Chapter 47 Chapter 47 He's Back Aria Hartwell.

Chapter 47 Chapter 47 He's Back Aria Hartwell.
Chapter 47
He's Back
Aria Hartwell.

The audit had been running since nine in the morning, and by the time the boardroom door opened at half past eleven I had answered sixty seven questions. Then Cassian walked in, and the room went still immediately. Pemberton stopped mid sentence with his mouth still open. Two external consultants I had never seen before, people who had apparently been brought in without my knowledge, looked up from their papers and then shot a glance at each other like they had just realized they were in the wrong room. Crawford's pen hovered over a notepad and did not move. Cassian took all of this and looked at the table, at the consultants, at the stacked files, at my face, and then he settled on Pemberton.

"Why wasn't I informed about this meeting?" He did not ask it loudly. He never needed to.

Pemberton swallowed before he answered. "Mr. Kent. You are back earlier than expected."

"Clearly." Cassian pulled out the chair beside mine and sat down, and the sound of the legs scraping against the floor made the consultant on the left flinch. "What are we reviewing?"

Crawford finally put his pen down. "Miss Hartwell proposed a performance audit of her independent contributions. We have been running it since Monday."

Cassian turned his head to look at me, and I could feel the weight of it. "Three days," he said. His voice stayed completely even, which meant he was angry. "You have been auditing my co-CEO for three days without informing me."

Pemberton tried to step in. "You were away, Mr. Kent. We did not want to interrupt "

"I was reachable." That shut it down. "What is the finding?"

Nobody wanted to answer first. Pemberton stared at his folder. Crawford examined the wall above the whiteboard. One of the consultants, the younger one with the bad haircut, started shuffling papers for no reason.

Finally Pemberton said, "The work holds up," and he said it like each word cost him something. "The figures are independently verifiable and she has been able to defend all her decisions accurately."

"Good." Cassian looked at the manila folder at the center of the table. That folder had been sitting there untouched since the start of the session, positioned like a grenade someone was saving for later. "What is in that?"

Pemberton's jaw moved slightly, as if he was chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Nothing we need to open today."

Cassian held his gaze for a beat too long. Then he stood up. "Thank you both for coming in." He said it to the consultants, and they started packing up fast, like they had been waiting for permission to escape. One of them nearly knocked over a water bottle. "We will be in touch."

The room emptied in under four minutes. I gathered my files into a stack and focused on arranging them. I did not look at him.

"You came back early," I said.

"Harrison." He pulled at his tie, loosening it, and I could see a small coffee stain on his collar that he must have picked up on the plane. "Someone burned his office to destroy whatever he had prepared. I was not going to sit in Paris while that same person decided what to target next."

"Right." I said it flatly, and I knew he heard the edge in it.

"Aria "

"How was the flight?"

He said my name again, slower this time. "Aria. We need to finish the conversation we started on the phone."

"Not here."

"Then where?"

I finally looked up at him. His tie was crooked now, and there was a vein visible at his temple that I had not noticed before. "I will tell you when I have decided what I want to ask you. Because right now I have a lot of questions, and I need to ask them calmly, and I am not calm yet."

He held my gaze before he shrugged, his eyes dimming slightly as they raked over my body. "That is fair."

"I know it is." I stood up and tucked my files under my arm, trying hard to ignore the places of my body that was heating up with his gaze. "There is someone I want you to meet. He should be arriving today."

"You mean Calloway."

I was impressed. "You already know and remember his last name."

"Fourteen percent at a thirty percent premium is more than enough reason to know that board member by his last name. And I've searched up everything about him, but it's like he's a ghost and just appeared out of nowhere."

"He is a friend. He wanted to invest."

"So you said on the phone."

I looked at him for a moment, trying to figure out what was underneath that even voice. A muscle near his eye kept twitching. "Cassian "

"I did not say anything." He picked up his jacket from the back of his chair. "Introduce me. I would like to meet him."

We walked out into the corridor together and the silence between us felt heavy. At the end of the hallway, the elevator doors opened and Ethan stepped out in a dark suit, unhurried, and his eyes found mine immediately. He smiled at me before his eyes moved to Cassian.

For a fraction of a second his expression changed. A tiny shift around his mouth, a slight narrowing of his eyes. I would have missed it if I had not been watching closely. Then the easy smile came back and he walked toward us with his hand already out.

"Ethan Calloway." He shook Cassian's hand. "I have been looking forward to this."

Cassian shook it, but he did not smile. He looked at Ethan's face with an expression I had never seen on him before. It was not suspicion, exactly, but it was close. More like he was trying to remember something that kept slipping away. He held the handshake a moment longer than necessary and turned it over behind his eyes, searching for a match. "Cassian Kent. Welcome to the board."

"Thank you." Ethan smiled and let go first. "Aria speaks very well of you."

Cassian said nothing to that. He looked at Ethan for one more beat, then turned to me. "I'll see you in my office in the next thirty minutes.