Chapter 2 Cracks in the Armor

I don't lose.

It's not arrogance. It's simply a fact, the same way gravity is a fact, the same way Kane Industries being the most powerful corporation on the East Coast is a fact. Some things simply are, and I am a man who wins.

Always.

So why was I standing in my office, loosening my tie like the room had suddenly run out of air?

I turned away from the window and poured two fingers of whiskey from the decanter on my shelf. Didn't drink it. Just held the glass, stared into it, and tried to locate the part of myself that had walked into that office upstairs expecting to find a ghost, and instead found something far more dangerous.

Aria Sinclair.

No. She had corrected me.

Miss Sinclair.

I set the glass down harder than I intended.

Marcus was already in my office when I turned around. My CFO, my oldest friend, and the only man on earth I permitted to enter without knocking. He was leaning against the edge of my desk with his arms folded and the expression he reserved specifically for situations he found entertaining at my expense.

"I heard it went well," he said.

"Who told you that?"

"Lily. Also the three associates on the 40th floor who watched you walk out of the new VP's office looking like you'd seen a ghost." He tilted his head. "Had you? Seen a ghost?"

"She's not a ghost." I moved to my chair and sat down. "She's a problem."

"She's the best marketing strategist the board has hired in six years. Her campaign for Voss & Reid increased their revenue by 40% in under a year." Marcus paused. "You did read her portfolio before you decided to hate her, right?"

I didn't answer.

He already knew the answer.

"Ethan." His voice shifted, quieter now. The voice he used when he stopped being amused and started being serious. "It's been three years. Whatever happened between you two,"

"Nothing happened."

The lie came automatically. Smoothly. The way all my lies did, dressed up so well they almost fooled even me.

Marcus looked at me for a long moment. "Right," he said finally. "Nothing happened. That's why you've had her photo"

"Marcus."

He stopped.

I held his gaze until he uncrossed his arms and straightened up.

"She's an employee," I said. "I want her performance monitored. Every campaign, every decision, every meeting she takes. I want reports."

"You want me to spy on the VP of Marketing."

"I want due diligence on a new executive."

He stared at me. Then he sighed, the long, suffering sigh of a man who had been watching me make bad decisions for twenty years and had accepted it as his cross to bear.

"Fine," he said. "But Ethan, just talk to her."

"Get out, Marcus."

He got out.

I didn't look at the photo.

I want to be clear about that. I am not the kind of man who keeps photographs. Sentiment is weakness, and weakness is something I was taught to cut out of myself before I was old enough to understand what the word meant. My father had been very thorough about that particular lesson.

So I didn't look at the photo.

I just happened to open the bottom left drawer of my desk to retrieve a contract, and it happened to be there, small, slightly worn at the edges, face down the way I'd placed it the night I decided looking at it was doing me no good.

I closed the drawer.

Opened it again.

Took the photo out.

She was laughing in it, the kind of laugh that takes over your whole face, unguarded and real, the kind she only ever did when she thought no one important was watching. It had been taken at the Kane Industries rooftop garden, three summers ago, at the staff anniversary event. She hadn't known I was the one who took it. She'd been talking to one of the interns about something, gesturing with her hands the way she always did when she was excited, her hair loose around her shoulders.

I had looked at her across that rooftop and felt something I had no language for.

I had still let her go.

My jaw tightened.

I placed the photo face down again, closed the drawer, and picked up the contract I'd originally reached for.

Business. That's all this was. A complication to be managed.

Aria Sinclair was back, and she clearly had an agenda. The calculated entrance, the deliberate coolness, the way she had looked at me, or rather, the way she had not looked at me, like I was simply a minor inconvenience in an otherwise well-structured day.

That bothered me more than I would admit to anyone.

The Aria I remembered had never been able to hide what she felt. She was an open book, warm, honest, occasionally too trusting for her own good. That was what I had,

I stopped the thought before it finished forming.

The woman upstairs was not that Aria. She had walked into my building like she was the one who built it. She had sat behind that desk like she'd been sitting there for years. She had dismissed me, dismissed me, with a politeness so sharp it left marks.

What had happened to her in three years?

What had I done to her?

Stop.

I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.

I needed to focus. The Harrington acquisition was closing next week. The board was already nervous about the new VP appointment, particularly because they hadn't consulted me before making it, a slight I intended to address at the next meeting. There were seventeen things on my agenda that required my attention before noon.

Aria Sinclair was not on the agenda.

My intercom buzzed.

"Mr. Kane." Lily's voice, tentative as always. "Miss Sinclair has requested access to the Q3 marketing data and the client portfolio files."

My hand stilled on the desk.

"She's been here three hours," I said.

"Yes, sir. She also asked me to remind you, and I'm quoting directly here, that the board granted her full executive access, and any delays in data sharing will be logged as obstruction and reported at the next quarterly review."

The silence in my office was absolute.

Three hours.

She had been here three hours and she was already using board protocol against me.

I leaned back in my chair, and despite everything, despite the whiskey I hadn't touched and the photo I shouldn't have looked at and the unfinished sentence I refused to let myself finish, I felt something unexpected move through my chest.

Something that felt dangerously close to admiration.

"Send her the files," I said.

"Yes, sir. Also, she sent this." A pause. "It's a coffee. From the 40th floor kitchen. She said, and again I'm quoting, 'He looked tense. Colleagues look out for each other.'"

I stared at the intercom.

A coffee.

She had sent me a coffee.

I didn't know if it was an olive branch or a chess move, and that uncertainty, that rare, unfamiliar uncertainty, was more unsettling than anything else she had done today.

"Leave it outside," I said.

I waited until Lily's footsteps faded. Then I got up, opened my office door, picked up the coffee, and went back inside.

I told myself it was just coffee.

I almost believed it.

That night, long after the building emptied and the Manhattan skyline turned to a scatter of lights, I stood at my window with my jacket off and my sleeves rolled up and the unanswered question sitting in my chest like something I couldn't dislodge.

Why did you come back, Aria?

And underneath that, quieter, the one I refused to say out loud:

Is it too late to make it right?

I didn't have answers.

But tomorrow, I decided, I would find them.

One way or another.

END OF CHAPTER 2