Chapter 4: Claimed

Monday morning arrived the way it always did — too early, too loud, the city already moving before Thalia had finished convincing herself the entire weekend hadn’t been some kind of fever dream.

She almost managed to believe it, walking into the Hendricks & Cole building with her coffee and her badge and her usual pile of half-finished spreadsheets waiting on her desk. Almost. Except that the moment she stepped off the elevator, she knew something was wrong.

The floor was too quiet. Too many people clustered near the break room instead of at their desks, phones held low, voices pitched into the particular hush of people discussing something they didn’t yet have permission to discuss loudly.

“Did you see the email?” Priya, from two desks over, caught her arm before she’d even set her bag down. “Check your inbox. Like, now.”

The subject line alone made her stomach drop for the second time in twelve hours: Hendricks & Cole Financial — Notice of Acquisition by Blackwood Holdings.

She read it twice. Then a third time, waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something that made sense, something that didn’t confirm exactly what she’d seen on that laptop screen at two in the morning.

Blackwood Holdings. The name meant nothing to her twelve hours ago. It meant everything now.

“Apparently the new owner’s coming in personally today,” Priya was saying, oblivious to the way Thalia’s hands had gone very still on her keyboard. “Some big all-hands thing at eleven. Everyone’s freaking out. You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’m fine,” Thalia said, in a voice that didn’t sound entirely like her own. “Just — didn’t expect this on a Monday.”

She spent the next three hours in a fog, half-convincing herself there was still a version of today where this was a coincidence — a different Blackwood, a different Alexander, some universe where the man from the club and the man now apparently signing her paycheck were not, in fact, the same person. She held onto that thin, foolish hope right up until eleven o’clock, when the entire floor was herded into the largest conference room the building had, and the doors at the front opened, and every possibility except the one she’d been dreading quietly closed behind her.

He walked in like he owned the room. Which, as of this morning, he did.

He’d traded the loosened tie and bare feet of two nights ago for a suit that fit like it had been tailored that morning, and the stillness she’d first noticed across a crowded club was fully back in place — controlled, unreadable, every inch the man who bought companies before breakfast. If he was surprised to see her standing near the back of the room, he didn’t show it. Not so much as a flicker.

“Good morning,” he said, addressing the room, though for one unbearable second his eyes found hers and held. “Some of you will have questions. I’ll try to answer the ones I can.”

He spoke for ten minutes about continuity, about minimal disruption, about the usual reassurances companies offered employees right before everything changed anyway. Thalia heard almost none of it. She was too busy running the timeline over and over in her head, trying to find the version where this was chance and not design, and coming up empty every time.

The meeting ended. The room began to empty. She was three steps from the door, close enough to convince herself she’d made it through unnoticed, when a voice behind her stopped her cold.

“Ms. Reyes.”

She turned. He was still at the front of the room, a folder in one hand, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read — not quite the man from two nights ago, not quite the stranger from the club either. Something colder. Something that made the back of her neck prickle.

“A word, if you have a moment,” he said. “In my office. Now would be good.”

It wasn’t a request. It had never once, she was beginning to understand, been a request.

She followed him out of the conference room and down a hallway she’d walked a hundred times before, except today it felt like walking toward something she couldn’t take back. He didn’t speak until the door of his new office — the one that used to belong to her old boss, she registered dimly, already stripped of every photo and personal object that had made it his — clicked shut behind them.

“You could have told me,” she said, before he had the chance to say anything at all. “Last night. This morning. Any point in the last twelve hours would have worked.”

“Would it have changed anything?”

“It would have meant I wasn’t blindsided in front of my entire office.”

He studied her for a moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. “I didn’t know how to say it,” he admitted, and for just a second the composed executive slipped, and she caught a glimpse of the man from two nights ago underneath it. “There wasn’t a version of ‘I own the company you work for’ that was going to make last night feel like anything other than what you’re clearly thinking it was.”

“And what am I thinking it was?”

“Calculated.” He said the word like it cost him something. “Planned. Which — for what it’s worth — the first part wasn’t. I didn’t walk into that club looking for you specifically.”

“But you knew who I was. At some point. Before this morning.”

He didn’t answer right away, and the silence told her everything his words hadn’t.

“How long?” she asked quietly.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

Something in his jaw tightened, like he was weighing how much of the truth she could handle before nine a.m. on a Monday. “A few weeks,” he said finally. “I saw your work on the Meridian account. I made a point of finding out who’d done it.”

The floor felt like it tilted slightly under her feet. “You’ve known who I was for weeks. And you let me think Saturday night was—”

“It was real,” he said, cutting her off, and there was something almost urgent in it, like he needed her to believe that part before anything else. “Everything that happened Saturday was real. The acquisition isn’t why I was at that club. You are why the acquisition happened this fast.”

She didn’t know what to do with that. Didn’t know whether it was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in years or the most unsettling.

“I need a minute,” she said, and turned for the door before he could stop her, though some small, treacherous part of her noted that he didn’t try.

She made it exactly as far as the hallway outside his office before her legs stopped cooperating, and she had to lean against the wall for a moment just to breathe. Coworkers passed her in both directions, oblivious, already gossiping about the new CEO, about what the acquisition would mean for their jobs, about everything except the one detail that had just upended Thalia’s entire understanding of the last three days.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from an unknown number — one she was already, with a sick certainty, sure she could guess the owner of.

I meant what I said. All of it. — A

She stared at the screen for a long moment, thumb hovering uselessly over the reply box, and realized with a fresh jolt of unease that she’d never given him her number either