Chapter 302 Rose wants to see you.
Chapter 302 Rose wants to see you.
Cassie opened her mouth to speak but suddenly remembered something important and clamped it shut. "I can't give you the details just yet," she said, meaning it in the most practical possible way. "We'll talk about it later."
Victoria looked like she wanted the answer immediately and in full, but she recognized a closed door when she saw one and let it go. For now.
Cassie made her way back to her office, pushed the door open, and stopped.
Jonathan and Franklin were seated on opposite sides of her desk with the relaxed, entirely unbothered energy of two men who had known each other long enough to be comfortable anywhere, both of them holding glasses of something that absolutely had no business being in a professional office at this hour. She didn't even want to know where it had come from.
"What exactly are we celebrating?" she asked, looking between them with the particular expression of a woman who has learned to pick her battles.
"Jonathan made progress," Franklin said, the picture of casualness.
Cassie exhaled and shifted her attention to him. "Speaking of moving forward, Victoria mentioned another girls' night."
She was excited about it but as expected, Franklin's response was instantaneous. "No."
"You didn't even let me finish—" Cassie was saying, sounding disappointed but again, Franklin did not give her room to finish.
"I don't need to finish it to know the answer is no. My pregnant wife is not going out to some club. That's final."
He was not ready to take any risk. Pregnancy had its own battles and a karaoke club where he wouldn’t be around to protect and make sure she was safe was not the right place for her.
Cassie pressed her lips together, let him have his moment, and then delivered the rest of the sentence she'd been trying to get to. "I was thinking we all go together."
Franklin went very still.
"A couples' night," Cassie continued, watching his expression recalibrate in real time. "Scarlet and Sebastian could come too."
The change that moved across his face was almost comical in how complete it was — resistance melting into something thoroughly enthusiastic. "Now that," he said, pointing at her, "is an excellent idea." He waved her over with the energy of someone who had entirely forgotten he'd just been objecting. "You should have led with that."
"I was trying to," she said, stepping around the desk and leaning in toward her laptop screen. Something on it caught her eye and she straightened slightly. "Wait, did you approve all of those already? In this amount of time?"
Franklin lifted one shoulder. "They seemed urgent."
Cassie looked at the screen, then at him, with an expression caught somewhere between impressed and mildly unsettled.
Every decision he'd made was exactly what she would have made. Every single one, in the same order, for what she was fairly certain were the same reasons. "It's like you're in my head."
"We're married and we're in love," he said, standing and sliding his arm around her waist in one easy motion, pulling her close. "That's exactly how it's supposed to work." His face had begun drifting toward hers with obvious and unhurried intention when Cassie cleared her throat.
"We have company."
"I'll give you two a moment," Jonathan offered, already shifting in his chair.
"Don't bother." Cassie pulled back with the efficient composure of someone who had made her point and moved on. "We need to get moving. Tristan needs to be picked up, and I have been waiting all day to see him."
The mention of Tristan worked on Franklin the way it always did, immediate and complete. Whatever plans he'd been quietly assembling for the evening rearranged themselves around the most important thing, and he reached for his jacket without another word.
Two weeks later
Hannah Connor received her sentence on a Tuesday morning — twenty years, handed down after she stood before the judge and gave him everything, every crime laid out in full with nothing softened or withheld. Cassie, Franklin, and Jonathan had returned to Manhattan, this time for the board.
The deliberations were thorough and the outcome was the right one. Given everything the company's needs, the transition ahead, and her own condition, Cassie promoted Drake to the position of CEO and assumed the role of Chairwoman of the Blackridge Maritime Group.
The announcement moved through the media with the speed these things always did, and Franklin stood beside her in every photograph with the particular quiet pride of a man who never needed to make himself the center of anything to make his presence felt.
The people who loved them celebrated loudly and warmly, and for a stretch of hours the world felt like it had found its right shape.
Then Cassie's phone rang.
Unknown number. She answered. "Hello, who is this?"
The breathing on the other end was slow and deliberate, and then a voice she recognized despite everything, and all the space that had grown between then over the years and now came through the line.
"Cass. Congratulations. It's me, Fred." He pause, as if waiting for her reaction and when it didn’t come, he continued. "Rose wants to see you. Can we meet?"