8. CHAPTER 7
Orion
In the last twenty-four hours, I’d shifted my focus back to Ironshore projects.
My home office had been my base all week, and I kept it that way until the Fernández mess was resolved. There was no point parading myself through the tower when half the Board still watched me like I was a grenade they’d agreed to sit on.
The first meeting since I’d assumed the role of Provisional Executive Chairman had been that morning.
Due to my father’s condition, the board had voted unanimously for me to sit in his place.
Though I had the support from my father’s allies, I still needed to prove myself to them. To prove I was worthy of the seat.
I hated virtual meetings, but here I was, neck deep in two hours of faces tiled across a wall of screens—Lagos, Greece, and Geneva flickering in and out as connections stabilized.
Their expectations came with compliments and caveats, condolences for my father’s health and praise for my decisive leadership.
Strip all of that away, and what remained was simple.
They wanted money, and they wanted it immediately.
The eighteen percent margin increase we’d projected from the alliance wasn’t a stretch goal in their eyes; it was the bare minimum.
A floor, not a ceiling. Their expectation was for me to hit it quickly or in any event that I failed, I’d step aside for someone more competent to do the job.
Which would mean that for the first time in history, the chairman of Ironshore wouldn’t be a Kade.
No grace. No mercy.
I expected neither.
They wanted the integration of the African assets—the Fernández permits, power, and local muscle—folded into Kade systems so neatly that not one regulator, journalist, or rival could point to a leak or any in-house chaos. It was to simply merge two empires and make it look as seamless as possible.
They wanted a story they could sell easily to their own shareholders.
The Alliance Consolidation Vehicle, as we’d named it, had to do more than exist on a slide. It had to feel inevitable. It had to look like a weapon—now my weapon—proof that I could not only inherit my father’s conglomerate but strengthen it, aim it, use it more ruthlessly than he ever had.
They'd never say it so crudely, of course, but I understood them. Failure to deliver was failure to lead, and failure to lead would mean losing the only thing that mattered in this family: control.
Plus my mother wouldn’t let me hear the end of it if anything went wrong.
Her constant comparison of my work with the great exploits of my father made me want to see this through and surpass every one of his achievements. Just to prove I can.
I closed the call with their polite nods still playing in the back of my mind and turned to the work itself.
Pre-truce, the Kades and the Fernándezs had been locked in a silent bidding war over Doukas vessel capacity.
There had been sabotage, and intelligence leaks in Piraeus. Damaged vessels that no one could prove but everyone privately blamed on the other family.
DOUKAS Shipping was as close to untouchable as a company could be without rewriting maritime law, its network stretching across the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and every oil port that mattered between the Gulf and the Baltic. All ran by Andreas Doukas.
Andreas liked to play kingmaker. He enjoyed watching rivals crawl.
The whole point of the truce was to take the crawling out of the equation.
Instead of arriving at his door as two competing suitors with overlapping routes and conflicting political alliances—one old-world European and cold, the other African, rising, and inconveniently popular—we would arrive as one bloc, with the same booking calendar and the same set of demands.
We’d offer exclusivity on certain lanes, long-term contracts on others, and make it financially stupid for him to say no.
That was the plan.
On my left monitor, the draft structure for the Alliance Consolidation Vehicle glowed, spread across a neat lattice of holding companies, trusts, and shells, all labelled, each one as lethal as the last.
On my right, a spreadsheet modelling scenarios if Doukas tried to play us against another up-and-coming carrier.
In the centre, between the empire and the numbers, sat the Stratum window.
Muted, but always open.
A small map highlighting the mediterranean coast. The thin ring of red marked a radius, with a moving dot within it.
Léonie.
She’d spent the morning walking the same short stretch of road between the rental house and a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea. Severin’s team had tagged each pass with a timestamp.
At 09:14 she’d stopped and stood still for six minutes. At 10:03 she’d met up with him and they walked to a cafe to get breakfast.
I watched the dot crawl its way back toward the house as I adjusted the parameters on a Doukas scenario—if we locked in ten percent more capacity on the Black Sea routes, how much leverage did that give us in Algiers?
In Lagos? How quickly would that push the Board’s projected eighteen percent into the low twenties?
The numbers were easy to follow and predictable. The girl on my screen was not.
I brought up a still Severin had pulled from earlier, showing her in a pair of linen trousers and a cropped top, the wind lifting her loose hair as she stared at the water.
If you didn’t know the context, you might have mistaken it for a holiday photograph.
A bored heiress killing time between lunch and an evening event.
Boring.
She was nothing more than a necessary variable. A vessel for the alliance. Nothing more.
I set the image aside and went back to the document my lawyers had sent through—the revised clauses for the alliance agreement.
I looked through the language for the heir provisions and smiled to myself. It was solid enough to fuse Kade and Fernández's assets so completely that untangling them would require blood.
I was adjusting the language on a paragraph about guardianship in the event of my incapacitation when the door opened without a knock.
I didn't need to look at her face to know she was angry.
My mother believes doors exist for other people. For her, space was something she entered and rearranged on principle, or whatever mood she was in.
“Is there a reason,” she began in French, “that I had to hear about your fiancée eloping from someone else?”
I looked up from the monitor.
Esmé Ndong-Kade was flawless as always. Cream-tailored trousers, a silk blouse the colour of champagne, hair swept back from her face in a style that made the matching gold necklace around her neck and earrings look like weapons rather than adornment.
Only her eyes betrayed the facade; they were fiercer than usual. Colder.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
Her lips pressed flat.
“éliane Fernández called me,” she went on, ignoring the greeting.
“Crying, in fact. ‘Woman to woman,’ she said, ‘you understand young people and their emotions. Please speak to him. Please don’t let this ruin everything.’” My mother’s voice lilted into a soft mockery of éliane’s accent, then flattened.
“That was how I learned your bride ran away with another man. Not from you. From her, a total stranger.”
I sat back in my chair.
“So éliane Fernández invited you to advocate for her,” I said. “How generous.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t be flippant.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m only noting that when faced with the consequences of their own lack of control, the Fernándezes ran straight to the nearest Kade and asked her to clean it up.”
She stepped closer to the desk.
“And you’ve been what? Sitting here watching it all like a show?” she hissed, looking down at the monitor in front of me. “Severin has known for days. You knew before her own mother… and you said nothing to me.”
Because it wasn’t your problem, I thought.
Also, because if I told you, you would do exactly what you are doing now.
Aloud, I said, “It didn’t require your intervention.”
“It required your mother knowing her son had been openly disgraced,” she snapped. “That his name was tied to a girl foolish enough to flee the arrangement with some little nobody.”
I felt my jaw tighten.
He is…irrelevant,” I said. “He was never a factor in anything.”
“He is a factor now,” she said. “He exists. People saw them. Do you understand what this looks like?”
“Yes.”
“Your soon-to-be fiancée runs with a lover before a single paper is signed,” she went on.
“She disappears. Her family panics while our family hears through gossip. And you sit here, playing politics and—” She flicked her fingers at the screen, as if the device itself offended her.
“—whatever it is you and Severin think you’re doing. ”
“Containing it,” I said. “Ensuring that what people think they saw never becomes anything more than a rumour that dies in a bar.”
“So you’re not denying it.”
What was the use of denying anything at this point?
“I’m not,” I said. “Once her family brings her back. I’ll make sure nothing reaches the press.”
She stared at me. “You sound very calm, mon fils.”
“Should I not be?” I asked.
She came around the desk, planted both hands on the edge and leaned in.
“You will cancel this,” she said coldly.
Gone was the social lilt, the gracious act.
She'd morphed into the woman who had survived my father's world by being steps ahead of the men who underestimated her.
“You will tell the Fernándezes the truce is void. Their daughter insulted you. She insulted us. The Kade name is not a second choice.”
I held her gaze.
“No,” I said.
The word landed heavily between us.
Her brows shot up. “No?”
“The truce stands,” I said. “The terms will change, but the marriage will happen.”
She straightened slowly, incredulous.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked. “The girl ran with another man, Orion. Do you comprehend the level of disrespect? The scandal if this ever leaks? People will talk. They will say you married a woman who chose someone else, who shared a bed with—”
“She didn’t,” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Esmé stilled.
“What?”