2. Simon
TWO
SIMON
I came down the staircase already dressed for work in a charcoal suit, my tie hanging loose around my collar. I'd been too lazy to wrestle a clean knot. I'd be holed up in my office all day anyway—with few meetings, if any, assuming I had the schedule right.
Marta, our housekeeper, stood by the stove when I walked into the kitchen.
"Good morning, Marta." I crossed to the dining table where my usual coffee mug waited.
"Good morning, Simon." She turned from the stove for a second. "Did you sleep well?"
I nodded and picked up my coffee, taking a slow sip.
It hadn't always been my preference. But over the past few months, I'd drifted off sugar and milk for good.
I used to hate the idea of black coffee, writing it off as a pretentious choice.
I'd go to absurd lengths with my café orders just to prove a point to myself—and to earn a scowl from Elena across the table.
She'd look at me over the rim of her cup, unimpressed, her eyebrows climbing toward her hairline while I grinned back.
It was the smallest, most unremarkable routine.
And I missed it.
These days the only thing I could stomach was the hard bite of caffeine.
"Where's Olivia?" I asked, though I knew the answer. By now, the question had worn itself down into a bleak morning ritual.
"She's in her room." Marta sighed and lifted a plated meal from the counter. "I'll bring her breakfast up shortly."
I only nodded.
Ever since Olivia moved in, she'd stayed barricaded in her bedroom, locked away from everyone. Nobody could blame the girl—a point her therapist had made plain and often. She'd lost both her parents in a single breath.
I dragged in a breath and watched Marta carry the tray down the corridor.
The empty table stared back at me. Like the thrill of sugar, the basic pull of food had gone.
Elena and I used to grab breakfast together before work, a habit we'd struck in college and never dropped. She had this way of watching every woman who passed our booth with open, easy admiration—nothing possessive or complicated in her eyes. She just found people fascinating and worth watching.
If anyone made a snide remark, she'd wave it off like water off a duck's back. She had her flaws and regrets like anyone, but she was good through and through. And I'd taken for granted that she'd be sitting there for the next breakfast, and the next, and the one after that.
Marta came back from the hallway with her hands empty and shot me a worried look. "No breakfast again? Can I at least serve you an early lunch before you leave?"
I shook my head. "I'll eat at the office."
Sighing, she took the loss and turned back to her cleaning.
I drained the last of my coffee and headed outside, where my driver, Manuel, was leaning against the SUV I used daily. The moment I stepped through the front door, he hurried out to meet me.
Manuel pulled the rear door open. "Good morning, Mr. Beckett."
I settled into the backseat with a nod, and we slid out of the driveway and merged into the morning traffic.
I unlocked my tablet out of habit, though I couldn't bring myself to read the glowing screen.
Instead I stared out the tinted window, watching the early sunlight throw a flat wash over the streets.
Half an hour later, we pulled up to the Beckett Media building.
This place was the only spot where my heart sat easy. Olivia and this publishing empire were the last two legacies Elena left me.
I remembered when all of it was nothing but an idea. I'd been hunched over my laptop, typing up some forgotten document, while Elena sprawled on the floor behind me with a paperback resting on her chest. I barely clocked her until she screamed.
She bolted upright, let the novel slide onto the carpet, and launched into a tirade—that the modern publishing world was a disaster.
That it was an industry built by executives who didn't read.
That the writers doing the actual creative bleeding got tossed the smallest scraps.
She dissected the romance market, tore into literary fiction, hashed out print versus digital, mourned the treatment of debut authors, and roasted one specific publishing house.
Somewhere around the three-minute mark, I gave up on my typing and spun my chair around just to watch her. Finally running out of steam, she dropped back onto the floor and stared at the ceiling for a long time before rolling her head to meet my gaze.
"Let's start our own company," she'd proposed.
I almost laughed out loud. Launching a publishing house was the kind of grand dream that's easy to pitch and near impossible to pull off. But her jaw was set, and her stare never wavered—which killed my amusement on the spot.
When Elena went still after being so loud, I knew better than to brush her off. Growing up together had taught me how to read that shift.
So we went to our father. He'd retired from his newspaper conglomerate the year before, quietly hoping I'd step in to replace him as CEO.
Elena's pitch was a sharp turn off his master plan.
He heard us out without one interruption, then said every person has to carve their own path.
He wrote us a shockingly generous seed check and asked for nothing in return except a promise that we'd build something worth doing.
The startup struggled early—no surprise there—but within two years we found our footing. And ten years later, the company grew into the largest publishing house in the country.
That is, until an anniversary trip took my sister from me and bent the whole shape of my life.
My thoughts were pulled back when the elevator doors chimed and parted on the top floor. The space was deserted—the way I liked it. As I rounded the last corner toward my suite, Violet was already on her feet, a bright smile lighting her face.
Violet had a razor-sharp wit. She could take someone apart in a whisper and slap on a pleasant smile the second they turned around.
I'd found that hidden talent one afternoon when a pushy HR rep came up to question her competence. I'd ordered Violet's name struck from the review list, but the memo had stalled, and she got ambushed. The rep grilled her without mercy, leaning hard on her academic record.
But she took the whole interrogation with her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap, barely moving. The second the rep stepped off the floor, Violet rolled her eyes to the ceiling and muttered something lethal under her breath.
I didn't catch every word, but I caught the heart of it—and it was funnier than I expected.
When the rep formally petitioned for her termination later that week, I rejected the request on the spot, without entertaining a word of discussion.
Before the accident, she'd been one of Elena's favorite employees. Whenever my sister swept through the executive floor, her face would light up the instant she spotted Violet. Elena loved to compliment her outfits, her curls, the care she put into her daily look, and Violet returned that warmth.
There was a quiet comfort in keeping someone close who'd known Elena, someone who carried a piece of her without feeling obligated to perform some tragic pantomime of grief.
She'd never performed. She'd come to the funeral, offered her condolences, and when I finally came back to the office, she treated me the way I needed.
That plain professionalism was a bigger mercy than I could put into words.
"Welcome back, sir." She beamed as I approached.
"What do you have for me today, Violet?" I bypassed her desk and headed straight into my office, the click of her heels following right behind me.
"You should've given me a heads-up on your wardrobe. I liked how we matched yesterday."
I turned to find her smile already in place as I sank into my leather chair.
"Tell me." I arched a brow. "Do you expect me to send over a full inventory of my closet every morning?"
"That would cross a few professional boundaries, sir. No matter how tempting it sounds."
I nodded, going mock-serious. "HR still has it out for you, you know."
"They're just jealous." She dismissed it with a wave. "They all know I'm your favorite. One of Beckett's girls, they call me."
I raised my brow higher. "One of? I was under the impression there was only you."
She slapped a hand over her mouth. "Mr. Beckett!"
I chuckled. "Enough joking. Tell me what I'm doing today."
Without a glance at a notepad, she ran down my itinerary, ticking off each item without a hitch.
A conference call with the London division at ten, bumped back from nine.
A full review of the Beatrice Holm launch materials before I locked the dinner seating.
A two o'clock strategy session with the ideas team, Devika's elite crew, the ones tasked with reading the market's future currents.
Her rundown done, Violet pivoted on her heel and marched back to her station. I scanned the printed schedule she'd left on my desk, then dug into the dense Beatrice Holm file.
The hours slid by until a sharp rap at the door broke my focus. I looked up and found Violet leaning against the doorframe with one hand on the brass knob.
"Not to disturb your royal majesty, but your two o'clock is in five minutes. The team's already waiting."
I pushed back from my desk. "Are you joining me?"
"I'd rather not. The ideas team despises me."
I brushed past her into the corridor. "Nobody in this building likes you, my dear."
"And I have you to thank for that."
"You've proven to be quite the corporate catch," I called over my shoulder, striding down the hall.
A low giggle trailed behind me as I walked away.
The ideas team was already ranged around the sprawling mahogany table when I opened the heavy boardroom doors.
Devika, the team lead, had her laptop open, four junior members flanking her on either side.
The moment I crossed the threshold, their heads snapped up and the low murmur of side conversations died.
"Let's get right into it." I pulled out the leather chair at the far end.
Devika swiveled, tapped a key, and connected her screen to the large smart screen.
"We've been digging into the serialized fiction market, specifically the rising dominance of online platforms." She pulled up a data-heavy opening slide.
"The user engagement numbers are wild! There's a real opportunity here, and it lines up with a pet project Elena had been developing before—"
She choked on the sentence and cleared her throat. "Before the accident last year…"
A tense stillness gripped the boardroom for a few hard seconds.
"Go on," I prompted.
Devika swallowed and nodded, finding her professional rhythm again as she walked us through the proposed business model. Independent writers were serializing their work chapter by chapter on dedicated indie platforms, where armies of readers paid monthly subscriptions to follow along in real time.
The differentiator—the golden hook no corporate platform offered yet—was what happened at the end.
Once a serialized novel wrapped, every loyal reader who'd subscribed from chapter one could get a signed hardcover in the mail.
The reader earned a trophy for their loyalty, and the writer finally earned a fair, heavily subsidized cut of what their work was worth.
"Think of our platform as the bridge," Devika said, gesturing to a flowchart.
"We'll connect the huge online readerships these writers have already built with the traditional publishing muscle Beckett Media brings.
" She pressed on. "We'll run the printing press, handle global distribution, and set up the signing events, while they keep full creative control over their work. Everybody wins."
I raised a brow. "What's the financial risk?"
"The author's identity is the wildcard." Marcus jumped in, an ambitious junior strategist seated to Devika's right.
"For the signature to hold any value, the fans need to know whose autograph they're getting.
The problem is, a big chunk of these top-tier writers are anonymous.
They've built cult followings under obscure pen names.
So getting them to step out of the shadows and reveal their identities could be a serious hurdle. "
I hummed, staring at the slides. "Then the fix is simple.
We'll build the platform to protect their anonymity at every stage except final fulfillment.
Let them keep whatever ridiculous pen name they want during serialization.
We'll only require a verified legal name and a location for the contracts and the shipping. "
"That could work—and beautifully," Devika agreed, typing a note into her laptop.
"So who holds the crown right now? If we're targeting serialized romance, who's the biggest fish in that pond?"
Devika tapped her spacebar, advancing the slide. A single name appeared in stark text, set beside a live follower count so high it made Marcus lean forward to count the zeroes.
"V.M. Ashby," Devika announced. "She has five million active subscribers. She drops a new chapter every Sunday at midnight on the dot. Our data shows she hasn't missed a single posting deadline in three straight years. Zero media interviews. Zero public appearances. Her legal identity is a ghost."
I stared at the projected slide, working the angles in my head.
"All right then. She'll be the anchor," I declared. "That's who we launch the platform with."
Devika held my gaze, her expression going grim. "There's a snag, sir. She hasn't answered a single piece of corporate outreach from any major platform we tracked. Rumor has it that a rival publisher is already deep in talks with her team."
"Move faster. Let's hit harder than they do." I pushed my chair back and stood to dismiss the room. "Use every resource we've got to find out who this woman is. And the second you find her—make her an offer she can't refuse."