Chapter 9
eight years earlier
“I am not going in there.”
Theo lets out a humorless sound. “Yes, you are.” He gives me half his attention, his signet ring flashing as his thumb moves across the phone he has been married to since we left campus.
“Don’t be a coward. We’ve been through this, Xavier.
You keep your mouth shut, take the punches, and show Dominic Karras you’re a son of a bitch made of titanium. ”
I suppose the last part is true. My father spent years testing what I was made of with his hands, his belt, and whatever else happened to be within reach.
Theo prods the back of my calf with the toe of his Chelsea boot. “Get your arse moving.”
I remain in place.
More accurately, I can’t. My feet stay rooted to the wet pavement, my body resisting the order my mind keeps giving it.
I wish there were an equation for this. A discernible sequence of numbers, variables, probabilities. Something I could solve on paper and be done with. I am good with those. People, less so.
When Dominic Karras agreed to hear my pitch, I knew there would be a catch.
Men like him do not open doors without leaving splinters in your palms. I assumed the worst meant the usual ritual humiliation: drinking, laughing at inane jokes, kissing the asses of men whose luck had convinced them they were gods.
Not this.
I lift my gaze to the two-story building in front of us and suppress a scowl. Red brick, darkened by rain. Narrow windows filmed with condensation and old grime. A black door set behind iron railings. Above it hangs a wooden sign carved into the shape of a bell, its clapper painted red.
The Ninth Bell.
My skin crawls at the sight of it, distaste bittering my tongue.
Pain itself doesn’t unnerve me; it is too intimate a language to frighten me.
What I can’t stand is the room behind that door. The sweat. The noise. The bodies. Men converting violence into a test of worth, brutality ennobled by ropes, rules, and an audience.
My father had the same proclivity, though he never needed ropes to dignify it. Walking back into it feels tantamount to returning, obediently, to a room my body spent years learning how to survive.
Thunder rolls across the smog-heavy sky, ushering the scent of rain, petrol, and impending doom through the street.
Theo sighs beside me, the blue-white glow of his phone lending his frustration a harsher edge. “It’s twelve sessions, not a goddamn public execution.”
“Comforting distinction.”
The sardonic note in my voice makes him scoff. He spares me a glance, his mouth curving into a grin. “Steady on, you tragic little wuss. ”
I deny him the dignity of a response.
Unlike me, Theo Mercer thrived in places like this. Violence didn’t make his skin crawl. Very little did.
While I had earned my place in LSE’s master’s program through grades, scholarships, and part-time jobs that left no room for sleep, Theo had arrived with a monogrammed trunk, a vintage watch, and the untroubled conviction that charm could be used as both apology and weapon.
It was the first thing I noticed about him when we became roommates at Bankside House. Theo could enter any room and assume it would rearrange itself around his comfort. I entered rooms by measuring exits.
I don’t begrudge him that. He had been raised in a world where money insulated men from consequence and bad decisions became anecdotes beneath the right family crest. His father could turn a Mayfair dinner into a funding round before the second course; his mother collected museum boards and titled acquaintances like pearls.
So when Theo said he knew a way to reach Dominic Karras, I believed him.
True to his word, one call was enough. Access, I am learning, has less to do with merit than proximity. The man every founder in the city was trying to reach had agreed to hear my pitch.
Conditionally.
Dominic Karras is the founder of Karras Meridian, the private investment firm capable of making or burying the acquisition I have spent six months building. He also holds a silent stake in The Ninth Bell, which makes his condition less surprising and no less insulting.
Twelve sessions with the house coach. Three rounds under his observation. If I am still standing afterward, he will review the term sheet and decide whether Karras Meridian anchors the acquisition.
That is the part Theo keeps reminding me of, as if repetition can make humiliation palatable.
Dominic is the first serious yes Aureon Capital has come close to securing.
Without him, Helix Ledger remains exactly what everyone else sees when they look at it: a failing compliance platform with brilliant code, dying cash flow, and founders too exhausted to keep lying to themselves .
With him, it becomes leverage. A company I can acquire before the market understands its value.
One signature from Dominic Karras could give me control of the first thing in my life no one else can take from me.
Worthless.
You will come crawling back once the world is finished indulging your delusions.
The last of my reluctance hardens into resolve.
I need this.
I pull in a breath through my nose and adjust the strap of my duffel higher on my shoulder. The rain has soaked through my hoodie and the white T-shirt beneath it, turning the cotton cold against my skin.
Theo had refused to put the roof up the entire drive here, grinning through the drizzle, imperiously convinced that discomfort was reserved for people without heated seats.
“I’m going in.”
“Thank fuck.” Theo claps a hand against my back, too hard to be encouraging and too careless to be gentle. “I was two seconds away from dragging your arse in myself.”
“No one asked you to stay.” I flick a look over the dark suit under his open overcoat. “You look dressed for something far more offensive than moral support.”
“I am.” Amusement cuts across his mouth. “I’ve got a date at Chiltern Firehouse with a woman who thinks I’m a misunderstood gentleman, and I’d rather not ruin the fantasy before dessert.”
He winks. I watch him saunter back toward the Aston Martin idling at the curb, one of several exorbitant machines he rotates through with the fiscal discipline of a bored prince.
Tonight’s is a DB11 Volante, roof still down despite the rain, because Theo Mercer would rather drown in style than arrive sensibly dry.
He slides into the driver’s seat and lifts two fingers in a lazy salute. “Try not to ruin your pretty face. I’m told investors like symmetry.”
“Charming.”
“Relentlessly.”
◆◆ ◆
The Ninth Bell contradicts every expectation I had brought across its threshold.
I expected noise. A crowded floor, given what Theo had told me about the place. Gloves striking leather. The usual choreography of a boxing club in motion.
Instead, silence waits inside.
The foyer is narrow and dim, paneled in dark wood that has seen better decades.
A brass reception bell sits abandoned on a black marble counter.
Beyond it, a corridor stretches into the building, lit by low amber sconces that turn the air sepulchral.
The place smells faintly of leather, antiseptic, and old sweat.
My sense of displacement refuses to recede. I retrieve my phone from the pocket of my joggers and check the email from Karras Meridian for the umpteenth time. The same details stare back at me. The address. The time. The appointment. The instruction that makes my jaw tighten every time I read it.
Unless there is another Ninth Bell tucked away on Poyser Street, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Except I am not due here until seven, and it is barely past six.
My compulsion to be early can, at times, border on pathological.
“You lost?” an unruffled voice calls from behind me.
The question catches me off guard, momentarily dislodging my composure. Embarrassing, considering composure is one of the few disciplines I have never had to fake.
I turn and come face-to-face with the most arresting pair of gray eyes I have ever seen—mercurial as London weather, marked by three tiny flecks near the upper outer corner of her left eye, and framed by dark lashes.
I notice them immediately .
Unusual, for me. I avoid looking into other people’s eyes. It feels invasive. Too intimate. Eyes betray what mouths spend years trying to conceal.
Yet my focus catches on the small constellation of pigment in her eye, pulled there by something I have no explanation for. The silence around me suddenly feels insufficient.
A line creases between her brows, and oddly, my fingers flex with the impulse to smooth it away.
“You’re early.” Her gaze drops briefly to the duffel on my shoulder. “Dom’s seven o’clock. Right?”
My attention snags on her mouth. Full at the center, with a pronounced Cupid’s bow that makes every word look deliberate.
She is speaking. I register that much. Her voice is low, calm, disconcertingly steady, but the blood pounding behind my ears turns every word unintelligible.
Fingers snap in front of my face, wrenching me—against my will—back into the room.
“You always stare this hard at people you’ve just met?” she asks.
My attention snaps back to her face.
Fuck.
She noticed.
Mortification scorches up my neck. The room, already too warm, seems to gain another two hundred degrees.
I clear my throat and lower my hands to my sides, careful to keep my movements controlled. The last thing I want is to make her feel cornered.
Judging by the look of her, however, I may be worrying for the wrong person.
“Xavier Navarro,” I answer at last, peering over her shoulder toward the dim corridor. “I’m here for the house coach.”
“You found her.”
A faint accent lilts through her English, too subtle for me to place, and the calmness of her voice does nothing to ease the catastrophic malfunction inside my head.
Wait. House coach ?
My eyes widen before I can school them.
Oh. Fuck. She’s the house coach.