[Narrated: 3rd limited, adjacent to Theo's perspective]
So Yoshitaka Yamamoto was coming to London, and Larssen secured them a dinner this Friday – Bells announced that evening when her and Theo sat down to a meal.
Wait, what?
The Yamamoto. The Moby Dick they'd been chasing for years. God only knew how Larssens even made it onto their radar. It started about two years ago – just when him and Bells began going out. A minor engagement. Jude wanted her looped in.
Theo still remembered when they worked on that project. Larssen gathering the team for an all-hands twice a week, spouting some BS about how they were "building something special," late nights that became early mornings for several months. A lifestyle that left no room for anything - or anyone - outside "the circle." They nearly broke up over it.
Theo watched her cancel dinners, cut weekends short, take calls at odd hours that she'd step out of the room to answer. Her attention – once a gilt-edged bond he'd taken for granted – suddenly a volatile commodity, fluctuating wildly based on Larssen's demands.
"He got you a dinner meeting with the CEO himself?" he asked, knife hovering over his steak, the meat bleeding pink into the white porcelain. Just to ensure he'd heard this right.
"I know… It's pretty impressive, isn't it?" Bells replied, her eyes sparkling with a excitement that sent a pang through Theo's chest. A spark of admiration there, bright and dangerous. It felt like watching your portfolio manager develop feelings for a competitor's pitch.
Theo didn't like it one bit but knew better than to express it. He cut into his steak with more force than necessary, the knife scraping against bone china.
"Very. It is a wonder how he'd done it." A touch of suspicion slipped through his tone despite his best efforts at neutrality.
"Jude has his ways…" she said, smiling, looking down at her plate, picking at food with her fork gently, dreamily.
Indeed, Larssen had "his ways". Theo knew all about the rather distinct office culture there from her stories. The way Larssen kept his staff working in concentric circles with him at the center like a corporate cult leader. Investment funds had hierarchy - clear chains of command, defined roles, partnership tracks you could see coming from miles away. Proper structure. Transparent valuations. But Larssens operated differently. "More organic", Bells had said once. "Collaborative."
Collaborative. Right. The way a spider's web was collaborative with the flies.
"Yamamoto's a big fish for you – what's their turnover now?" He kept his voice casual, conversational, the tone he used when pricing assets he suspected were overvalued.
"¥1.66 trillion for the general trading company reported this year." Bells said, seemingly ecstatic, sitting up straighter. "200,000 employees around the globe. That European expansion really was the right move for them, nearly doubled their revenue in the last five years."
Theo chewed slowly, letting the information settle like spoilt caviar in his stomach.
What fucking business did a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate – the kind of firm that made Watson's Investment Fund look like a corner shop – have with Larssen's scrappy 5-year-old tech consulting gig? A start-up with a hundred employees playing dress-up in the big leagues.
Theo was already baffled when Larssen secured their first project with them, but this – a dinner with the legendary owner-CEO?
It violated every principle of market logic he understood. Blue-chip conglomerates didn't take meetings with boutique consultancies. Not unless something else was on the table.
"You know Jude has big plans…" Bells continued, unperturbed by Theo's tense silence. "He wants us to be the preferred tech consulting vendor for Europe and to secure a framework agreement."
Framework agreement. The words landed like a prospectus for a ponzi scheme.
"Yes, you've mentioned before…" Theo replied, reluctant, reaching for his wine glass. The Bordeaux was excellent – a 2015 Pauillac his father had recommended – but it tasted bitter tonight. "That's… very ambitious of him."
She laughed, and for a moment his chest loosened. Perhaps she was not as tragically invested as Theo had feared.
Perhaps she could still see the absurdity, the hubris, the fundamental miscalculation of a man punching so far above his weight class he'd need oxygen.
"I thought he was mildly deluded but you know… With this dinner on the horizon now… Who knows. He might just get us there."
And there it was. His hopes liquidated.
"You know if he does… Or perhaps when…"
Perhaps when? As if this was inevitable? As if Larssen manifesting a billion-pound contract through sheer audacity was the expected outcome rather than statistical impossibility?
"It will turbocharge Larssens overnight – not 100 heads, but a thousand at least. Multiple offices. Perhaps even abroad – maybe one in Tokyo so we're close to the Yamamoto headquarters." Her voice had taken on a breathless quality, the one his brokers used when describing portfolio gains during bull markets.
Theo listened to this, eyes widening at the scale of the delusion. At the speculative madness of it.
Larssen was selling her futures that didn't exist, and she was buying them like a first-time investor convinced they'd found the next Amazon.
"And you know what he said to me, too?" she uttered.
"What did he say, darling?" he asked as politely as he could muster, though the endearment felt like pushing chips across the table on a losing hand.
"He'd make me COO if we get it." The words tumbled out quickly now, confession and excitement blurred together. "I didn't tell you before because it just seemed so far-fetched but now…"
But now it was STILL very much far-fetched, Theo thought savagely, knife and fork grinding against his plate with considerable force.
But he bit his tongue. The metallic taste of restraint. Instead he smiled politely, chewing his food slowly, mechanically, each swallow an act of discipline. Like sitting through a pitch meeting for a venture you knew would bankrupt everyone involved but couldn't say so without appearing jealous, petty, threatened.
COO. Chief Operating Officer of a fantasy. A title that existed only in Larssen's imagination and Bells' growing conviction that this man could rewrite market fundamentals through force of personality.
Theo watched her across the table, the woman he loved, the woman who wore his ring, overweighting her position in Larssen's speculative venture. And he was powerless to stop it. You couldn't argue someone out of a position they'd reasoned themselves into emotionally.
[Narrated: 3rd limited, adjacent to Bells' perspective]
When they had finished their dinner, Bells left the table almost immediately. Her chair scraped back, the sound harsh against hardwood floors.
"Do you mind doing the dishes, honey?" she said, glancing back at Theo briefly. Not even a full look. "I really need to go over our past work for them and Yamamoto company data. Friday's just around the corner."
She saw Theo nod, understanding painted on his face.
"Of course," he said, smiled.
Her mother's voice echoed somewhere in the back of her mind, gentle and persistent as always:
"Your Theo Belly, he is always so gentle, accommodating and kind. You truly lucked out when he asked you out."
Penny, her sister, couldn't help but compliment Theo's build and handsome features each time she saw them. Yes, Bells was a lucky woman.
She should remember this. Should appreciate him the way she ought to.
Yet some things about her Theo just didn't get. Not the way Jude seemed to, without her ever needing to articulate them.
Theo had asked her constantly to just... leave. Get a normal job. Nine-to-five. Clear boundaries. He even offered to arrange her a role at Watsons.
As if it was that simple. As she hasn't built something at Larssens that mattered.
She hired Jack when he was fresh out of university, terrified and brilliant. Now he's running the engineering division. She convinced Jake not to quit after his divorce, and now he was their highest-performing analyst. She brought Keith over from Deloitte when everyone said he was washed up, past his prime, too set in big-firm ways to adapt. Last month he closed the biggest deal in company history.
These were PEOPLE. Real careers. Real lives she shaped. You don't just walk away from that because your boyfriend thinks you're working too much.
Anywhere else she'd just be another cog in the machine, at Larssens she was the keystone species.
And Jude… Yes, he was intense.
Yes, he would text at midnight asking her to urgently send over some report he'd have her prepare. Yes, he didn't understand that normal humans needed sleep and meals and the occasional weekend – not in the "peak times" especially. Yes, he could be rude, cruel in small ways he pretended were jokes. He would frame client data and corporate narratives in ways bordering unlawful. Unbearable in his arrogance, reframing his mistakes as strategic pivots.
But that was not all he was.
He was the smartest person she had ever worked with. Possibly the smartest she knew, though she'd never tell Theo that.
The only man who had never underestimated her – not when she joined - a young pretty female, bright but still clueless – certainly not now.
He gave her impossible problems and trusted her to solve them. He would ask her "what do you think?" and actually LISTENED to the answer. And when he spoke about the business - breaking down complex problems into their principal components, seeing patterns no one else caught - that competence was intoxicating.
He could be devastatingly charming when he wanted to be, composed under pressure that made other men sweat, darkly humorous in ways that caught her off guard.
Also, it helped that he was… So easy to look at.
Theo was so proud of himself for doing the few years at Golman before stepping into the director's position at Watson's Investment Fund.
As if it wasn't his father that got him that Goldman interview in the first place.
His family name opened doors. Not that he needed them opened so much with the CEO position at the fund available as soon as his father decided to retire – which Bells suspected would be soon.
The path had been paved before Theo ever walked it. Smoothed, polished, guaranteed.
Jude built his company from nothing to what it was now. Jude met her when she was a nobody. A consultant from a mid-tier firm working alongside Larssens on a government contract. And he SAW something, told her to "step out of the golden cage and join him in at a place where real innovation happens."
Ever since, he had built something around her. With her.
That kind of trust? That kind of partnership? You don't find that at Goldman fucking Sachs. Not at Watson's.
And yes, things were tense between them now, with his awards love confession. The sex. Her subsequent engagement to Theo. The physical attraction, the magnetic pull toward each other, complicating matters. But they could push through this.
She sat down at her desk, the chair exhaling beneath her weight, and started wading through data. All the work they'd done for Yamamoto previously. What had been in the news lately. Publicly available financial statements. Anything she could get her hands on, really.
She texted Jude.
"You'd better be prepping"
He replied.
"That's what you're for. Do a deck for tomorrow will you"
She sighed. With relief. There it was. That old tone - annoying, smug, familiar. The kind that made her want to fight him and impress him in equal measure.
She opened a blank slide.
The rhythm was back. The shorthand. The dangerous alignment of two people who played off each other, turning friction into momentum. A truce, for now.
Her fingers moved across the keyboard with practiced efficiency, pulling up documents, cross-referencing dates, building the architecture of understanding that Jude would expect her to have internalised by morning - and she would. This was what she was good at.
And damn it, she'd missed this. The thrill of it.
She'd missed him even more.