2026-06-23 03:13:31Room 209 of Meridian Hall had a whiteboard on the door that served as a warning. It read:
IF YOU ARE HERE TO BORROW SOMETHING, THE ANSWER IS NO.
IF YOU ARE HERE TO PITCH ME A STORY IDEA, SUBMIT IT THROUGH THE PAPER.
IF YOU ARE HERE FOR ANY OTHER REASON, RECONSIDER.
Callan stared at the block letters for a moment and ignored it before knocking. There was no response for a good half a minute, so he knocked again, harder this time.
"I can hear you breathing," a voice snapped from inside. "The whiteboard was pretty clear."
"My name is Callan Voss. I need two minutes. Then you never have to see me again."
The door opened slowly, revealing herself with an air of deliberate suspense. Seren Ashby was absolutely not what he expected. She stood there in pajama bottoms and an oversized shirt, her dark hair knotted atop her head, reading glasses perched on her forehead. She held a red pen like a weapon. She looked like someone who had been working for six hours and had no intention of stopping.
She looked at him with disdain on her face and said directly to his face "You're the one who butchered my article on the housing policy."
"I left three editorial notes because two of your citations were wrong." He countered flatly.
She glared at him and scoffed, "My citations were—"
"The council vote was in March, not February. And Alderman Fitch abstained. It’s public actually record." He cut in flatly, and to her surprise, he wasn't cocky about it.
Her jaw tightened. She hated that he was right. "What do you want, Voss?"
"Tonight is my twentieth birthday. In forty-seven minutes, I have a mandatory dinner at my family's estate. My girlfriend broke up with me an hour ago. I need to walk through that door with a woman my grandmother considers...appropriate. Someone from an old family that she will recognize. Your mother's maiden name is Crestwood. If you come with me, I will owe you something significant. You can name your price."
She stared at him, bewildered. "That’s the most insane thing anyone has ever said to me at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday."
He sighed after letting all that off his chest and replied, "I know, but I need this."
"You want me to go to a billionaire dinner, pretending to be your girlfriend, in forty-seven minutes?" She asked.
"Forty-six actually," he corrected.
"Get away from my fucking door, Voss." She said flatly, her eyes glaring with hatred.
As she moved to close it, he did the unthinkable: he caught the frame of the door. "Seren," he said, using her first name to anchor her.
"I know you're hiding something. Ashby isn't the name you started with. You’ve been here for fourteen months and haven’t let a soul close to you. I’m not the threat, I’m just asking for two hours. I will never bring your name into my business again."
She went still, the red pen clicking in her hand. "How do you know about my name?"
"Does it matter?" He asked.
"It's big fucking deal, Mr. Voss." She said with spite.
He sighed and glanced at his watch, "I'll explain in the car...Please."
The word hung in the air, jarring for both of them. She studied him for a long moment, searching for a trace of a lie, she didn't think he was the kind of guy to use words like please. "I need fifteen minutes to get dressed. You explain everything in the car. If you lie to me once, I will walk out of that dinner and tell your grandmother exactly how tonight happened."
"Fair enough."
"And you're paying my rent for November." She said flatly.
He blinked at her, completely stunned, but with a subtle smile, he muttered, "Done."
She slammed the door the door in his face and Callan breathed, his pulse finally slowing. His phone buzzed with a text from Felix asking: How’d it go?
She agreed, Callan typed. She also terrifies me.
She emerged in exactly fourteen minutes, wearing a dark emerald dress—an old piece pulled from the back of a closet because it had been a last resort. Her hair was down, her glasses gone, and she carried a small clutch with the air of a woman walking into a high-stakes negotiation. She looked exactly like the kind of person Maris Voss would scrutinize for hours.
"The car is outside," Callan said, trying to hide his fascination with how beautiful she looked all of a sudden.
"Start with how you know my mother's family name."
As they walked, Callan spoke to her. He told her about Felix, the "Midnight Condition," the two years of forced anonymity, and the betrayal by Vivienne and Dorian Chase. Seren listened without a single interruption, but her face expressed her occasional shock and amusement.
Mace, the family driver, stood by a black limousine car at the south gate. He opened the door and bowed slightly.
Seren paused and squinted at him. "That's not a regular driver."
"His name is Mace," Callan said. "He’s been watching me from a distance for two years."
"Your family had someone surveilling you?" She asked.
"The rule was that I live without the family name and resources. No one said anything about surveillance."
She looked at Mace, who met her gaze impassively. "I'm Seren," she said.
"Ma'am," Mace replied with a slight nod.
She slipped into the car smoothly. The interior was quiet, smelling of leather and filtered, rich air. They rode in silence for three minutes before she spoke.
"Why haven't you told anyone who you are? You could have lived in comfort, you know." She said flatly rather than ask.
"That was kinda the whole point."
"To suffer?" She asked, arching a brow at him.
"To understand." Callan kept his eyes on the road. "My grandfather built the empire from a single trading company. He knew what it meant to have nothing. My father, on the other hand, never did. He made decisions from a position of wealth that cost the company four hundred million dollars and six hundred jobs. He lives in Geneva now. My grandmother hasn't spoken to him in three years."
Seren was quiet, but her assaying eyes never left him.
"And tonight," she said slowly, "you just need to walk in with someone. That's all your grandmother is assessing?"
"She is assessing whether I have the judgment to build a life alongside someone worth building with. It's not about love, Seren. It's about the quality of my choices."
"That's quite bleak." She said, blowing air at her cheeks.
"It's practical." He defended subtly.
"Still bleak." She smoothed her dress. "What do I need to know about your grandmother?"
"Her name is Maris Voss. She’s seventy-three. She has never said anything she didn't mean. She will be polite, but she will be reading every word you say for authenticity and lastly...she despises performance."
"What does she like then? You said nothing about that." She remarked slightly.
Callan thought for a moment and suddenly smiled. "Directness. People who don't need approval and people who push back."
Seren looked at him, her expression shifting into something that looked like respect. "I can do that," she said.
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CHAPTER 10: Into the tower of doom
The night Callan Voss walked into Chase Tower with Seren Ashby, he wasn't just a boy playing at rebellion anymore. He was a man wearing a dark jacket, a custom-forged contractor’s badge that Rue had looped into the building’s own security matrix, and the calmness of someone who had already accepted the possibility of being locked up in a prison cell.Seren was at his side, clothed in the same dark emerald dress she’d worn to the gala. To the lobby cameras, she was just an elegant, anonymous guest. In her own mind, she was more of a ghost. She kept her chin high and her breathing shallow, her eyes tracking the movement of the security detail like a hawk.This was her life now. A series of high-stakes tightrope walks, each one steeper than the last. She remembered the rush of the first time she’d forged her mother’s signature to secure her own tuition, the way the world felt like it was shifting beneath her feet.But this was quite different and the adrenaline rush that came with it was
CHAPTER 9: SOMETHING LEFT BEHIND
Callan had left only one thing behind in room 114.It actually hadn't been a mistake, he was much smarter than that. It was a burner phone. The browser history was that of a terrified young scholarship student who had spent his final weeks on campus desperately researching the Voss family succession laws.He had hidden it four days ago, tucking it deep behind the loose floorboard beneath his old bed, acting on a quiet warning from Felix that Matthew Bening was still leaking information to Benjamin Starr.Since Starr had been whispering directly into Dorian Chase’s ear for the past two weeks, Callan knew it was only a matter of time before someone came hunting for a smoking gun.At the end of the dark corridor of Meridian Hall, Felix stared at his secondary tablet, his fingers trembling slightly as he adjusted the remote camera feed. He caught the precise second Matthew Bening slipped out of room 114. Matthew’s face was pale and desperate, his knuckles white as he clutched the burner p
CHAPTER 8: THE FILE
The intelligence team was actually three people, not six. His grandmother had led him to believe in a small army, but the reality was actually more dangerous. The core of the operation consisted of Anna, a former city prosecutor, Rue, a tech prodigy whose fingers seemed to dance across keys at the speed of thought; and Winthrop, an older man with silver hair and a lifetime of secrets from the national financial crimes unit.They met in the basement of the estate at 10:00 p.m. The room was small and quiet, but it seemed big until the new boss walked in. Callan stepped into the light, his hand resting briefly on Seren’s back. It was a gesture of ownership, or perhaps protection, that neither of them acknowledged."This is Seren," Callan said, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "She is my partner in this. Give her the same clearance you give me."Anna looked at Seren, scanning the way Seren held herself—shoulders squared, jaw set, eyes tracking every piece of equipment in the roo
CHAPTER 7: Signed in Red
Seren spent the twelve hours doing what she did with every decision that threatened to alter her life again by building a dossier.She opened a fresh document and began to map the status of her situation. She wrote down everything she knew about Callan Voss, everything she had dug up in twelve hours of frantic researching. A few things that didn't add up, there were gaps in his history and then there was the the sheer, impossible silence of his life.She ran his name through the campus registry, through Meridian City’s public business records, and through the social archives of every gala and board meeting the Voss family had attended in the last five years.He wasn't in any of it and it made absolutely no sense to her. Two years of total ghosting! No photos. No tags. No mentions whatsoever anywhere.That was either the result of deep discipline or high-level coaching. She suspected it was quite the exhilirating combination of both.She opened a second column for Dorian Chase. He was
CHAPTER 6: What Dorian Knows
Dorian Chase’s office occupied the thirty-second floor of the Chase Tower, the sharpest needle on the Meridian City skyline. He had designed the space with the intent of watching the Voss tower and reminding himself constantly of what his target was. He was actually obsessed; the Voss tower was literally just 4 blocks away.He was twenty-two, and he had been staging this collapse for four years.His father, Edmund, had lost a vital port contract to Maris Voss when Dorian was eighteen. The loss had cost Chase Holdings two hundred million in projected revenue, but the real damage was actually the humiliation.Edmund had come home that night, eaten his dinner in silence, and gone to bed as if nothing had happened. Dorian had watched his father absorb the defeat with what people called dignity, and he had decided then that it was the most pathetic thing he had ever witnessed.And since then, he had been building his counter-stroke.His assistant stepped into the room, holding a tablet c
CHAPTER 5: The Proposal
Callan sat across from Seren at the small, cramped table by her window. Two lukewarm coffees sat between them, completely forgotten as Seren's quiet morning had turned into a tactical briefing. He laid his cards out plainly, without any games or false softness. In twenty years of watching power move through rooms, he had learned that decoration only ever hid a weak position.His position wasn’t weak by the way. He just needed her to see that before she realized how much leverage she actually held."Here is the truth," Callan began, his voice steady. "Dorian Chase called you last night. That means you were flagged the moment you walked into the estate with me. Your coveris already compromised, Seren but not by me. By the fact that he was watching."Seren had both hands wrapped tight around her coffee cup, her knuckles turning white. She was listening the way she always listened, her eyes staring at him without darting, her body as stiff as a log and all that."He mentioned my stepfathe
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