Chapter Two #2
He was gone before Damon could answer, which was, Damon reflected walking back to his office, a skill Julian had honed over a lifetime of saying the thing designed to sit in a person's chest the longest.
Priya was waiting with a coffee that was actually warm this time and a look that meant she had questions she wasn't going to ask unless invited to.
"How did it go," she said, which was as close as she came to asking directly.
"She needs to think about it." Damon sat, pulled his laptop toward him, and didn't open it. "Forty eight hours."
"And if she says no?"
"Then we find someone else." He said it the way he'd said it to Elena, flat, procedural, a fact laid on a table. It felt different saying it out loud a second time, in a room without her in it. Less true, somehow, though he couldn't have said why.
Priya didn't push, which was one of several reasons he trusted her more than nearly anyone else on his floor. She set the folder with his afternoon schedule on the desk and turned to go, then stopped in the doorway.
"For what it's worth," she said, "the Marchetti name really does carry weight. My mother used to talk about the Belmere like it was a person. Everyone in this industry over fifty remembers exactly what that hotel was before your father got hold of it."
"I'm aware."
"I know you are." She hesitated in the doorway a moment longer, and Damon, who had learned to read the specific quality of Priya's hesitations over six years of working twelve-hour days across from her, waited for whatever she'd stopped herself from saying the first time.
"Can I ask you something. And you can tell me it's not my place. "
"You're going to ask regardless of what I say, so go ahead."
A small, reluctant smile. "Do you want this to work? Not the will clause. Not the board. Her. Do you want it to actually work, or is this purely a transaction you're planning to survive."
The question sat in the room longer than he wanted it to. "I don't think that's a question I get to answer honestly right now," he said finally. "I met her four hours ago under circumstances that don't exactly invite honest answers from either of us."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
"No," Priya agreed, "it isn't." She closed the door this time, and left him alone with it.
Alone, Damon allowed himself, for exactly as long as it took to drink half the coffee, to think about the reasoning he hadn't given Elena, the piece underneath the piece he'd told her.
The optics were real. The board's concerns were real.
Julian's threat was real, and growing more urgent by the week as the deadline compressed and the journalist's questions sharpened.
All of that was true and none of it was the entire truth, and he was aware, in the specific, uncomfortable way he was aware of very few things about himself, that some part of the calculation that had landed on Elena Marchetti's name instead of any of the dozen socially convenient alternatives his lawyers had floated, had nothing to do with optics at all.
His grandfather had never forgiven his father for the Belmere deal.
Damon had grown up hearing it in the old man's silences more than his words, a disapproval that never once became a direct accusation but sat under every family dinner like a stone under a rug.
We do not need to be the kind of family that takes what it wants and calls it business, his grandfather had said once, the only time he'd come close to saying it plainly, and Damon, fourteen years old and desperate to be the grandson who finally made the old man proud, had filed that sentence away and never once, in twenty years of running the expansion division his father had built on exactly that principle, found a way to reconcile it with the empire he was supposed to inherit.
Marrying a Marchetti didn't undo what his father had done.
Nothing could undo it. But some part of him, the part he didn't examine too closely because examining it required admitting how much he still wanted a dead man's approval, understood that it would be a kind of answer to that stone under the rug, a way of saying, without ever having to say it out loud to anyone, look, I know.
I know what he did, and I'm doing something about it, even if the something is imperfect, even if it's built on leverage I'm not proud of using.
He knew exactly how that would sound if he said it out loud to Elena Marchetti.
It would sound like the thin justification of a man trying to make coercion feel like penance, because that was precisely what it was, and he had no intention of dressing it up as anything nobler than what it actually was: a blackmail arrangement wrapped around a debt he couldn't pay any other way.
He thought, too, about what the attorney had told him that morning, the old man's insistence that the clause was never really about the marriage itself, but about whether Damon could be trusted to choose something, rather than simply execute whatever was most efficient.
It was, he had to admit, a very good question, and one he wasn't sure he'd have been able to answer honestly even before a woman with steady, furious eyes had walked into his office and made the question suddenly, uncomfortably personal.
He had spent his entire adult life being efficient.
He had never once, in thirty-five years, chosen anything the way his grandfather apparently meant the word, freely, without an underlying calculation about what the choice would cost or return.
He wasn't sure he knew how. He wasn't sure the man he'd built himself into over two decades of running an empire that rewarded exactly the opposite instinct was even capable of it anymore.
He finished the coffee, opened the laptop, and spent the next four hours not thinking about the way she'd looked standing at his window, though he was aware, with the same clinical honesty he brought to everything else in his life, that not thinking about it was its own kind of admission.
Near seven, with the office emptying out around him and the city going gold then gray outside his window, he pulled up the investigator's file on Elena Marchetti one more time, though he'd already read it twice and knew most of it by memory.
He looked past the parts he'd already used, the leverage, the brother's debt, the mother's failing bonding insurance, and found himself instead reading the parts that had nothing to do with any of that.
The Ashford ballroom restoration, eighteen months of painstaking work reconstructing hand-painted plasterwork from three surviving photographs.
A guest lecture she'd given at Columbia on adaptive reuse in historic hospitality, the transcript of which revealed a woman who talked about buildings the way other people talked about people they loved, with a precision that came from actually paying attention.
A donation, small and recurring, to a scholarship fund for first-generation architecture students, made quietly enough that it hadn't shown up in any press coverage, only in the financial records his investigators had pulled as a matter of routine thoroughness.
None of it was relevant to the will clause.
None of it would move the board or satisfy Julian or answer Harriet's careful, third-party questions.
He read it anyway, twice, and then closed the file and sat for a long moment in an office that had gone almost entirely dark around him, thinking about a woman who had spent ten years rebuilding other families' histories because someone had taken hers, and wondering, with a discomfort he didn't examine any further than he had to, what it would actually take to deserve the kind of yes he was currently extorting out of her by Friday.