I'd worked at Graves International for eight months, and in that time I'd seen Damian Graves maybe a handful of times, always from a distance—striding through the lobby, sealed inside a glass conference room, a name people said with a kind of careful respect that bordered on fear. I'd never actually spoken to him. Not once. Not until an elevator ride that had somehow seen straight through me.

I made it to my desk with maybe four minutes to spare before the department meeting. I was still trying to steady my hands around my coffee cup when Marcus Webb appeared beside my desk, arms crossed, his tie a little too tight around his neck the way it always got when he was about to make someone else's morning worse than his own.

"Serena." He said my name like an accusation. "The Kessler contract meeting. It was supposed to be moved to nine, not ten. I told you this."

"You didn't." My stomach dropped anyway, that old instinct to apologize first and figure out the truth later. "I have the email, Marcus. It says ten."

"I sent a follow-up."

"I never got a follow-up."

"Well, someone dropped the ball, and it wasn't me." He was already turning, already raising his voice enough that a few nearby desks looked up. "Now I've got three board members waiting in an empty room because—"

"What's the issue here?"

The voice cut through the air like a blade through paper. Marcus went still. I turned, and there was Damian, standing just outside his office door, jacket still buttoned, eyes moving from Marcus to me and back again.

"Sir." Marcus straightened, some of the color leaving his face. "Just a scheduling mix-up. Nothing that concerns—"

"It concerns me if you're raising your voice on my floor." Damian's tone didn't change, didn't rise, and somehow that made it worse for Marcus than if he'd shouted. "What time was the meeting scheduled for?"

"Ten," Marcus said. Then, quieter, "Originally."

"And was that time changed in writing?"

"I sent a follow-up email—"

"Did Miss Vale receive it?"

Marcus hesitated, and in that hesitation, I watched him realize he didn't actually know. "I—I assumed—"

"Don't assume when you can check." Damian's eyes flicked to me, brief, almost nothing. "Pull the email trail before you decide whose fault it is. If the meeting needs to be moved, move it. Don't make a scene over something you haven't confirmed."

Marcus opened his mouth, closed it, and mumbled something that might have been an apology before retreating toward his own desk like a man trying to disappear.

I stood there, coffee cup still in hand, feeling strangely exposed now that the confrontation had ended in my favor instead of against me. No one had ever done that before, not like that—not calm, not loud, just a quiet insistence on facts before blame.

"Thank you," I said, before I could stop myself.

Damian looked at me a beat longer than necessary. "I don't like guessing when the truth is available." Then he turned and walked back into his office, and the door closed behind him with a soft, final click.

I went back to my desk, but I couldn't focus. My mind kept drifting—to the hospital's twenty-four-hour deadline, to Eli's face last night when he'd said *someone already paid part of it,* to the folder with my photograph that Daniel had snatched off that table before I could reach it. I typed the same line of a report three times and deleted it three times, unable to make the words mean anything.

At two o'clock, my desk phone rang. Damian's assistant asked me to come up.

I smoothed my blazer, told myself it was probably about the Kessler mix-up, and walked the short distance to his office with my heart going faster than the situation should have warranted.

His office was exactly what I expected and somehow nothing like it—floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the city, a desk with almost nothing on it except a laptop and a single closed folder, and Damian himself standing near the window instead of sitting behind the desk, hands in his pockets, watching the skyline as if it owed him something.

"You wanted to see me," I said, when he didn't turn right away.

"Sit down."

I sat, bracing for whatever criticism I'd earned without knowing it.

Instead, he turned from the window and studied me for a moment before he spoke. "How is your mother doing?"

The question landed wrong, off-balance, like a step I hadn't expected on a familiar staircase. "I'm sorry?"

"Your mother." He said it plainly, like it was an ordinary thing to ask. "She's undergoing cancer treatment. I understand the costs have been high."

My mouth went dry. "How do you know that?"

"And your brother," he continued, as if I hadn't spoken, "Eli. He survived leukemia three years ago. The treatment left considerable debt."

"Mr. Graves." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, fear creeping in under the confusion. "Why do you know any of that?"

He didn't answer right away. He watched me instead, that same unreadable expression from the elevator, like he was deciding how much of the truth I could hold.

"I don't enter agreements without understanding the risks," he said finally.

"What agreement?" My pulse picked up. "I don't understand what that means. I work for you. That's the only agreement between us."

"For now."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Whatever he might have said next, I never found out, because his phone buzzed against the desk, and something in his expression shifted the moment he looked at the screen—a tightening around his eyes, subtle but unmistakable.

He answered without excusing himself, his voice going low and clipped. "When." A pause. "Where." Another pause, longer this time, his jaw setting hard. "Increase security on the building. All entrances. I want a report by end of day."

He ended the call and stood there a moment, silent, some private calculation happening behind his eyes that I wasn't invited into.

"Mr. Graves?"

"Someone's been asking questions about you," he said, not quite looking at me now. "That's all I can tell you."

"Asking questions—what kind of questions? To whom?"

"That's all I can tell you," he repeated, and the door on the conversation closed as firmly as it had opened. "You should get back to your desk, Miss Vale."

I left his office with more questions than I'd walked in with, my mind spinning through everything—the folder at the restaurant, the debt someone had mysteriously paid off, and now this, my own boss reciting details about my family that I'd never once mentioned to him.

---

By the time I left Graves International that evening, the sky had gone dark early, streetlights flickering on along the avenue as I walked toward the subway station six blocks away.

I noticed the car almost by accident—a dark sedan, idling at the corner as I passed, then pulling slowly into traffic behind me.

I told myself it was nothing. New York was full of cars. I kept walking and turned left at the next block out of habit, not suspicion.

The sedan turned left too.

My heart started beating faster. I crossed the street without using the crosswalk, cutting between two parked cars, and glanced back in time to see the sedan slow, then ease into the turn lane, following.

I picked up my pace, weaving toward the busier avenue two blocks ahead where the sidewalks were crowded with people leaving work, restaurant lights spilling gold onto the pavement.

I turned onto that crowded street and let myself get swallowed into the flow of pedestrians, my breath coming quickly, my hands shaking around the strap of my bag.

When I finally dared to look back, the sedan was gone.

I stood there a moment, catching my breath, telling myself I'd imagined it all, that exhaustion and stress had turned an ordinary car into something sinister.

Then my phone rang.

Unknown number.

I almost didn't answer. Something in me—some instinct built from the last twenty-four hours—told me to answer anyway.

"Hello?"

Silence on the other end, just for a second. Then a voice, distorted, mechanical, impossible to place as male or female, young or old.

"Tell your father to stop talking."

The line went dead before I could say a word.

I stood frozen on the crowded sidewalk, phone still pressed to my ear, people moving around me like water around a stone.

I hadn't spoken to Richard in weeks. I didn't even know where he was.

So why did whoever just called know about him at all?