Chapter 10 No Softer For It
Matteo was at his desk by seven, showered, dressed, tie knotted with the same precision he brought to everything, and the only evidence that last night had happened at all was the faint ache in his shoulder where she'd bitten him hard enough to bruise.
"You look like hell," Ronan said, dropping a folder on the desk without knocking.
"I look fine."
"You look like a man who didn't sleep." Ronan sat, uninvited, studying him with the particular attention he only used when he already suspected the answer and wanted to watch Matteo's face while he lied about it. "Where were you last night?"
"Working."
"Working."
"That's what I said."
Ronan let it sit, not pushing, which was somehow worse than if he had.
Matteo opened the folder instead, forcing his attention onto the district numbers rather than the specific shape of her mouth against his jaw or the sound she'd made with her hand fisted in his hair, both of which had kept circling back through his head at inconvenient moments since four in the morning.
"Delacroix," Ronan said, tapping a line item. "You want to keep chasing them, or write it off?"
"Chasing them costs more than it's worth at this point. Write it off."
"That's new. You spent a week insisting we'd win it back."
"I spent a week wrong." Matteo closed the folder, harder than necessary. "What else?"
Ronan studied him another beat, and Matteo felt the scrutiny like a hand on the back of his neck, unwelcome and precise.
"There's a warehouse space two blocks from Marea coming up for lease.
If we grab it before she does, it kills her expansion plans before she's even filed the paperwork.
I heard she's been eyeing it for a second venue. "
The words landed in Matteo's chest with more weight than a real estate listing had any business carrying, and he made himself hold his expression flat, the same discipline that had built everything he owned, refusing to let Ronan see the half second of resistance that moved through him before the rest of him caught up.
"Do it," Matteo said.
"That's fast."
"You said it yourself. It kills her expansion before it starts."
"I did say that." Ronan didn't move to leave, kept sitting there with his arms crossed, and something in his expression had shifted from curiosity into something closer to concern.
"You sure about this? Because forty eight hours ago you sat at a gala and told me, out loud, that this thing with her had stopped being purely business. "
"Business doesn't stop because feelings get involved. It stops when I decide it stops, and I haven't decided that."
"Even after last night?"
Matteo's jaw tightened, a fraction, controlled enough that anyone else in the room wouldn't have caught it, but Ronan had spent thirty seven years learning every tell his brother possessed, and Matteo watched the understanding land on his face in real time.
"You went to her," Ronan said, quieter now. "That's where you were."
"Get the warehouse locked down by end of day."
"Matteo."
"End of day, Ronan."
Ronan stood, slow, and gathered the folder back off the desk without further comment, though the look he gave Matteo on his way out carried more weight than anything he could have said out loud.
Matteo watched the door close and sat alone in the sudden quiet, hands flat on the desk, and let himself feel, for exactly three seconds, the specific discomfort of a decision he'd made correctly and still didn't like.
Then he buried it, the way he buried everything that threatened to slow him down, and pulled up the district supply map instead, the same sprawling web he'd been studying since the courier had given up Sorin's name three nights ago.
His phone buzzed an hour later. Ronan, back at the door, expression different this time, sharper, the look of a man who'd found something that mattered more than a warehouse lease.
"You need to see this."
"See what?"
"The shipment. The one from three nights ago, the one the driver gave up Sorin's name for.
" Ronan crossed to the desk, pulling up something on his tablet, turning it around to face Matteo.
"I ran the delivery route backward, tried to figure out where it originated before it hit our dock.
It came through a produce distributor two blocks off Biscayne. "
"That's not news. The driver already said produce cover."
"The produce distributor's primary client is Marea." Ronan set the tablet down flat, letting that sit. "Not exclusively. But they're on the account, regular deliveries, three times a week, and the timing on this shipment lines up almost exactly with one of their scheduled runs to her club."
Matteo went very still, the same stillness that had frightened grown men in interrogation rooms, and stared at the delivery logs Ronan had pulled, cross-referenced dates and times sitting in stark black and white against everything he'd assumed about a threat that had, until this exact moment, existed entirely on his own turf.
"You're saying the shipment that came through my dock might have been intended for hers."
"I'm saying it's possible. I'm not saying it's confirmed.
Could be coincidence, could be the distributor working multiple accounts and our dock just got an accidental crossover.
" Ronan's voice stayed careful, deliberately not pushing further than the evidence actually supported.
"But if it's not a coincidence, that means Sorin's operation isn't running through my territory alone.
It's running through hers too, possibly through her, and she has no idea. "
Matteo looked at the delivery logs a long moment, the numbers refusing to rearrange themselves into anything less alarming no matter how many times he read them, and felt something cold settle into his chest that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with a woman standing barefoot behind her own bar telling him she hadn't slept with anyone since she'd opened that club.
"Does she know the distributor?" he said.
"I don't know. Probably, if they're a regular supplier. Doesn't mean she knows anything about what's moving through their other accounts."
"I need confirmation before I say anything to her."
"You're going to tell her?"
"I said I need confirmation first." Matteo's voice came out sharper than he intended, and he made himself pull it back, made himself think through the actual calculation instead of the instinct currently pulling at him to call her right now and tell her everything he knew, incomplete as it was.
"If I go to her with a theory instead of proof, I look like I'm manufacturing a threat to get closer to her, or worse, using it as leverage in the war.
She won't trust it. She might not trust me at all after last night if I show up with something this serious and can't back it up. "
"So you sit on it."
"I gather more first. Quietly." Matteo stood, crossing to the window, looking down at the district spread out beneath Obsidian's glass, Marea's sign a faint smear of magenta even in daylight, barely visible against the sun.
"I want full financials on that distributor.
Every client, every invoice, every payment discrepancy going back two years.
If Sorin's using them to move product, there'll be a paper trail somewhere, even a thin one. "
"That's going to take time."
"Then start now."
Ronan left again, faster this time, already dialing someone before he'd cleared the door, and Matteo stood alone at the window with the particular weight of a decision he wasn't fully comfortable with sitting heavy in his chest. Every instinct that had built his empire told him information was leverage, and leverage was worth more held close than spent early on an incomplete theory.
Every other instinct, the one that had driven him across the city last night with no plan beyond needing to see her, told him he was making excuses to delay a conversation he should be having right now.
He picked up his phone. Put it back down. Picked it up again.
He didn't call her.
Instead he pulled up the warehouse lease Ronan had flagged an hour ago, the one that would kill Del's expansion plans before she'd even filed the first application, and stared at it with the same cold focus he'd have given any other business decision in his career.
It was still the right move, strategically.
Taking the space denied her leverage in the district, kept his advantage intact, proved to anyone watching, Ronan included, that whatever had happened on her bar top last night hadn't compromised his judgment.
It would also hurt her. Badly, probably, given how invested she'd been in expanding beyond a single venue for over a year now, according to every district report he'd read on her operation.
He authorized the lease anyway.
His hand didn't shake signing off on it, and that fact bothered him more than the decision itself did, a low, unfamiliar discomfort sitting in his chest that he recognized, distantly, as something close to guilt, though he refused to call it that outright even in the privacy of his own head.
Guilt implied he'd done something wrong.
He hadn't. He'd made a strategic decision consistent with a war that predated whatever had happened between them last night, a war she'd told him herself, in her own office, hadn't ended just because they'd slept together.
She'd said it wouldn't change anything. He was simply proving her right.
The justification held for exactly as long as it took him to picture her face when she found out, the particular flash of betrayal she'd carry for maybe half a second before her expression hardened into something colder, something that would put distance between them faster than any business decision he'd made in the last month, and something in his chest tightened at the image with an intensity that felt considerably more dangerous than the guilt he'd already refused to name.