Page 29 of The Devil of Downtown

For a moment, the only sound is the slow tap of my fingers on leather before Maria ends her call and resumes her monologue about projections and policy, blissfully unaware that the temperature in the car has turned molten.

The car rolls to a stop, and I glance out the window. Westminster rises ahead of us. An empire carved in stone, its spires cutting into the clouds like a sharpened crown.

Maria exits first, still talking. Sloane reaches for the handle, but I catch it, my voice soft.

“You know what they say, Sloane?” She shivers as I lean closer, my lips brushing the shell of her ear.

“No, Mr. Black.” Her voice is quiet but steady.

“If you play with the devil...” I let the words drag, savoring her sharp inhale. “Eventually, he starts to play back.”

Her breath hitches, but her gaze doesn’t waver. “I’m not afraid.”

My face twists into a slow, dark smile as I release the door and let the chilly morning air filter in.

“Oh, you should be.”

Chapter eight

Dane

The oak-paneled room smells of wax and oak, centuries of history soaked into the walls. The wood creaks under me as I take my seat. Maria sits to my left, composed and gleaming, one leg crossed over the other, the perfect picture of poise.

A few cameras line the back, their red lights blinking like predators’ eyes. MPs sit in a half-circle, papers rustling, like sharks circling for headlines rather than answers.

I lean back in the witness chair, unbothered. Let them circle.

I didn’t come to London to beg.

“Mr. Black,” one MP says—gray suit, gray skin, gray soul—the kind of man who blinks too often and still thinks he can intimidate. “Why would Parliament allow a foreign investment firm to take control of one of our most respected media institutions?”

I let the silence hang, honed through years of negotiation. The cameras drink it in.

“Because without me, Bexley collapses. Thousands of jobs gone. Papers shuttered. Your constituents won’t thank you when the only thing they can read is clickbait spun out of Silicon Valley.”

A murmur ripples through the room. Pens scratch faster. Someone at the press bench smirks. They smell the headline.

Despite my best intentions, every so often my gaze flicks her way. She’s perched in one of the observer’s seats, notebook open, pen poised. It’s still there, simmering—the same pull that started in New York and hasn’t left me since. A low, thrumming tension that coils tighter the longer I stare.

Another MP, a woman with fierce eyes and an agenda, leans forward. “And what about influence, Mr. Black? A hedge fund dictating what the public reads—that’s not enterprise, that’s interference.”

I meet her stare. “With respect, your media’s already compromised. Hollowed out by short-term investors who don’t understand it. I’m the only one willing to put something real behind it. Or would you prefer your press owned by shell companies you can’t trace?”

Her features harden with disdain, but she doesn’t have an answer.

When the chair calls a ten-minute recess, I loosen my tie and stand, letting the hum of the room fade into background noise.

Inevitably, my eyes drift back to her. But this time, she has her phone in her hand, her thumb sliding across the screen. Whatever she’s reading pulls a soft smile to her face. And then I remember the call in the car, the nameBrodyflashing across the screen incessantly.

The pressure in my chest constricts. Jealousy isn’t something I entertain. I don’t envy. I acquire.

But the way she’s smiling at that screen—

It’s like watching sunlight fall somewhere I can’t reach.

The rest of the session passes in a string of rhetoric and restraint. Questions about governance, accountability, oversight—all the things I could recite in my sleep. I answer cleanly, coolly, while my focus stays split between the debate and the girl clinging on to the belief she doesn’t want me.

“Mr. Black,” someone challenges near the end, “how do we know you won’t strip Bexley the same way you’ve gutted other companies?”