Beckett's POV
The thing about my father's office is that it shrinks me. Not the room — the room is large, corner-facing, with two walls of glass that swallow the skyline and a desk the size of a small country.
The room itself doesn't do anything. It's just a room.
But the moment I cross the threshold, something happens to my spine — a millimeter of tension, a microscopic recalibration — and I am twelve years old again, being called in after a board meeting to account for something I said to the wrong man's son.
I hate that. I hate it as much as I hate that I notice it.
Father doesn't stand. He doesn't gesture to the chair across from his desk. He simply watches me walk toward him like he has decided the outcome of this conversation before his opponent sits down.
His monitor faces outward deliberately and the tabloid photo fills the screen at a size that leaves no room for misinterpretation.
Me and Waverly, both walking out of the club entrance.
The headline reads: MORROW'S LATEST ACQUISITION — PRYCE'S OWN WIFE?
"Explain this to me," he says quietly. "After I handed you the most strategically advantageous alliance this company has ever been positioned for, your face is on every gossip outlet in the city beside the legally married wife of your competitor."
He folds his hands on the desk.
"Tell me, son. What am I looking at?"
"You're looking at two people leaving a club," I say and take the chair.
I sit back in it, deliberately open, shoulders relaxed. The alternative is letting him watch the twelve-year-old materialize.
"The Duvals are reconsidering." His voice stays level. "Henri called me at seven this morning to ask whether my son is conducting an affair with a married woman. I told him he was mistaken." He pauses. "Was I mistaken?"
"We've been over the acquisition arrangement since day one. I don't see how a photo changes the business terms."
"Beckett." He says it the way you say a word when the word has gotten tired of doing its job. "You have humiliated this family's name over a woman who is still legally bound to your main competitor. Do you understand what you've destroyed?"
I look at the photo on his screen. Then I look at my father.
"The timing couldn't be more perfect," I say.
Father goes very still. The silence is different from his usual kind. He is not deciding how to respond, but rather reading something he wasn't expecting to find. His eyes move across my face the way he reviews a contract: methodically, looking for the clause that changes the meaning of everything before it.
He's getting there, and I watch him arrive.
His composure cracks. It's small — a tightening at the jaw, a fraction of heat entering the eyes — but I have catalogued my father's emotional tells for thirty years, and I have seen genuine anger on his face exactly twice.
This is the third time.
"You wanted the photographs out," he says.
Smart man, I'll give him that.
"The Duval engagement was a transaction. You arranged it without asking me." I lean forward, forearms on my knees. "I wasn't going to marry a woman I met once because it would expand the coastal footprint."
"So you engineered this." He pushes back from the desk by an inch. "It didn't even need to be her." His voice drops further, which is the equivalent of any other man's shout. "You used her."
The word lands somewhere specific, and I don't let it show.
"I ended a business arrangement you made on my behalf without my consent," I say. "I used the tools available to me."
"You learned strategy from the best," Collier says like he's acknowledging his own handiwork—proud and wary at once.
"You taught me that," I say. "I'm just applying the lesson."
"Don't reduce this to philosophy." His voice comes out with an edge I haven't heard since the morning I turned down the corner office. "You are just being reckless, and your recklessness has a French family reconsidering a billion-dollar alliance."
"Then let them reconsider."
"Beckett…"
"I said let them reconsider." I stand, the chair scrapes back. "I built this company from a single property without a cent of Duval money and without a cent of yours past the original loan, which I paid back with interest. I don't need an arranged marriage to compete, and I don't need your board approval to decide who I—"
The door opens and Ridley appears without knocking. He never knocks when it's urgent — it's one of the things I established when I hired him. Because a man who pauses to knock when the building is burning is a man who lets the building burn.
He steps in, reads the room in a single pass, and his eyes find me.
"I need you," he says. "Now."
Father looks at him. Ridley does not look at Collier.
I cross the room. Father says my name once more behind me when I cross the room, and I walk through the door without turning.
The hallway outside is long and marble-floored. It echoes footsteps and amplifies every sound a person makes walking away from an argument. I stop twenty feet from the office door.
"Talk," I say.
Ridley's jaw is set, which means he has already decided how to say what he's about to say and he doesn't like any of his options. "Sloan called me."
Sloan.
I almost ask when he got Sloan's number. Then the pool surfaces, and I file it away and keep moving. "Why is Sloan calling you?"
"Because she couldn't reach you. Her phone shows your number as blocked, which I assume is Collier's assistant's work this morning." He pauses. "She needed to tell someone."
His pause registers before the next sentence does. Ridley pauses for effect when he's being strategic. He pauses like this — heavy, careful — when the information is bad.
"Tell someone what?" My voice comes out even.
He looks at me directly. "Waverly is at the hospital. Sloan is with her." He gives the last piece a beat of its own. "Possible miscarriage."
The hallway doesn't move. My feet stay on the floor, my hands stay at my sides, the marble keeps holding its shape beneath me. Everything remains exactly as it was three seconds ago. The thoughts arrives in full before I can redirect it.
The tabloid photos were my doing.
I chose strategy over her safety, and now she's in a hospital.
The child she has been terrified to hope for might be—
"Beckett." Ridley's voice cuts through. "Car's downstairs."
I'm already moving.