Damien's POV
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I knew she was back before Julian told me.
I had known since yesterday morning when my security alert flagged her name at the airport — a system I set up eight months ago when the Vale contestation first became a possibility. The alert came in at 11:42am. I read it once. Set my phone face down on my desk. And went back to the contract I was reviewing like the name Sienna Vale hadn't just detonated something quiet and dangerous in the center of my chest.
I was very good at that.
Going still on the outside while something moved on the inside.
My father taught me that. Not kindly.
So when Julian walked in this morning and dropped a fresh report on my desk with the particular energy of someone delivering news they think will surprise me, I looked up slowly and said nothing.
Julian raised an eyebrow. "Sienna Vale landed yesterday."
"I know," I said.
He blinked. "You know."
"Prepare the briefing files for the board meeting. Tomorrow. I want everything updated by tonight."
Julian stood there a second longer than necessary. He did that sometimes — stood and watched me like he was trying to read a language I had deliberately made impossible to translate. We had worked together for five years. He was the most perceptive person I had ever employed, which was useful in every situation except the ones that involved my personal life.
"The Vale file," I said, holding my hand out without looking up.
He put it on my desk. Didn't leave.
"Julian."
"You already know she's back. You have her airport flag on your personal alert system." He said it carefully. Neutrally. "That's not standard procedure for a corporate opponent."
"She's not a standard corporate opponent. She's a lawyer contesting a will that directly affects our merger timeline. Monitoring her return is logical."
"Right," he said.
The way he said it meant he didn't believe a single word.
"Stop doing that," I said.
"Doing what?"
"Whatever your face is doing right now."
He pressed his lips together. The corners pulled slightly upward. He turned and walked out, closing the door behind him with the careful quietness of someone who was absolutely smiling on the other side of it.
I looked at the file.
-
Sienna Vale. Twenty-seven years old. Only biological child of Robert Vale, founder of Vale Enterprises. Named heir-apparent in her father's original will at age twenty-two.
Left the country three years ago. No public statement. No press release. Just gone.
Returned yesterday.
Law degree completed abroad — top of her graduating class. Specialized in corporate and inheritance law. Which was not an accident. A person who runs from a corporate family and comes back with a law degree specifically designed to fight corporate inheritance cases is a person who always planned to come back. She just needed to be ready first.
I respected that more than I wanted to.
The file had a photograph. A recent one, pulled from airport arrivals footage. She was walking through the hall in a sharp coat, head straight, face composed. She looked older than twenty-seven. Not in a tired way. In the way of someone who had been through weight and carried it correctly.
She was holding a small boy's hand.
I looked at the photograph for a moment longer than I should have.
A child. She had a child. The file had a name — Leo Vale, three years old — and nothing else. No father listed on available records. No information about the other parent. The research team had flagged it as a gap they couldn't fill.
I moved past it.
I read the rest of the file twice. Her legal filing strategy was already partially visible through the court submission records — she was contesting on the basis of undue influence, arguing that the will amendment transferring shares to Mira Vale was made under circumstances that compromised her father's judgment in his final months. It was a strong angle. Clean. Hard to dismiss.
She was going to be a serious problem.
A serious, complicated, necessary problem.
I closed the file.
And then I did something I did not plan to do.
I opened my desk drawer.
It was there. It was always there. I hadn't moved it in three years because moving it would have meant making a decision about it, and I had decided very early on that the decision could wait.
A small porcelain mask. White. Delicate. Broken at one edge — a clean crack running from the left temple down toward the cheek. It had been on the floor of The Glass Jungle the morning after. I had gone back to collect my jacket which I had left there, and found it near the bar stool where she had been sitting.
She had left without it.
She had left without anything, actually. No name. No number. No trace.
I had searched for her for three years through every quiet channel available to me. A masked woman, no name, no title. The Glass Jungle kept strict privacy — no cameras inside, no records, no staff willing to talk. I had descriptions. I had a memory sharp enough to recall exactly the way she had laughed — surprised by it, like she hadn't planned to — and the way she had gone still when something mattered to her.
I had nothing useful.
Until eight months ago when the Vale situation surfaced and a name appeared in my merger briefings and something in my chest went very quiet in a very specific way that I had been ignoring ever since.
Sienna Vale.
I looked at the mask.
Then I closed the drawer.
-
I had work to do. A merger to finalize. A board meeting to prepare for. A legal challenge to counter. These were real things with real stakes — the kind of stakes I understood and operated in every day without difficulty.
Whatever the rest of it was, it did not belong in this office.
I picked up my phone and called my head of legal. We went through the counter-filing strategy for thirty minutes. I confirmed three positions I wanted defended at tomorrow's meeting. I told him to prepare for Sienna's specific line of questioning — she would challenge the letter of intent Mira signed, she would argue procedural invalidity, she would find the weakest clause in our merger terms and press it until it bent.
"She's a corporate lawyer," he said. "We can handle a corporate lawyer."
"She's not just a corporate lawyer," I said. "Prepare accordingly."
I hung up.
My alert system pinged.
A new flag. Not Sienna this time. A secondary monitor I had running on Vale Enterprises' internal communications — legal, not illegal, a channel my team accessed through a legitimate consulting agreement that gave us limited visibility on their official correspondence.
The flag was on a filing submission.
Someone inside Vale Enterprises had filed a counter-challenge to Sienna's will contestation last night. Fast. Too fast for Mira's legal team to have built it from scratch. Which meant it was pre-prepared.
Which meant someone knew Sienna was coming before she came.
I looked at the name attached to the filing.
Gerald Paine. Robert Vale's personal lawyer for fifteen years.
He had filed against his own client's daughter.
I leaned back slowly.
That was not Mira's move. Mira was impulsive, reactive, driven by jealousy. This was calculated. Layered. This had been built over months by someone who thought three steps ahead.
Someone who wasn't Mira.
I pulled up everything my team had on Gerald Paine in sixty seconds.
And then I stopped.
Because in the list of Paine's recent financial transactions — accessible through a compliance database my team monitored for exactly this kind of pattern — was a single large transfer.
Three months ago.
From an account that, after four layers of corporate shell companies, traced back to one source.
Enzo Mercer.
My father.
My father had paid Robert Vale's lawyer.
My father had been building this trap.
And somewhere in the middle of it was a woman with a three-year-old boy and a broken mask she left on a bar floor.
I sat very still for a long time.
Then I picked up my phone and called my father's office.
His assistant answered.
"Tell him," I said quietly, "that I need a meeting. Today."
I hung up before she could respond.
Outside my window the city moved like it always did — fast, indifferent, unbothered.
I looked at the closed drawer.
Tomorrow I would sit across a table from Sienna Vale for the first time.
And I would know exactly who she was.
The question that was going to destroy me was whether she had any idea who I was.