Damien's POV
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I had made a mistake.
I realized it approximately four minutes into the board meeting when Sienna Vale opened her mouth for the first time and I understood — with complete, uncomfortable clarity — that giving her that folder was not the calculated move I had told myself it was.
It was something else.
Something I didn't have a clean word for.
And I did not like things I didn't have clean words for.
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The meeting had started the way I planned. My team presented. The numbers were solid. The merger terms were airtight — or they should have been. I had reviewed them personally three times.
Then Sienna started asking questions.
Not aggressive questions. Not emotional ones. She didn't raise her voice or make accusations or do any of the things people did when they were fighting from a place of desperation. She asked quiet, precise, surgical questions in a tone so calm it took the room a full beat to realize each one was a blade going directly through the center of our argument.
Clause seven of the letter of intent — she identified a ratification gap in four minutes that my legal team had missed entirely.
The projected asset valuation — she found an averaging method we had used that was technically legal but selectively applied, and she named the exact regulation that made it challengeable.
The timeline for share transfer — she pointed out a fourteen-day window that the merger terms skipped over entirely, which created a procedural void that could be used to pause the whole process.
Fourteen days. We had missed fourteen days.
I watched my legal team shift in their seats. Watched them make notes with the particular energy of people writing down things they wished they had caught first.
She had been back in this city for less than forty-eight hours.
She had clearly been preparing for this for much longer than that.
I sat at the opposite end of the table and I listened to her and I kept my face exactly where I always kept it — neutral, unreadable, giving nothing — and I thought about a bar three years ago where a woman in a white mask had sat beside me and said, some names are traps. The ones we're born into especially. And I had asked her what she meant and she had looked at her drink and said, it means I'm done letting mine decide who I am.
I had thought about that sentence more times than I would ever admit to anyone.
I looked at Sienna across the length of the table.
She was not looking at me. She was looking at my legal team, walking them through her third challenge with the focused patience of someone who had rehearsed this moment a hundred times and was now simply executing it.
She was magnificent.
That was the problem.
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We went three rounds on a single clause. She did not blink. I matched her point for point and she came back each time from a slightly different angle, which meant she had prepared multiple routes to the same destination — the mark of someone who expected to be blocked and planned accordingly.
Two of my board-side members had stopped looking confident.
I made a note to speak with them after.
When the formal session ended and people began to move around the room, I watched her stay in her seat. Head down. Going through her notes. Not performing composure — actually composed. There was a difference and she was the second person I had ever met who genuinely had it.
The first was my mother, before my father finished the job of reducing her.
Julian appeared at my left shoulder.
"She's good," he said.
I picked up my folder. "She's a problem."
Julian said nothing. His expression, however, said a considerable amount. It said: I know you know she's more than a problem. I know you've been watching her for two hours with an attention level you don't give to things that are simply professional problems. I know something, Damien, and I am waiting with great patience for you to tell me what it is.
I walked out before his expression could finish its sentence.
-
In the corridor I called my father.
He answered on the third ring. "How was the meeting?"
"She challenged the letter of intent on ratification grounds," I said. "She found the fourteen-day gap."
A pause. "Your team will handle it."
"My team missed it in the first place." I kept my voice level. "I need to know what else you've built into this situation that I don't know about. The Paine filing. The shell account. All of it."
Another pause. Longer.
"I protect our interests," my father said. "That's what I've always done."
"You paid Robert Vale's personal lawyer to file against his own client's daughter," I said quietly. "That's not protecting interests. That's building a trap. I want to know who the trap is for."
Silence.
"Come to dinner tonight," he said. "We'll talk properly."
He hung up.
I stood in the corridor and looked at my phone and understood, with a cold certainty that settled in my chest like something heavy, that my father was not going to tell me everything at dinner. He was going to tell me what he wanted me to know, in the order he wanted me to know it, shaped in the way that served his purpose.
That was how he operated.
It was how he had always operated.
I turned back toward the boardroom. Through the glass panel in the door I could see Sienna still at the table. Julian had given her the folder — I had watched from the corridor. I had watched her open it. I had watched her go very still.
Now she was on her phone. Her free hand was flat on the table. Something about the set of her shoulders told me the name on page four had landed exactly as hard as I thought it would.
My phone buzzed.
Julian. A text.
"She just called someone. Not her lawyer. Personal call. She said four words before she walked out of the room."
I typed back. "What four words."
His reply came in seconds.
"Is Leo with you."
I read it.
Read it again.
Leo.
The boy in the airport photograph. Three years old. No father on record.
Something that had been sitting at the back of my mind for two days — quiet, patient, waiting — moved forward.
Three years ago. The masked bar. A woman who left before morning and never came back.
Three years ago.
I did the math.
I stood very still in that corridor for a long time.
Then I called Julian.
"Find out everything there is to know about Leo Vale," I said. "Everything. Date of birth. Hospital records. Anything accessible. Do it quietly and do it now."
I hung up.
My hand was not shaking.
But it wanted to.