8. Tristan
Tristan
Tristan paced the perimeter of the executive boardroom.
Leather soles scuffed against the floorboards, tracing a relentless circuit behind the rows of seated executives.
He kept his turns tight, avoiding the mahogany table anchoring the center of the space.
The lack of sleep battered his focus, blurring the edges of his vision.
Stopping near the corner window, he stared at his blank smartphone resting on the sill.
Three days. He had been so arrogant on Sunday night, assuming Marianne was just racking up room service charges at a five-star resort to make a point.
Six-figure hospitality bills should have triggered the financial security alerts by morning.
Instead, the screen remained blank. He ordered his men to hold off on a physical sweep, convinced a few miserable nights toughed out in whatever dingy city motel she found would break her stubborn pride.
She loved him. She would cave and force a phone call. But her silence pushed his endurance to the edge. The waiting game clawed at his temper. He dragged a thumb under his restrictive silk collar, trying to ease the tight fabric against his throat. It clung to his skin despite the chilled air.
He released the silk. The silence from his wife was unnerving. He poured every ounce of his remaining energy into the hostile takeover, desperate to distract himself from the empty bed waiting upstairs.
“Move to the Lancaster valuation slide,” Tristan ordered.
A junior analyst at the far end of the oval scrambled to comply.
The glow of the projection screen illuminated the darkened room, casting jagged shadows across the silent board members.
Executives around the table froze in terror.
None of them dared to speak out of turn.
His volatile mood kept their eyes glued to their notepads.
Tristan stepped away, turning his back on his phone. He needed to close the Lancaster deal today. Once he secured the margins, he could finally dispatch a field team, track her down, and bring his wife home.
The presentation slide flickered onto the screen.
Rows of dense financial projections lined the white background.
Tristan narrowed his eyes at the third column.
A decimal point sat one space too far to the left on the commercial real estate margins.
The careless formatting error shattered the last of his patience.
He could not control his wife walking out the front door, but he maintained absolute authority over the people in this room.
“Hold on that slide,” Tristan demanded. He walked straight up to the screen.
The junior analyst flinched, dropping his presentation clicker. It rattled against a legal pad before settling still. Tristan crossed to the edge of the mahogany table. He brought his open palm down hard against the table. The sharp crack echoed off the glass walls.
Every executive in the surrounding chairs stiffened. The room went instantly silent.
“Mr. Hawthorne, the decimal placement on the Lancaster modeling shifted on slide twelve,” Sebastian, the junior analyst, stammered into the silence. He gripped his legal pad, dropping his gaze from Tristan’s face to the table. “I can pull the slide back up and correct the numbers right now.”
Tristan leaned over the table. He loomed over the younger man.
He needed an outlet for the mounting panic over his empty penthouse.
The incompetence of a decimal error during a ten-figure pitch infuriated him.
If he could not rely on his own staff to calculate basic math, the foundation of his empire offered no comfort.
“Do I pay you to guess the numbers, Sebastian?” Tristan asked. “Fix the slide before I terminate your contract and make sure no firm in this city ever looks at your resume.”
Sebastian swallowed, caving to the threat. He shrank back into his chair, breaking eye contact.
“Understood, sir. I’ll have the updated data on your desk the minute this meeting is over.”
“That is enough, Sebastian,” Genevieve interrupted.
The sudden scrape of her chair cut through the vacuum in the room. Tristan kept his eyes locked on the junior analyst. He did not invite her intervention. He did not need a rescue from his own temper.
Genevieve stepped away from her chair. She moved in close, bringing a strong wave of vanilla perfume with her. The artificial scent washed over him. It was wrong. It lacked the soft, familiar comfort of Marianne’s soap and skin.
“You are unspooling, Tristan,” Genevieve said.
She reached out and clamped her fingers around his bicep. The sharp pressure of her nails dug into his jacket, anchoring him in front of the silent executives.
Tristan flinched. His skin crawled at the unwelcome contact. He tore his arm free, dislodging her grip from the fabric. He took a fast half-step backward, skidding against the floorboards.
His sudden recoil shocked the boardroom. The executives stared, their eyes darting between the CEO and the Harrington heiress.
He stared at the space where her hand had been, hit by a sudden rush of guilt for humiliating his oldest friend in front of the room.
He had tolerated her boundary-crossing for years, treating her physical familiarity as another cost of doing business.
He used to prioritize her comfort over Marianne’s valid protests to keep the peace.
He was simply too exhausted to hold on to the guilt. His patience for the high-society performance was gone. He needed everyone to back away and stop crowding his space.
“We need to step out, grab a quick bite downstairs, and reset your head before the afternoon proxies,” Genevieve insisted, lowering her voice to a placating purr.
She reached for his arm a second time.
“Take your hand off me, Genevieve,” Tristan ordered, his tone cold and flat.
She froze, her hand hovering between them. The color drained from her face. She dropped her arm back to her side, her nails biting into her palm.
Tristan held his ground, pulling rank in front of the watching board members. He was done letting her blur the professional lines.
“We are business partners,” Tristan said. “I expect you to maintain a strict professional boundary with me at all times.”
Genevieve bristled under the public reprimand. She shot a defensive glare across the table toward the junior executives, falling back on her elite status to shield her pride.
“I was simply trying to help you manage your stress,” Genevieve said. “There is no need to snap at me just because I care about you.”
The double doors swung inward, slamming against the walls. Winston stormed into the boardroom. His broad shoulders dominated the space. He ignored the junior executives, locking his glare on his son.
“Clear the room!” Winston bellowed, pointing a thick finger toward the corridor. “Every single one of you, out!”
The junior staff bolted. Legal pads were swept off the table.
Briefcase latches clicked in a frantic, staccato rush down the length of the mahogany oval.
Sebastian snatched his laptop off the table, nearly fumbling it onto the floor before securing it under his arm.
The chairs squeaked and scraped backward as the executives fought to escape.
Genevieve seized the momentary chaos. Stung by the rebuke, she adjusted her blazer and stepped away from Tristan’s side. She joined the mass exodus, slipping through the doorway behind the trailing analysts. The double doors swung shut, sealing the two men inside.
Tristan turned his back on the empty seats. He walked away from the center table, counting his strides across the floorboards as he approached the corner window.
He needed the physical distance. Winston’s booming baritone always filled the space, and right now it reverberated against the glass walls. Tristan stopped at the edge of the pane and clamped his hands around the window frame. He leaned his weight hard against the frame.
He thinks he can just commandeer this floor. The arrogance infuriated him. Every corporate acquisition under this roof eventually devolved into a brutal hostage negotiation for his worth. He built the Lancaster trap himself, securing the proxy math while Winston played golf.
Letting the patriarch hijack the final execution phase just because his temper slipped was unthinkable.
The exhaustion eroded his focus, but yielding meant surrendering his autonomy.
The panic over his missing wife was a separate crisis, and he refused to let Winston sniff out the weakness in his home life.
He would finalize this buyout on his own schedule.
Winston closed the distance to the table, slapping his hand against the wood. “Have you lost your mind?”
Tristan stared out at the sprawling city grid, refusing to turn around.
“You are hemorrhaging our profits,” Winston said, his voice dropping to a low growl. “And you are publicly berating our most vital financial partner.”
Tristan dug his thumbs into the window seam. The sharp chill helped steady his nerves. He refused to acknowledge the accusation that he was losing his grip.
“My margins are stabilized,” Tristan said, keeping his tone flat. He finally turned his head, looking over his shoulder at his father. “I am just forcing some actual rigor onto an acquisitions department that has grown complacent.”
Winston stepped around the edge of the table. He crowded the open space, squaring his shoulders in a deliberate show of force.
“This pathetic lack of discipline ends right now,” Winston snapped. “Fix your attitude before you derail a multi-billion-dollar joint venture.”
Tristan pushed his weight off the frame. He stepped away from the glass, crossing the floor to grab the high back of the nearest chair.
“You gave me the CEO title,” Tristan said, dragging the chair backward until its high leather back rested between them. “Let me do the job.”
He stood his ground behind the chair, blocking his father from stepping any closer. Tristan’s jacket pulled taut across his shoulders. The sudden drop in his voice silenced the argument. The rapid, hollow ticking of the boardroom wall clock counted the seconds.
Winston narrowed his eyes, staring down at the chair before looking back at Tristan’s face.
“If your wife running off is the root of these childish outbursts, get it sorted,” Winston said. “I am not letting some pedestrian domestic drama jeopardize my legacy.”
Tristan gripped the top edge of the chair, the leather creaking under the pressure.
He thinks she’s just a distraction. The insult burned, but Tristan held his silence, biting back the urge to argue. Winston possessed zero jurisdiction over his marriage.
The plan was sound. Letting Marianne hide out in whatever freezing motel she escaped to was a calculated maneuver. It was a harsh lesson in basic survival, designed to prove her reliance on the Hawthorne empire.
Hearing his father reduce her to a corporate liability infuriated him.
Yet, admitting he had lost track of her whereabouts was unthinkable.
If Winston smelled blood in the water, he would deploy his own security teams, turning a private matter into a publicized manhunt.
Tristan would retrieve his wife on his own timeline, without his father’s suffocating interference.
Tristan released the chair and pointed sharply toward the double doors.
“My private life is off-limits to you,” Tristan said. “The Lancaster buyout is locked down, and I don’t need you hovering over my desk.”
Winston didn’t move for a long moment. He stared at the pointed finger, then shifted his gaze to the wall clock. The silence stretched between them.
“Then prove it,” Winston said. “Get this deal closed on Friday with zero collateral damage, and do not disappoint me again, Tristan.”
Winston turned his back and exited the boardroom.
Tristan let the quiet stretch for a heartbeat before abandoning the room.
He pushed through the door of his private office and twisted the lock.
The absolute quiet of the empty office unsettled him.
Usually, he craved the isolation of this room after a corporate fight.
Today, the silence only fed his exhaustion.
He walked to the corner wet bar, grabbed the decanter, and poured a generous measure of scotch. He brought the glass to his lips and swallowed the liquor straight. The peaty heat slid down his throat, doing nothing to dull the underlying panic over her absence.
He dragged a hand under his collar, pulling his tie loose. He abandoned the glass on the counter. His gaze drifted toward the desk holding the Harrington merger files.
“Leave the files for tomorrow, Tristan. The firm isn’t going anywhere tonight.”
“I have to lock down these margins, Marianne. Just go to sleep. I’ll be in shortly.”
The memory of their argument hung over him in the quiet room. Crossing the carpet, he picked up the tablet resting near his keyboard and tapped the screen to access the penthouse security logs. The pale glow illuminated the dim office. He selected the lobby footage from Sunday night.
The video buffered, then began to play in a silent loop. Marianne appeared on the screen. She dragged her weekender across the lobby.
She spoke to the night doorman, turning down the private car service. She pushed through the glass doors and stepped out into the freezing night.
The video reset. She walked across the frame again. He stared at the pixelated image of his pregnant wife hauling her own luggage. She pulled her winter coat tight across her stomach to brace against the chill.
The absurdity of it gnawed at him. She despised public transit and winter weather. Whatever meager personal cash she managed to scrape together could not possibly stretch this long.
He tapped the screen, forcing the loop back to the beginning.
“End the stunt,” he muttered to the screen.
He dropped the device flat against the desk.
The tablet continued to play the video face up next to the Harrington portfolios.
Watching the footage of her exit ruined the last of his focus.
The hostile takeover, the board members, Winston’s demands—none of it mattered if the penthouse remained empty.
He stepped up to the edge of the desk and stared at the massive stack of glossy cardstock detailing the joint venture. He reached out and slammed his hand against the side of the stack. He swept the pile of corporate files onto the floor.
Thick paper scattered across the floorboards.
Glossy charts and proxy tallies slid over the carpet in a ruined mess.
Sweeping the desk clear did nothing to settle his temper.
He gripped the edge of the desk, breathing hard into the quiet room.
He resented that she was dragging out this miserable protest instead of just picking up a phone to call him.
“You can’t possibly have any cash left,” Tristan said to the empty room. “End this ridiculous protest and come back to me, Marianne.”
He stared down at the ruined files, missing his wife.