1
VIVIAN PARK
The chandelier goes out mid-sentence.
One second the gala hums—champagne flutes clicking, the board’s smiles like polished knives—and the next the room collapses into a hot, intimate black that smells of wine, fear, and something else I can’t place.
“Power surge,” someone says, too loud, too breathless. My grip on the podium is the only thing steady. I can hear a financier’s shoes scrape marble as he uses the darkness like a stage. He has always loved theater. So I breathe, count the beats, and turn his spectacle into numbers.
“Please remain seated,” I say. My voice slices through panic. It’s practiced. It’s precise. “Security has it under control. We will resume in three minutes.”
They believe me because they must. Because I made them believe me. Because my job is to be unshakable.
Then he finds me.
A shape moves through the dark: tall, deliberate, a silhouette that doesn’t belong in a room of suits. Someone’s hand brushes my arm as they pass. The contact could have been accidental. It could have been a shove. There is an economy to the movement—no wasted apology, no hesitation—and something in my bonesanswers with a reflex I have spent thirty-six years training out of myself: readiness.
There is scent. Not perfume. Not the citrus employees wear to neutralize late nights. It’s older—iron, cold sea on a winter coastline, cedar smoke, the wet leather of a saddle. It presses under the cuff of my gown, in that triangle where skin meets silk, and the boardroom air expands to include a memory that is not mine.
A name flashes—not words but images: black stone cliffs, a watchtower, a man on a parapet waiting for a signal. The image is not mine, and it is instantly, violently intimate. My stomach flips. My mouth tightens. I force it into a clause: observe, catalog, dismiss.
“Madam Park,” a familiar voice says from the podium’s shadow. The financier, smirking. “Given recent—complications, perhaps it’s time your shareholders considered liquidity. A bad quarter can be a mercy.”
Polished, parasitic. He believes the outage is his curtain. He’s wrong. I pivot the energy; practiced legalese slides into a smile sharp enough to cut.
“We’ll review the quarter,” I say. “But first, do you want to explain to our guests why you’re advising shareholders to sell the company that just posted our highest retention metrics in five years?”
Laughter, thin and nervous, leaks into the dark. A hand clamps around my wrist—part reflex, part something else. The touch is warm through the silk, grounding. The scent surges. The image sharpens to a voice that is not a voice but a memory: a command barked across a courtyard, the scrape of boots, a child learning to stand.
My professional armor vibrates. I have built a life on lucid contracts, on signatures and clauses that bind liabilities andabsolve feelings. I do not flinch. Yet under my skin an animal answers—an old and unwanted need to listen and respond.
“Sir,” I hear myself say. “If you’re interested in shareholder value, let our CFO provide the report. If you’re here to destabilize, we have counsel and limits.”
He leans in. The sound of his breath is corporate—slick with campaign-ready venom. “Limits,” he repeats. “Or legal overhead.”
The lights die completely. No stage whisper now. The blackout is deliberate; that I know the instant my eyes register total black. The room becomes a cave. The financier’s charm evaporates under the blind pressure of dark. People move with animal urgency, hands on backs, murmurs rising. Panic is contagious and I am allergic.
The hand on my wrist tightens—not to keep me from falling but to anchor me. Closeness becomes presence. The scent folds in on itself and the memory flood is sudden and invasive: I am running along wet rock. I am on a tower. Someone takes my hand and everything is bright and cold and known. Heat kisses the hollow of my neck. My breath goes wrong.
This is not how boardroom politics operate.
“You okay?” a voice asks, close to my ear. It’s not the financier. It’s not anyone I can name. It’s soft, but the word carries weight like a gavel.
“Fine,” I say, because that is the default. I am never anything but fine in public.
“Good.” His fingers curl around mine with a pressure that registers the way a pulse does. “We stay put. Lights back on in sixty seconds.”
The sixty seconds stretches like taffy. In the dark the mate-bond makes itself ugly and beautiful at once. It is not consent and it is not choice—it's an indiscriminate recognition, a gravitational tide between two bodies that have no right toalter one another’s course. I see flashes more vivid than memory should allow: a carved chair with a lion’s back, a seal pressed into wax, a ledger bound in a hand that bears more rings than a CEO should carry.
The part of me trained to reduce emotion to risk assessment files the sensation: this is a vulnerability vector. It’s something an enemy could exploit, a headline waiting to be written. Practical ruthlessness steadies me. But even as I catalogue, the animal inside recognizes territory. My jaw tightens.
We are aware of each other in a way colleagues and competitors never will be. The bond throws images into my skull like slides: his hands—large, expert—mapped in places that would be intimate if they weren’t simply topography; a throne at the end of a corridor; a mother’s lullaby; a blade kissed by salt air. The scent layers over my breath and I want to inhale it like oxygen and choke on it at once.
A soft click sounds by my palm. Cold metal grazes leather. I glance down—my glove, the one I always wear to meetings, has weight at the cuff where pressure has been applied. Someone presses a ring against the grain, moving the leather slightly, as if testing pliability. The metal leaves a warmth through the fabric, an impression my skin registers as presence.
“Stay calm,” he murmurs. I could identify that voice in a courtroom of echoes. Command tempered with something older: possessiveness that reads like protection.
I am not powerless. I am vigilant and furious at feeling anything at all. I pull my wrist back, testing my autonomy. My hand meets his and the inside of my palm blooms with that impossible image: the seafront, salted teeth of cliffs, a banner snapping in a wind I haven’t felt. The bond staggers me with its insistence. It is not seduction; it is imprint.
