Sienna's POV
-
The unknown number had sent one more message by morning.
I had stared at the first one — "Welcome home. We've been waiting." — for half the night. Then at 6am a second message arrived from the same number.
"Don't go to that meeting today."
I got dressed, kissed Leo on the forehead while he slept, and went to the meeting.
Nobody threatened me out of a room. Not today. Not ever.
-
I had prepared for a hostile board.
I had prepared for Mira's people — the ones she had quietly flipped to her side over three years, the ones who smiled at me while already deciding I was yesterday's news. I had prepared for procedural challenges, for Gerald Paine's counter-filing to come up, for someone to question my right to even sit in that room.
I had prepared for all of it.
I had not fully prepared for the moment I walked through the boardroom door and saw Damien Mercer already seated at the far end of the table.
Photographs did not do it justice.
He wasn't loud about it — that was the thing. He wasn't performing. He was just sitting there, jacket on, hands folded, looking at the door when I walked in like he had known the exact second I would arrive. Cold. Precise. Still in the way that very dangerous things are still.
My heart did something I am not going to describe in detail.
I ignored it completely and walked to my seat.
The room was full. Board members I recognized. Legal teams on both sides. Mira was there — positioned carefully, dressed like a cover shoot, watching me with a smile that didn't reach anything above her cheekbones. Cole was two seats from her. He found my eyes immediately and gave me a small nod like we were old friends.
I looked through him like glass and sat down.
The meeting was called to order.
Damien stood.
And the room changed. Not dramatically — he didn't raise his voice or make a show of standing. But something shifted the way a room shifts when the temperature drops. Everyone sat slightly straighter. Even Mira, which told me everything I needed to know about who actually held the power in this merger.
His voice was low. Even. The kind of voice that didn't need to be loud because it had never had to compete for attention.
He laid out the merger terms efficiently. No fluff. No performance. Facts, figures, projected outcomes. He had clearly done this before — spoken in rooms full of people who didn't want to agree with him and made them agree anyway through sheer precision.
I watched him and I listened and I took notes and I told myself I was doing this because I needed to track every legal vulnerability in his presentation.
I was mostly telling myself the truth.
Halfway through his third point he looked up from his notes.
Directly at me.
I had been watching him already. Which meant we made eye contact at full force with nothing to soften it — no accidental glance, no looking away fast enough. Just his eyes on mine across the length of the table.
Something moved in his face.
Small. Fast. Gone almost immediately.
But I saw it.
I didn't know what it was. I refused to investigate what it was. I wrote two words in my notepad — merger timeline — and looked back down at my page like nothing happened.
He finished his presentation.
Then he did something I didn't expect.
He walked around the table.
Not all the way. Halfway. Just far enough to be standing a few feet from my end, which put him closer to me than he had been since I walked in, and he extended his hand toward me the way you extend a hand to someone you are acknowledging as an equal opponent.
"Mr. Mercer." He said it simply. Like an introduction. Like a line being drawn.
The room went quiet in that particular way where everyone is pretending not to hold their breath.
I looked at his hand.
Then I looked at his face.
Up close was worse. Up close I could see the exact sharp line of his jaw, the careful blankness of his expression, the way his eyes were doing the thing I had noticed from across the table — moving, thinking, calculating, all of it happening behind a face that showed almost none of it.
I knew that face.
Not from newspapers. Not from airport screens.
From a dark bar. From a black mask tilted sideways. From a conversation that lasted hours and meant everything and then disappeared like smoke.
My throat tightened.
"I know who you are," I said.
I sat down without taking his hand.
The room went very, very quiet.
Damien stood there for exactly one second. And then — so small that I think only I saw it because I was watching too closely — the corner of his mouth moved.
Not quite a smile.
Almost.
He walked back to his seat.
-
The meeting ran for two hours.
I challenged the letter of intent on procedural grounds — Mira had signed without full board ratification, which created a validity question under Vale's corporate charter. Damien's legal team countered. I countered back. We went three rounds on a single clause and I did not blink and neither did he and by the end of it two board members who had walked in on Mira's side were looking at their papers with the careful expression of people reconsidering their choices.
It wasn't a win. But it wasn't a loss either.
After the room started clearing I stayed in my seat going through my notes. I needed a minute. Just one minute to sit in the aftermath of two hours of performing calm I did not entirely feel.
Most people filtered out.
I didn't look up.
I felt when the room was almost empty.
Then a folder landed on the table in front of me.
I looked up.
Julian Cross — Damien's second, who I recognized from the briefing file Petra had prepared — stood beside my chair. Calm. Polite. Not quite smiling.
"Mr. Mercer asked me to give you this," he said.
I looked at the folder. "What is it?"
"He said you'd want to see it before tomorrow." Julian paused. "He said — and I'm quoting directly — she'll know what it means."
Julian walked out.
I stared at the folder for a long moment.
Then I opened it.
Inside was a single document.
It was Gerald Paine's counter-filing — the one that had blindsided me yesterday, the one filed against my will contestation, the one I had spent last night trying to find a way around.
But someone had already found a way around it.
The document was covered in handwritten notes in the margins. Sharp. Precise. Every weakness in Paine's filing identified, marked, and countered.
At the bottom of the last page, one line.
No signature. Just the words.
"Your father's lawyer was paid to file against you. The payment traces to a source you won't expect. Look at page four."
Page four.
I turned to it.
My eyes found the name at the bottom of the payment trail.
And every single thing I thought I understood about this merger, about this war, about whose side anyone was on —
collapsed.
Because the name on that page wasn't Mira's.
It wasn't Cole's.
It was Damien's father.
Which meant Damien had just handed me evidence against his own family.
And I had absolutely no idea why.