4. WILLIAM
WILLIAM
The bass comes up through the floor and into my chest, a frequency I know well enough that my body stopped registering it as sound years ago.
It just runs. Below the VIP section, three hundred bodies move across Vanta's dance floor in waves.
They surge and compress in the dark, strangers pressed close, and from up here the whole thing looks like breathing.
Every sight line in this building was planned.
Every bottleneck, every degree of access, from the line outside to the staff corridor behind the bar.
I know where the fire exits are because I approved the blueprints.
I know where the sound drops off because I stood in every corner during calibration and listened.
This is my club.
And the man sitting across from me, whisky in hand, surveying my dance floor like it exists for his personal entertainment, just blew up the one thing I asked him to handle.
"What do you mean you're not Paula's lawyer anymore?"
Adrian doesn't look at me. He tilts his glass, watches the amber catch the low violet light spilling up from the floor below, and takes a slow sip. The ice shifts. He swallows. He still doesn't look at me.
I wait. The longer he doesn't answer, the tighter the muscle along my jaw wants to pull. I hold it still.
I glance at Carter. He's to my left, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, one hand resting on the dark wood table beside his untouched water. His expression is the same one he wears during quarterly reviews when a department head starts making excuses: patient, attentive, giving nothing.
No help from that direction, then.
I turn back to Adrian. Everything in me wants to lean forward, close the distance, make the space between us smaller until the pressure does its job.
I'm built large enough that most people find the combination of size and stillness clarifying.
But I've known Adrian since I was sixteen, and I learned early that pushing him only makes him uncooperative.
He's the only person I know who gets more comfortable the angrier the room gets.
So I sit back. I adjust the cuff of my jacket. I fire the question that matters.
"You had one job. What happened?"
Adrian tilts his head, smirks. Then he looks at me.
"Sienna Cross happened."
That name.
I feel the ripple before I can stop it.
My posture doesn't change. My expression doesn't shift. But something turns over in my chest, slow and unwelcome, and I know Carter notices it because his fingers move a fraction against the tabletop.
"She walked into the meeting," Adrian continues, and there's a warmth in his voice that wasn't there before, something I don't recognize in a man I've known for two decades, "and she signed a document relinquishing everything.
The financial holdings, the investments, all the personal property.
Every cent." He pauses. Looks at me. "She only wants the house. Cross Manor."
I process this information. Discard the first three responses that form because none of them are useful. "That's a generous deal for Paula. She gets the entire liquid estate." I say.
"Very generous."
"So if it's such a sweet deal for your client, why are you sitting here telling me you quit?"
Adrian lifts his glass again. Takes another sip. Sets it down carefully on the table, adjusting its position once. Then he looks at his glass the way you'd look at something you're about to blame for a decision you already made.
"Conflict of interests." Half a voice. Almost swallowed by the bass.
"Conflict of interests." I repeat it. Wait for it to make sense.
It doesn't.
Carter shifts. A small angle toward both of us, deliberate and quiet, "Adrian is interested in Sienna."
The bass keeps going. Adrian's ice keeps melting. Below us, the crowd moves in the dark and the bartenders work their clean efficient lines and everything I built continues to function exactly the way I designed it.
Except the three of us, sitting in this elevated corner where no one approaches without permission, are now in a different conversation than we were thirty seconds ago.
I look at Adrian. He has the decency to look slightly caught, though on him it registers as nothing more than a half-second delay before the deflection arrives. He picks up his whisky. Takes a deliberate sip.
"She's old enough to be your daughter." The words come out flat and tight.
He sets the glass down. "Only if I started remarkably early. I’m thirty seven. Only eleven years older than her, Will. You should know. You're the same age as me."
"I'm younger."
"One year."
"One year counts."
Adrian blows a dismissive sound through his lips and takes another drink. "She's not what you think."
"You met her once!" Adrian is testing my patience.
"Once was enough to know she's not what I expected.
" He leans back into the leather, stretches one arm along the top of the sectional.
"She walked into that room alone. No lawyer.
Paula spent several minutes telling me what a disaster she is, and then Sienna sat down and dismantled the entire conception I had of her.
Didn't raise her voice. Didn't engage with any of the provocation. "
Carter shifts beside me, a subtle straightening. "So, just to be clear," he says, and there's something dry underneath the evenness, "you dropped your client because you want to date the opposing party."
Adrian considers this. "When you say it like that, it sounds unprofessional."
"It is unprofessional." Carter sets down his water.
"I prefer to think of it as ethically proactive. I identified a conflict early and removed myself before it could compromise the proceedings." A pause. "That's basically selfless of me."
"That's basically malpractice." Carter reclines back on the sofa.
I stop listening. My mind has already left the conversation and gone somewhere I don't want it to go.
Sienna.
The last time I saw her, she was sixteen.
Standing in a courtroom under fluorescent light that made everyone look grey.
Small in a way that had nothing to do with her size.
They were reading the terms of her involuntary commitment.
She sat in the front row and didn't move, didn't look around the gallery for someone who might step in.
She just sat there and took it, and the composure of it was wrong in a way I couldn't name then and still can't.
I followed up afterward. Good facility. Excellent reputation. My involvement ended there.
And now she wants the house.
"...this way about her that I can't explain," Adrian is saying, and I realize I've missed part of the conversation.
"The way she holds herself. Composed. Controlled.
But underneath it, there's something." He trails off, which is unusual for Adrian.
He's never at a loss for words. He's often at a loss for a filter. "You'd have to see her."
I stare at the surface of the table where the low light collects and I let myself think about the Cross property. Where my family used to live.
The small house at the edge of the grounds. White paint peeling on the south side because my father never got around to it. By the time he got home from driving Conrad Cross wherever Conrad Cross wanted to go, it was dark and he was too tired.
My mother coming from the main house in the evening, still wearing her apron, her hands rough from the long hours. The way she'd sit at our kitchen table for ten minutes before she said anything, like she needed the silence to remember who she was outside that house.
And then she was gone. Heart stopped at forty-three. One morning she was humming at the stove. By noon my father was kneeling on the kitchen floor and Charlotte was crying in the hallway and I was calling an ambulance that was already too late.
My father unravelled after that. Slow at first, then all at once. He stopped eating. Stopped sleeping on schedule. Started missing turns, forgetting pickups, leaving the car running in the driveway.
Conrad Cross tracked the decline the way you'd track a stock in free fall. Waited until the liability exceeded the inconvenience, and then cut him loose. After years of service, no severance. Just one letter and one locked gate.
I swallowed my pride. Knocked on the door of the main house, stood in Conrad Cross's study and I begged.
My hands close into fists on my knees. The memory surfaces the way it always does when I let myself get this close to it.
The sound of the belt clearing the loops, the specific whistle of it through the air, the bright clean impact across my shoulder and the back of my arm.
I didn't make a sound. I was sixteen and I already understood that making a sound meant he won.
I need to hit something. Something that will absorb force and not break.
"Maybe it's time to let go." Carter's voice comes quiet. The bass drops away somewhere below us, a momentary gap between tracks, and in that silence his words carry the full weight of a man who has been watching me carry this for years. "Conrad is dead, Will."
The anger arrives clean and clarifying, stripping away everything except what matters.
"Have you forgotten what he did? When we started expanding into hotels, into what he considered his domain, he came after everything.
Lobbied against our permits. Called in favors to block our financing.
Went after our investors personally. Told them we were overleveraged, told them we had organized crime ties, told them whatever lie would stick. "
I lean forward. The table is cool under my forearms. "We were in debt to a point where one bad quarter would have finished us. Remember that? You know how close we came.”
"I remember." Carter's voice doesn't rise.
"And we prevailed. With hard work. With integrity.
Look at what we built." He makes an encompassing gesture, and the implication is clear.
The MH Group. Vanta where we are now, but also the restaurants, the hotels, the portfolio spanning three continents. "He slowed us down. He didn't stop us."
"So we should forget?” I can’t.
"I didn't say forget." Something in Carter's eyes sharpens, and for a moment I see the man underneath the patience, the one with his own private ledger of what Conrad Cross cost us. "I hope he is burning in hell for everything he did. But he is dead now. And there is nothing left to fight."
"There is one thing left." I say with a certainty I can feel in my bones. "And to do it, I need Cross Manor."
Adrian studies me with the kind of attention that makes people confess things they didn't plan to.
"What do you want it for?" Adrian asks.
"That's my business."
Adrian accepts this with a shrug that communicates both respect for the boundary and total intention to revisit it later.
"Well, if things go the way they seem to be going, you're going to need to buy it from Sienna. And from what I saw today..." He picks up his glass, turns it once in his hand. "She's not selling. That house means something to her."
The music below shifts. Heavier. The bass drops and the floor absorbs the impact and I feel it again, up through my feet and into my chest, steady as a second heartbeat.
There is only one move. If I want that house, I need to understand what kind of person she is now, what she's willing to negotiate. Everyone has a price. I need proximity. I need time.
"What did you say she does?" I ask.
Adrian's eyebrows lift slightly, reading the shift. "Landscape design. Small firm, but growing."
I think about the angles.
I turn to Carter. "The new hotel in Ojai. The Vale. Where are we on the landscape scope?"
I watch the assessment move through his expression, the brief resistance, the pragmatic override. "We've already contracted Sycamore Design. They're already on site. We can't back out now."
"I'm not saying back out entirely. Find additional work to do. Something that doesn't touch Sycamore's contract. Enough work to justify proximity, close enough to assess her."
Adrian leans forward, glass balanced on his knee, and the corner of his mouth curves into something I already don't like. "I can get close to her. It won't be a hardship."
I give him a hard look that has reliably ended discussions. Adrian holds my gaze without blinking, perfectly at ease, apparently unbothered by the fact that it's being directed at him.
"Not helping." I mutter
"I'm always helping. You just don't appreciate my methods."
"Your methods involve dropping clients to pursue opposing parties." My voice stays flat.
"I didn't drop Paula to pursue Sienna." He tilts the glass, watching the light move through it. "I dropped Paula because I found her insufferable and Sienna handed me a clean exit."
Carter makes a sound. Low, brief, almost inaudible under the music. It takes me a moment to realize it's a laugh.
I look at Carter. "You know how important this is to me."
It's the closest I get to asking. With anyone else, I'd frame it as a directive. With Carter, I can't. He's earned the right to be asked.
Carter holds my gaze. Adrian waits. The moment stretches, fills with bass and violet light and the particular quality of silence between men who have built something together and know what it cost.
"Okay," Carter says.
"Target acquired: Sienna Cross." Adrian raises his glass. When neither of us responds, he drinks alone, unbothered. "You two are no fun."
I look through the glass railing at the floor below. Bodies moving in the dark. Three hundred people who paid for the privilege of being inside something I built from nothing.
Sienna Cross gave up a fortune and asked for a house. That is either naivety or strategy. I don't care which. All I care about is that she is standing between me and what I want.