Chapter 4
Dylan
The power dies at eleven-fourteen.
I know the exact time because I'm still at my desk, still reviewing merger annexes, and the clock on my laptop freezes mid-second before the screen goes dark.
Then nothing.
The estate settles into a sound that lands wrong — that specific quiet that means the heating system just lost its spine. Backup generators kick in within forty seconds. Lights flicker back, dim and amber. The Wi-Fi stays dead.
I pull on a shirt and walk the hall.
Marcus meets me at the east corridor junction, already holding a status report like he anticipated the walk.
"West wing heating is down," he says. "Boiler relay tripped. Staff have moved to the service quarters — they've got the secondary system. Merger team is consolidated in the east suites."
"All of them?"
"All of them." A pause. "Including Calder. She's been reassigned to the guest suite in your wing."
I look at him.
He looks back, professional, blank.
"Bennett's call," he adds. "Closest available room with working heat."
Of course it was.
I send Marcus back to the security station and walk to the end of the corridor.
Her door is closed. Light under the gap.
I don't knock.
I go back to my room.
She knocks on mine forty minutes later.
I open the door and she's standing there in a grey thermal shirt and dark leggings, hair damp at the ends, a tablet tucked under one arm. No heels. No armor. Just her — and she still manages to look like she owns the hallway.
"The backup router is in your wing," she says. "Bennett told me."
"He's wrong."
"He's not."
I step back. She walks in like she's done it before.
The router is, in fact, in the cabinet beside my desk. I hate that she knew that.
She crouches in front of it, pulls the panel, hits the reset. Her shirt rides up at the back — just an inch. I look away.
"There." She stands. "I need to send two documents before midnight."
"Use it and go."
She sits at the small side table, opens her tablet. I go back to my desk.
We work in silence. I catch myself counting her keystrokes and stop.
"Your father's merger terms are aggressive," she says, not looking up.
"They're designed to be."
"They're designed to intimidate Pierce's team into signing before they've done proper due diligence."
"That's business."
She looks up then. "That's a liability."
I set my pen down. "You're going to lecture me on liability at midnight."
"I'm going to put it in my report at midnight. I thought you'd prefer a preview."
I stand up. I'm not sure why. Some instinct that says let her sit while I'm standing, let me have that much.
She doesn't flinch. She watches me cross the room and stop at the edge of the table, arms crossed, waiting for her to back down.
She doesn't.
"You push a lot," I say.
"You notice a lot." She tilts her head. "Is that a Vale trait, or just yours?"
"Careful."
"You keep saying that." She closes the tablet. "I haven't been careful once and nothing's happened."
Wrong.
Plenty has happened. None of it visible.
The lamp on the desk throws everything gold and shadow. Her hair is still damp. There's a small mark on her collarbone — not a bruise, just the press of something, the strap of a bag maybe — and I have no business noticing it.
"You should go," I say.
She stands.
She's closer than I thought. Or I moved without deciding to. Either way, there's less than two feet of air between us and it feels like nothing at all.
She looks up at me. Steady. That infuriating steadiness.
"Dylan."
My name in her mouth is a problem. It always sounds like a challenge.
"Don't," I say.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing everything."
Something shifts in her expression — not softness, not quite. More like recognition. Like she filed this moment under a category she already had open.
My hand moves before I decide to let it. Fingertips at her jaw. Just that. Just the line of it, the warmth of her skin, and I watch her breath catch and she lets me watch it.
Her eyes close for one second.
One.
Then they open and she says, quietly, "This is a bad idea."
"Yes."
"We work together."
"Yes."
"You don't even trust me."
I tip her chin up. "No."
She exhales — not a sigh, something shorter, sharper — and then my mouth is at her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, not kissing — close. Pressure and heat and her hands finding the front of my shirt without deciding to.
I walk her back two steps until her shoulders meet the wall.
She doesn't resist. She pulls.
My hands slide under the hem of her shirt — both palms flat against her waist — and she makes a sound low in her throat that undoes something in my chest. I press my mouth to her neck.
She arches into it. Her fingers curl into my shirt and I feel her pulse fast against my ribs — the most honest thing she's given me.
"Dylan—"
"Still here," I say against her throat.
Her head tips back. My hands move up her sides, learning the shape of her, and she shivers once — a small thing she tries to suppress.
I catch it.
I let my thumbs trace the underside of her ribs. She exhales against my shoulder, and for one moment every angle she carries just — drops. No strategy. No armor.
Just her.
I pull back enough to see her face.
Her eyes open. Dark, wanting, wary.
There it is.
She's not as steady as she wants me to think. And she knows I know it now.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand.
We both hear it.
She straightens first. Smooths her shirt with both hands. Her expression rebuilds faster than I expect and I hate how good she is at that.
I cross to where my phone is and check the screen.
Dad. Incoming call.
I answer it.
"Dylan." His voice is flat, measured. The voice he uses when something is already decided. "I've been reviewing the Calder hire."
I keep my back to Lexy. "It's late."
"This won't take long." A pause — the kind he uses for effect. "Do not trust her. She's there for something else."
The line goes quiet.
I turn around.
Lexy is already at the door, tablet under her arm, barefoot, composed.
She doesn't look back.
The door closes with a soft, final click.
I don't move.
My father's voice is still in the air. Her warmth is still on my hands. Both things are true at the same time and I don't know what to do with that.
She's there for something else.
I replay the last hour. The router. The documents. The way she walked in like she'd already mapped the room. The way she argued about the merger terms at midnight like it was her empire on the line, not mine.
The way her pulse went fast under my hands.
That part I can't file anywhere useful.
I sit on the edge of the desk. The lamp is still on. The side table where she worked still has the ghost of her — a ring from her water glass, a dent in the chair cushion. I'm cataloguing evidence like she does, and I hate that I've picked up the habit.
What does she want?
The question sits wrong. Not because I don't have answers — I have too many. She wants the merger terms softened. She wants access to the Foundation Years archive. She wants something from the past that she hasn't named yet.
But she also turned into my hands like she'd been waiting to.
That's the part my father's logic doesn't account for. The shiver she tried to swallow. The exhale against my shoulder, small and unguarded, nothing strategic about it.
Unless it was.
I push off the desk and walk to the window. Snow against black. The gate at the end of the drive, locked now, its light blinking red and steady.
She's trapped here. So am I.
My father doesn't call twice. When he says do not trust, he means he already knows the reason and has decided I don't need to. That's how he's always operated. Information as control. Trust as a thing he dispenses or withholds.
The problem is I've spent my whole life following that logic.
The other problem is I'm not sure I want to anymore.
I look at the closed door.
Her warmth is fading off my hands. My father's voice isn't.
And for the first time, I think my father might be right about her — and I'm going to need her to prove him wrong.