Chương 6: The Royal Invitation
The name lands in the middle of a toast, dropped so lightly by an old woman in sapphires that Maeve almost misses it entirely, except that Leon's whole body goes still beside her the way a room goes still right before a fire alarm finally reaches the ear that's been listening for it the longest.
Chad Albrecht. Maeve turns the syllables over in her mind, watching the color leave Leon's face by exactly one careful degree. Whoever that is, he isn't in this room tonight. And Leon would very much like to keep it that way.
That was near the end of the evening. First, there was the morning, and the lawyers.
Wyatt's legal team had arrived at nine sharp, two men in expensive gray suits who clearly expected the meeting to run in their favor, and Maeve had watched from the glass observation room adjoining Reinhardt's legal offices, arms crossed, refusing to let herself pace. Frau Albrecht, the company's general counsel, had dismantled their entire complaint in under twelve minutes, a masterclass in unhurried precision that reminded Maeve, uncomfortably, of watching Leon work a difficult room.
"Your client alleges professional misconduct," Frau Albrecht had said, sliding a folder across the table without raising her voice, "yet has failed to produce a single verifiable incident occurring after Ms. Sterling's employment with Reinhardt Group began. What you have described, gentlemen, is a former partner attempting to leverage a personal grievance into a corporate liability. I would strongly advise your client reconsider before this becomes a countersuit for harassment."
He lost, Maeve thought, watching the two lawyers exchange a look that confirmed it before either of them spoke again. He sent his most expensive weapon across an ocean, and it didn't even leave a mark.
They left within the hour, and Leon found her afterward in the observation room, something almost like satisfaction moving behind his usual composure. "It's finished," he said. "He won't try that particular route again."
"He'll try another one." Maeve said it without bitterness, simply as fact. "He always does."
"Then we will meet that one too." Leon said it the way he said everything, plainly, as though the outcome were already a settled matter rather than a hope.
She thought, watching him straighten his cuffs with the same unhurried precision he brought to every small motion, of how differently this morning had gone compared to every version of conflict she'd survived with Wyatt. Wyatt had always needed her to manage his anger for him, to translate it into something presentable before it reached anyone who mattered. Leon simply handled things and told her afterward, as a fact rather than a performance requiring her reassurance. This is what it looks like, she thought, when someone else's competence doesn't require you to disappear into the background of it.
"Which brings me," Leon said, "to why I actually wanted you in my office this morning."
He'd slid the contract across his desk without ceremony, though the terms inside were anything but small. Creative Director, exclusive to Reinhardt Group's events division, her name on the letterhead, her decisions no longer subject to review by anyone but Leon himself.
"I don't typically create positions," he said, watching her read it. "I fill the ones that already exist. I made an exception."
"Why."
"Because the events division has spent three years without a creative vision anyone actually remembers a week later, and you built an entire wedding for a company merger in your head in under twenty minutes." He said it simply, and then, after a pause that told her he was choosing to say the next part deliberately, added, "And because I find I would rather build something permanent with you in this company than continue treating whatever this is as a complication I haven't scheduled time to address."
That's as close to a declaration as he's capable of giving in an office, Maeve thought, feeling something warm settle low in her chest despite herself. "I accept," she said, "on the condition that you stop announcing your feelings for me in the same tone you use for quarterly earnings."
Something that was almost a real laugh escaped him, brief and startled, as though he wasn't entirely used to being teased. "I will take that under advisement."
The dinner that evening had been his aunt's idea, not his, a small, exclusive gathering at the family's countryside estate an hour outside the city to formally introduce Maeve to the handful of people whose opinions Leon apparently still weighed above his own considerable authority. The estate itself surprised her, older and more unguarded than she'd expected from a man who kept his office stripped down to glass and stone, ivy climbing one whole wing of pale stone, a long gravel drive lined with lindens that Leon told her, almost sheepishly, his grandfather had planted the same year the company was founded. It was the first place she'd seen him stand somewhere he hadn't chosen entirely on purpose, and something in his shoulders loosened the moment they stepped inside, as though the house itself remembered a version of him the boardroom never got to meet.
Tante Ingrid turned out to be a formidable woman in her seventies with sharp eyes and sharper diamonds, holding court at the head of a table set with more silver than Maeve had seen outside a museum, and she'd taken an immediate, delighted interest in Maeve that Leon seemed both grateful for and faintly nervous about. Two cousins, a business partner Maeve gathered was more friend than colleague, and a quiet, elegant woman introduced only as Leon's mother's oldest friend rounded out the table, all of them watching Maeve with the particular, unhurried curiosity of people who had clearly heard a great deal about her already and were now simply confirming it in person.
"You have the look of a woman who fixes things," Ingrid said, over the second course, studying Maeve with unsettling directness. "Leon has needed someone like that for years. Ever since the business with Chad Albrecht, he trusts almost no one enough to let them fix anything at all."
The name dropped into the conversation exactly as lightly as a woman might drop the name of an old family recipe, and Maeve watched Leon's jaw tighten by one precise degree, his hand going still around his wine glass.
"Tante Ingrid," he said, quiet and even, "that is not a story for the table."
"It is a story everyone at this table already knows, Liebling." Ingrid waved a ringed hand, entirely unbothered. "I only mention it because I like this one. I would rather she hear it kindly, from me, than read some poisoned version of it in a business journal someday."
He's not embarrassed, Maeve thought, watching the careful stillness settle over Leon's whole frame, the exact same armor she'd first seen in his office weeks ago. He's protecting something that still bleeds.
"Another time," Leon said, and something in his voice closed the subject with enough finality that even Ingrid, for all her delighted directness, let it go, though not without one last look at Maeve that seemed to promise the conversation wasn't actually finished, merely postponed.
They didn't speak of it again until much later, back at his apartment in the city, the estate's silver and diamonds replaced by ordinary lamplight and the particular quiet of two people deciding how much of themselves to hand over on purpose.
"Chad Albrecht was my closest friend," Leon said finally, without her having to ask, staring at the dark window rather than at her. "Since university. My business partner, for nearly a decade, before any of this belonged to only me. I trusted him with everything, the company's early structure, my family's confidence, things I have not told another living person outside this room."
"What happened."
"He sued me." Leon said it flatly, the words clearly costing him something even now. "Claimed I had cut him out of ownership he believed he was owed, took it to court rather than to me directly, and let the entire proceeding play out in public over eighteen months while I was still grieving my father. I lost nearly everything I had built confidence in during that year. Not the company. Myself." A long pause, and when he continued his voice had gone quieter still. "I won the case, eventually. I have never once felt like it was a victory."
There had been a period, he admitted, watching the dark window rather than her, when he'd stopped attending board meetings entirely, when Ingrid had been the only person permitted past the front gate of this very apartment for nearly four months, when the company's stock had wobbled badly enough that two separate acquisition offers had arrived within the same week, both of them, he suspected now, timed deliberately by people who had read the same court filings the public had. He had rebuilt himself the only way he knew how, methodically, one closed door at a time, until the man across from her now existed largely because the one before him had decided, quietly and completely, never to be caught that unguarded again.
That's the wound underneath the wound, Maeve thought, watching him carefully, understanding now the particular shape of every careful, controlled thing she'd noticed about him since the interview. He didn't just lose a friend. He lost the ability to believe that closeness doesn't eventually cost him everything.
"I'm not him," she said quietly, reaching for his hand.
"I know." Leon's fingers closed around hers, and for the first time since Ingrid's toast, something in his shoulders eased, fractionally. "Knowing it and trusting it completely are, I am learning, two very different disciplines."
"Is that why the office," she asked gently. "All that glass, nothing on the walls, nothing that gives anyone a place to hide anything from you. You built a room where you'd see it coming this time."
Something crossed his face that told her she'd landed closer to true than she'd expected to. "I built a room," he said slowly, "where nothing could be hidden from me again without my noticing considerably sooner than eighteen months. Whether that has made me safer or simply more alone, I have not yet decided."
"Maybe it doesn't have to be one or the other," Maeve said. "Maybe you just haven't had a reason yet to test whether the room works both ways. Whether someone standing inside it with you might actually be worth the risk of not seeing everything coming."
He looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind the careful gray of his eyes, and didn't answer directly, though the way his thumb traced slow, absent circles over her knuckles felt like an answer of its own kind.
Her phone buzzed against the side table before she could answer, and some old, tired instinct made her check it immediately rather than let it wait, the way two years of bracing for bad timing had trained her to. Rina's text lit the screen, three words followed by a photo that made the warmth in Maeve's chest go suddenly, sharply cold.
Mae. Look who's boarding.
The photo, grainy, clearly taken quickly through an airport crowd, showed Wyatt Lang at a gate check-in counter, sunglasses on despite the indoor lighting, a single boarding pass visible in his hand. Maeve zoomed in without meaning to, and felt her stomach drop cleanly through the floor at the destination printed across the top in small, undeniable letters.
Frankfurt.
She showed Leon the screen without a word, and watched the same careful stillness she'd seen at Ingrid's table settle over him again, colder this time, more deliberate, the look of a man recalculating a battlefield he'd assumed, until thirty seconds ago, was still an ocean away.
"He's coming here," Maeve said quietly, more statement than question.
"Then let him come." Leon set his phone down beside hers, and the quiet certainty in his voice did more to steady her pulse than any reassurance could have. "He will find considerably less waiting for him in this city than he expects."