Chapter 1 The Terms
The elevator opened on the forty-second floor and Zara stepped out like she owned the place.
She did not. Not yet.
The lobby of Voss Industries was the kind of room built specifically to remind you of your own smallness. White marble floors so polished they threw your reflection back at you like still water. Ceilings high enough to have their own weather. The air was several degrees cooler than it needed to be, cold in the deliberate calculated way of a man who understood that discomfort was a tool and used it accordingly. A receptionist with a practiced smile and careful eyes looked up from behind a desk that cost more than Zara's car and her rent combined.
"Zara Cole. Ten o'clock appointment."
"Mr. Voss is expecting you." She said it the way people announced something unavoidable.
Zara adjusted the strap of her bag and followed the corridor toward the corner office at the far end. The walls held framed headlines and photographs, Damien Voss shaking hands with senators, standing at podiums, receiving awards with the expression of a man who found the whole exercise faintly beneath him. She had studied this face for three years. She knew the public version of it the way you knew the face of someone you had been watching from a distance for a long time, completely and without intimacy.
Three years of work had brought her here. Three years of traced shell companies and sourced documents and a paper trail so deliberately buried it had taken her fourteen months just to confirm it existed. Somewhere inside this building was the truth about what had happened to her father, a man who had spent twenty years building a logistics company from nothing, who had known people in this industry, who had once told her when she was twelve years old that the most important thing a person could do was build something that outlasted them.
His company had not outlasted him. It had been taken before he was fifty.
She was not going to waste this moment by being nervous.
The office door was open.
He stood at the window with his back to her, hands loose at his sides, looking at the city below with the stillness of a man who had long stopped being impressed by things that impressed other people. Damien Voss was taller than the photographs suggested. Broader. There was a density to him that no image had captured, something unhurried and certain, as if the world arranged itself around him and he simply waited for it to finish.
He did not turn when she entered.
"Sit down," he said.
Not a greeting. A directive issued to the glass without the small courtesy of eye contact.
Zara sat. She placed her bag on the chair beside her, folded her hands in her lap, and said nothing. Silence was a test men like this administered to everyone who sat across from them. They used it to measure how quickly discomfort would make you reach for unnecessary words. She had failed that test once, at twenty-two, in a different office, and she had not forgotten the lesson.
When he finally turned she was ready.
She had rehearsed for this face. The sharp jaw. The grey eyes every journalist described as cold. The composed expression that gave nothing away. What she had not prepared for was the way those eyes settled on her, not with the sweeping assessment of a man encountering someone new, but with something slower and more deliberate, the particular quality of a man looking at something he had already spent time thinking about.
He crossed the room, sat behind the desk, opened a folder without glancing at it, and looked at her.
"Your credentials are strong," he said. "Three years at the Herald. Shortlisted for the Laine Award. You left journalism six months ago." A pause with weight in it. "Why."
"I wanted something different."
"Corporate communications is an unusual direction for someone with your instincts."
"I like understanding how powerful companies shape their stories," she said. "And what they choose to leave out."
Something moved behind his eyes. Quick and controlled and gone before she could name it.
"I want honesty in this role," he said. "Not agreeableness. Not careful people who tell me what they think I want to hear. This office has had enough of those." He turned the folder around and slid it across the desk. "Read clause seven before you sign."
Zara turned to clause seven.
It was almost entirely blacked out. Four dense lines of solid ink where the terms should have been, leaving nothing legible except the clause number at the top and a single word at the bottom that might have been conditions or might have been something else entirely.
She looked up. "What does it say."
Something crossed his face that was almost an expression. It did not reach his eyes.
"Sign the contract," he said, "and you will find out."
She looked at the page for three seconds. She thought briefly of her father sitting at his kitchen table the year she turned nineteen, looking at his hands like they belonged to someone he did not recognise, and she thought about the twenty years of work those hands had represented and what had been done to all of it. Then she picked up the pen, signed her name in one clean motion, and slid the folder back across to him without another word.
He took it. He looked at her signature. He looked at her face with an expression she could not read at all.
"Welcome to Voss Industries, Ms. Cole."
"I look forward to it, Mr. Voss."
She stood, picked up her bag, and walked to the door.
"One more thing."
She stopped but did not turn.
"I do not tolerate dishonesty," he said. "From anyone. Under any circumstances."
She turned just enough to meet his eyes over her shoulder. "Neither do I."
She walked out.
In the elevator going down, with the contract copy in her bag and her pulse still faster than she would admit, she allowed herself one quiet breath. Three years and she was finally inside his world.
She had no idea that upstairs, Damien Voss had already set her folder aside and opened a second one. Older. Thinner. A photograph paperclipped inside the cover.
Not a surveillance photograph. A personal one. Two men standing outside a building she recognised immediately. Her father on the left, younger, smiling. A younger Damien on the right.
They had known each other.
And Damien had been keeping the evidence of it for a very long time.