The Billionaire They Never Saw Coming

Chapter 7

Ethan called Marcus back within the minute.

"Tell me he's okay."

"He's fine. Shaken, but he's fine. He wasn't even there when it happened." Marcus sounded, if anything, more detached than usual, almost as if he were forcing himself to calm down. "Whoever did it knew precisely what they wanted. Didn't touch his computer, anything with value. Just the physical copies on the Veyron brief. In and out in under six minutes according to the building's security log, which, conveniently, has a gap in exactly that window."

"Someone who has access to the cameras."

"Someone that has access to very good things, apparently." He exhaled. "Ethan, this isn't Adrian's approach. Adrian operates under a low profile. This person was looking for an answer here tonight and never stopped to consider if anyone might catch them kick the front door open."

"Victor."

"That's my assumption as well." A paused. "Which means he's not just curious about the situation anymore. He's worried. Curious men wait. Worrying men break things."

Ethan stood at his window for quite some time after he hung up, watching the street below do precisely nothing of interest, turning the word worried over in his mind like it was a loose thread that might unravel itself if he could just find a good place to start.

Victor Blackwood, patient by every account Ethan had ever heard about him, had just pulled off a tremendously impulsive maneuver. That was a problem, actually, not a relief. The man the moment he decided being patient in situations such as this was simply no longer worth the risk was usually the one responsible for having said risk become a rather unpleasant reality.

He didn't sleep much that night. He told himself that in the morning the evidence he saw around his pillow were the residue of the break in not the re-playing, twice over, of Isabella saying caring about someone you can't quite finish solving, in his kitchen.

He didn't expect Serena to be the one to interrupt that particular thought, but she managed it anyway, appearing at Veyron's building the following afternoon like she'd simply willed herself into the wrong story.

He almost missed seeing something wrong with her at first, not because he found something wrong, but because he spent three years constructing himself someone who simply would never have looked surprised to see her and it turned out that particular construction hadn't held up nearly as well in real life in the lobby of the sort of place he still had things to loose, in the real world.

"Ethan." She said his name like maybe she was just testing to see if it still worked on him.

"Serena."

"I heard you were engaged." She said the words like genuinely surprised to find this out in the middle of things. "Isabella Laurent. I have to say, when Kent mentioned it I assumed he'd misspoke and assumed someone's future son-in-law."

"He didn't."

"No. I know that." She looked him over, her gaze lingering in its usual unimpressed way in a few places, only thing different this was what was in this particular assessment had changed- less unimpressed as of late, more... uncertain. Like maybe she wasn't sure what she was looking at. "You look different."

"I'm not."

"You are." She said, almost to herself. "You used to look like you were waiting for permission to take up space. You don't look like that anymore."

He didn't know how to respond to that, so he said nothing, and said nothing long enough that she had to reach into something familiar to fill up what was between them.

"Kent's fine," she said eventually. "The board seat's fine. Everything I said I wanted, that I've got." A tiny, humorless little laugh. "I keep thinking maybe I'm glad with the choice I made."

"Serena"

"I'm not asking you to fix that for me. I realize that isn't actually an option." She looked up at him, something unsteady behind her eyes in spite of the practiced poise she wore over her face. "I just thought. I wanted to see you, ask if you were happy. I told myself that was all this was."

"Was it?"

She didn't answer for him that, which was in and of itself an answer, and Ethan saw the familiarity of disappointment he felt take root, momentarily, before he forced the stem of it back down where it had always belonged.

This, of course, was the precise time Isabella came around the corner.

She paused a few feet away from Ethan, taking up the scene in that quick, efficient manner she used to assess everyone and everything Serena too close, Ethan too still, the particular electricity that suggested this was not, in fact, a happy occasion that had been caught mid-sentence.

"Am I interrupting?" Isabella's voice was smooth and calm, something she was very clearly not. "Isabella." Serena turned, reclaiming, in an instant, the appropriate mask with which to hold a conversation regarding the engagement of her best friend at the side of a man she didn't know but who was already too deeply entwined in her life. "I was just telling Ethan how happy I am for you both."

"Were you." Isabella's eyes flicked to Ethan, briefly. Impossibly unreadable. "That's kind of you."

"He's a good man." Serena's smile was filled, suddenly, with subtlety and teeth sharp enough to cut glass. "One of the better ones, anyway. I'd know."

"One assumes so."

The two of them stared at each other too long without anything in common to say that had nothing to do with the other, entirely the product and domain of their own respective genders. Serena was the one to reach for the escape first, retrieving her bag, offering Ethan a look she couldn't quite name.

"It was good seeing you." she said, turning on her heel and walking away before either of them could say anything at all, shoes clicking sharp against the marble, not looking back.

Isabella watched her go, and then turned to Ethan, arms crossed, his voice more subdued than he would have expected.

"She still has feelings for you."

"That's not my problem to fix."

"I didn't say it was." She studied him for a moment. "I'm asking if you have feelings for her."

"No."

"That was fast."

"It's the truth. Not necessarily fast."

"That doesn't change it."

He met her eyes, held them, willing her to understand what, exactly, he was saying. "Whatever I had for Serena ended the night she told me I'd always be happy being nobody. There's been a great many opportunities since then for me to prove her on that point, one whether she realizes it or not."

Something in Isabella's expression lightened, just somewhat, though she hid it well. "Good."Because I don't share well. Even fake fiances."Noted."

She almost smiled. This, the tension between whatever the two of them had shared in the past and the impossibility between them now, the break in, Victor, the carefully structured set of compromises that had finally broken in the last twenty-four hours- all of it, briefly, seemed to release a single breath of tension, and then she was looking up at her phone and whatever eased in her face tightened straight back into focus the second she read it.

"The board just moved the confidence vote up." Isabella said evenly. "Tomorrow morning. Nine a.m. They're not waiting for Friday anymore."

"Why the change."

"Because someone told them a rumor this morning that Veyron's fiance isn't who he says he is, and the board decided that was significantly less trustworthy, as compared with the SEC filing, they were in any case." She looked up at Ethan, something new in her expression, almost apprehensive, more than anything else. "Ethan. Someone is telling my board information about you. Things I don't even know."

His phone vibrated at that very instant, and for the first time Ethan did not look, not remotely, who called.

Adrian just requested to speak at tomorrow's board meeting. Topic: the character and background of Ethan vale.