He continues before I can answer. “Or is it about that girl?” He makes a small, disapproving sound. “She must be half your age.”
My hand fists tighter in his collar. The urge to break his jaw is so immediate it nearly does itself. “She is none of your business.”
“No?” His eyes flick over my face, amused in the most poisonous way. “She looked frightened. Not of me, of course. Of understanding you.”
I slam him harder into the wall. “Say her name again.”
He smiles. A slow, terrible thing. And then, because he knows exactly when a man is ready to cross a line and exactly how to step just beyond it, he says, “I have a proposition for you.”
I don’t let go. “Talk fast.”
“Marry Alena.”
For a second, I actually think I misheard him. Then rage comes roaring back so hard it sharpens everything. “No.”
He continues as if I didn’t speak. “And I’ll back your claim.”
That gives me pause. Tiny. Involuntary. Real.
He sees it. “Twenty percent,” he says. “Of the fortune. Control stays with you. Publicly, I support the succession. Privately, I receive a percentage. You know it’s a reasonable demand.”
I stare at him. Reasonable. He says it like he’s asking for a seat at dinner, not a cut of an empire he’s spent half his life trying to manipulate out from under me.
“With Alena’s family behind you,” he adds, “you become untouchable. Their money, our infrastructure, your grandfather’s name. You’d be the most powerful man in this city.”
I almost laugh again.
His answer to everything: power. Optics. Alliances. Blood and marriage treated like assets on a balance sheet.
And Alena.
Of course, Alena.
Elegant, connected, ruthless enough to survive him and polished enough to survive me. On paper, she’s perfect. The kind of woman boardrooms would applaud and society columns would worship.
And she would poison the inside walls of my house in a week.
My grip loosens just enough for me to pull him off the wall and let him stand. I smooth his collar back into place, not out of respect. Out of contempt.
“You really don’t understand me at all,” I say.
“No,” he replies evenly. “I understand you very well. Better than she ever will.”
He means Zatanna.
The fact that he uses the pronoun like that, as if he’s already reached into my head and found the shape of the problem, makes my vision narrow.
I take one step back, then another, not because I’m calmer but because killing him in a hospital corridor would complicate the week more than I can afford. “Alena is not an option,” I say.
“She was before.”
“She isn’t now.”
His gaze sharpens slightly. “Because of the girl.”
I don’t answer.
“That,” he says quietly, “is why you’ll lose.”
