The Heir's Midnight Deal

CHAPTER 4: Morning Comes with Receipts

Seren didn’t sleep that night. She lay on her back, staring into the dark of room 209 while the full account of her night spiraled in her mind.

She had climbed into a car with a stranger, walked into a viper’s nest of a dinner, and looked Maris Voss in the eye. She had been exactly herself, which was the single most reckless thing she could have done. Being herselfw as the very thing she had come to this university to bury.

Seren Ashby was a necessary mask. Her true name was Seren Crestwood-Dane, and her stepfather—the man who had legally appended his name to hers when she was eleven and spent the years since  dismantling every good thing her mother had built—was currently engaged in a financial restructuring that would leave him very interested in finding her.

Seren possessed a document. It was a single page, signed by her mother before she died, that pre-empted the inheritance changes he had made and restored the Crestwood-Dane assets to her. He had buried it, but she had found a copy.

She had been hoarding it, staying quiet and invisible, waiting for the exact second she could use it without being neutralized first. She had been doing well, too, until Callan Voss knocked on her door.

She pressed her palms into her eyes, but the images remained. The thing was, it had worked quite well. She had stepped into that house and held her ground, and Maris had looked at her like she was exactly what she appeared to be, which was true, and that was the problem.

A thread now connected Seren Crestwood-Dane to the Voss family, and threads were how people got found.

Her phone lit up on the nightstand, and the screen flashed with an unknown number. She almost let it go, but she decided to pick up.

"Miss Crestwood-Dane." The voice was smooth, male, and pleasant and it sent ice into her blood.  

"I think you have the wrong number." She said flatly, her fingers quivering slightly.

"I don’t think so." There was a small pause. "My name is Dorian Chase and I believe we have mutual interests. I’d love to have a conversation at your convenience."

The stunned her the moment she remembered that Callan had mentioned it in the car, and now here it was, dripping into her ear. "How did you get this number?"

"I'm resourceful, but you see, I also want to be helpful. Your stepfather has been making inquiries about your location, and I happen to know where those inquiries have reached. I think you'd find that information valuable." He said.

She sat up in the dark quickly, her heart pounding furiously in her chest. "What do you want?"

"I just want to to talk. Callan Voss is not what he seems, and I think you deserve to know that before you commit to whatever arrangement he's proposed." He replied.

She stopped for a moment, wondering how he'd found out about that. "He hasn't proposed anything."

"He will tomorrow. He's very good at making things sound reasonable." Another pause followed for a few seconds. "Sleep well, Miss Crestwood-Dane. We'll speak soon."

He hung up, leaving her in the stifling silence. Seren sat in the dark for a long time, her mind racing, before she opened her notes app and started writing down everything she remembered about both of them. Every detail, and every fucking word. She was a journalist, and she documented things, and that was the only advantage she had left to waste.

At nine the next morning, she opened her door to get coffee from the hall kitchen and found Callan sitting on the floor outside room 209 with two cups and a bag from the bakery on the corner. He looked up, meeting her eyes with a smile/

"You said Thursday for the proposal," he said, his voice quiet. "It's Wednesday, but I was in the building and..." He paused, his expression shifting as he squinted at her. "Someone called you last night."

Her eyes widened and her breath got hooked in her throat. "What?!"

"Dorian Chase. Don't worry, I know. He has a habit of moving quickly when a plan goes wrong." He held up one of the coffees, offering it like a peace offering. "I didn't come to apologize. I came to tell you that whatever he said, he said it because you are now relevant to something much larger than a birthday dinner, and you deserve to understand what you're actually in the middle of."

She took the coffee, feeling the heat radiate through the cup on her palm.

She had two choices now.

She could shut the door and disappear back into the careful, grey invisibility she had built, or she could take the coffee, go back inside, and hear the rest of it. She thought about the smooth, patient voice of Dorian Chase, and she thought about the encrypted folder on her laptop, and she thought about her stepfather hunting for her in the shadows.

If Dorian was connected to her stepfather—and the call was too precise to be a coincidence—then her invisibility was already a terrible lie.

The only question was whether she faced the coming storm alone or with a man who had his own reasons to fight the same enemy. She stepped back from the door, making up her mind. "Come in," she said, her voice steady. "And if you lie to me once—"

"I know," he said, offering a faint, grim smile. "The red pen."

He stood up and walked through the door, crossing the threshold of her sanctuary.

***

Outside, in the campus parking lot, a silver car sat that had been there since seven a.m was parked. The man inside watched the door, raised his phone, and sent a single, silent text.

Three floors above, in the window of the administration building that overlooked Meridian Hall, a figure watched the door of room 209 close. Dorian Chase put his hands in his pockets and smiled. He had expected Callan to spend his morning consolidating the dynasty's resources and celebrating a narrow victory, but he hadn't expected him to go immediately to the girl.

"Interesting." He mumbled and turned away from the window, his mind already racing.

He had twelve moves prepared, and he was going to use every single one of them to take Callan down.