CHAPTER 15
Sebastian
They call me the Blade because I cut. Divisions, people, whole product lines. I’ve never once flinched at the sound of something dying under my hand. The press loves it. My board loved it, once, when the thing bleeding out on the table wasn’t the crown jewel.
éternel was the crown jewel. And éternel was dying.
Four years after the launch that made us four hundred million dollars, the mother bottle sat in a climate-controlled vault on the twenty-second floor like a relic no one could pray to anymore.
Because we couldn’t make it again. Not the same.
Every batch since the third year came out flat, hollow, a photograph of a scent instead of the scent itself: the sandalwood present, the jasmine present, and the impossible green-white thing that had made grown men buy it by the caseload simply gone, the way a face can have every feature right and still not be the person you loved.
Chloe couldn’t reproduce it. Of course she couldn’t.
I sat through nine months of her excuses (the suppliers changed the absolute, the humidity in the lab, the naturals are inconsistent this harvest) and I nodded and I approved her budgets and I did not say the thing that lived in the back of my throat like a stone.
Which was that Chloe Beaumont had never made éternel in her life.
She had stood in a spotlight and said I’ve dreamed of this scent my whole life and I had kissed her knuckles for the cameras, and I had known, even then, exactly whose hands the dream had come out of.
I’d just decided it didn’t matter. That was the kind of man I’d made myself into. The kind who could look at the truth and cut it away because it photographed badly.
Four years I’d been cutting. Harder, colder, richer than I’d ever been.
We’d doubled the conglomerate; there was a floor of the building now that hadn’t existed when she left it.
And emptier than a man has any business being at thirty-seven.
I lived in a house I couldn’t fill, and somewhere in a drawer I never opened there was a wedding ring I’d never managed to give back to anyone, because there had only ever been one hand it fit and she’d set it down on a stack of empty magnums and walked out of every photograph I owned.
I told myself I’d stopped looking for her in the second year. That was a lie too. I just got quieter about it.
The board convened on a Tuesday and sharpened their knives on me for a change. Vale Group’s fragrance arm was down forty percent year over year. And the reason had a name, and everyone in that room said it the way you say a competitor you’re afraid of.
Maison Cendre.
A Paris house not five years old, no legacy, no heritage advertising, and it was eating us alive.
Whatever their nose was doing, it was doing the thing éternel used to do: the thing that made people press a wrist to their face and go somewhere in their own history.
Their newest launch had sold out three continents in a weekend.
Reviewers used the word alive. They used the word human.
They used every word my chemists had stopped being able to earn.
“So we buy them,” I said.
The table went quiet. You don’t acquire the house that’s beating you; you starve it, you undercut it, you poach its talent.
That was the Blade playbook. But I was so tired of cutting things, and there was a hunger in me I hadn’t felt in four years: to simply have the one thing I couldn’t replicate.
To own the nose I could not name and could not beat and, if I was honest in the small hours, could not stop thinking about the way you can’t stop pressing a tongue to a broken tooth.
“Founder won’t sell,” someone said. “She’s turned down everyone. LVMH, Kering, all of us.”
She. I filed it and didn’t look at it.
“Everyone sells,” I said. “Get me the dossier.”
It came that afternoon in a black folder. Financials, holdings, a partner named Delphine Cross, a mentor of some legend in the trade. And on the first page, the founder, the nose, the reason a dying fragrance arm had put a target on my back:
Adeline Rousseau.
The name meant nothing to me. I read it the way you read a name that will one day undo you and cannot possibly feel it coming: flatly, professionally, the way I read everything now.
French. Trained in Grasse. Reclusive. No photographs cleared the file; she guarded her face like a formula.
I turned the page looking for a number and a weakness and found neither, and something in that (the closed door of her, the house I couldn’t beat) decided me.
I told my assistant to clear the week. I’d fly to Paris myself. You don’t send an emissary to a knife fight you can win by post; you go, you sit across the table, you make the offer no reasonable person walks away from, and you watch them not walk away.
“It’s just business,” I said, to no one, to the black folder, to the ring I didn’t open the drawer to check was still there.
I signed off on the acquisition mandate at 9:04 that night and told my pilot to file for Charles de Gaulle. Then I stood a moment at the window over the city I owned and could not fill, and I believed myself completely.
It was the last easy lie I would ever tell myself.
I boarded the jet.