The Neutral Ground
The boardroom Damien reserved wasn't in any of his towers. It was a private floor of an old Carnegie building in Midtown, stripped to steel and silent—no assistants, no distractions, no surveillance. Just a long obsidian table and two chairs, facing each other like dueling pistols.
This wasn't Le Bernardin. No wine. No low lighting. Just steel, silence, and consequences.
The elevator climbed in perfect quiet, each floor passing like a countdown. Victoria checked her reflection in the polished steel doors—black suit, no jewelry, red mouth like a weapon. She'd chosen this armor carefully. No softness. No vulnerability. Nothing that could be misconstrued as weakness.
The doors opened to reveal a hallway of exposed brick and industrial fixtures. Her heels clicked against concrete floors as she walked toward the only lit room at the end. Through the glass partition, she could see him already seated, hands folded, waiting.
She paused at the threshold. This was the moment. Once she walked through that door, there would be no pretending this was anything other than what it was: a calculated negotiation between two people who trusted each other exactly as much as two scorpions in a bottle.
The Contract
Victoria walked in first.
She didn't offer a greeting. She placed a leather folder on the table and slid it across to him with one manicured finger.
He opened it.
Inside: seven pages of bulletproof legal precision. Already signed. Dated today.
"Before you start," she said coolly, settling into the chair across from him, "these are my terms. Non-negotiable."
Damien didn't speak. He read his expression a masterclass in neutral assessment. She watched his eyes move across each line, searching for any tell, any flicker of surprise or displeasure. But his face remained a perfect mask.
The terms were surgical in their precision:
Co-CEO position. Equal authority, equal access, equal representation on all board communications.
Prenup with sole asset seizure upon infidelity or strategic deceit. What's his becomes hers if he strays—physically or professionally.
No children clause. A mutual agreement that this arrangement would remain strictly business, with no complications of legacy or inheritance.
Non-compete agreement. Neither party could move against the other's interests for the duration of the arrangement.
Weekly alignment dinners—mandatory. Performance reviews disguised as intimacy, ensuring neither party could operate in complete isolation.
No physical intimacy until Q2 review. Business first, with the possibility of reassessment once the initial merger period stabilized.
A mutual exit clause, pre-scripted for scandal-free dissolution. Clean breaks, controlled narratives, and protected reputations.
He raised one brow, just slightly. The only indication he'd found anything remotely surprising in her comprehensive dismantling of traditional marriage expectations.
"And the escape clause?" he asked, voice smooth as silk over steel.
Victoria leaned forward, her hands flat on the obsidian surface. "If either of us breaks rank, we part ways quietly. NDA, no smear campaigns. I control the press release. You keep your face; I keep my empire."
A pause. The air between them felt charged, electric with the weight of what they were negotiating.
"This isn't marriage, Damien. It's merger. And I don't sign until the leverage is mine."
The Hidden Truth
Damien closed the folder with care. He didn't argue. Didn't smile. Didn't show even the slightest indication that he found her terms anything other than reasonable business propositions.
Instead, he asked, "Anything else I should know about your future plans?"
She met his gaze without a flicker. "Not unless my skincare line poses a national threat."
A clean lie. Delivered with the kind of practiced smoothness that came from years of boardroom battles and media interviews.
And he knew it.
She didn't know he owned the private medical consortium behind Dr. Chen's clinic. She didn't know he'd seen the ultrasounds before she had, filed away in digital records that technically belonged to him through a shell company buried six layers deep in offshore holdings. Or that he'd paid off her assistant's student debt in exchange for weekly reports on Victoria's schedule, her moods, her carefully hidden doctor's appointments.
She didn't know that from the moment she walked out of that hotel suite two months ago, morning sickness disguised as food poisoning, he'd started protecting what was his.
Not out of sentiment. Sentiment was a luxury neither of them could afford.
Out of strategy.
She lies like I breathe, he thought, watching her maintain perfect eye contact. But she forgets—she's carrying something that makes her visible.
She thought she was holding a gun to his head with her contract. She didn't realize she'd already been tagged, marked, catalogued in ways that made her infinitely more valuable and infinitely more vulnerable than she understood.
He said nothing. Timing was everything. Power required patience.
The Opening Move
His phone pinged.
He glanced at the screen—encrypted alert. A photo of Marcus, clean-shaven, smiling nervously, entering a mirrored tower with Eden Rothschild Strategic etched in gold across the facade.
Below the image: Subject has accepted initial funds. PR campaign in motion. Targeting Blackwood Holdings first.
The game had begun.
Rothschild wasn't just making a move against him. She was declaring war on everything he'd built, starting with his weakest points and working inward. And she was using Marcus—his former protégé, the one person who knew his operational strategies from the inside—as the opening shot.
Damien locked his screen. When he looked up, Victoria was watching him—sharp, assessing, reading the micro-expressions that most people missed entirely.
"What is it?" she asked.
He stood, straightening his jacket with deliberate precision. "You'll move into my penthouse by Monday."
Her laugh was short, dry. "No."
"For optics," he said simply, already calculating the media angles, the board reactions, the way Eden's strategists would have to recalibrate their attack plans. "The press will assume reconciliation. Eden will hesitate. And my board will stop circling like vultures."
"I don't need your fortress," she snapped, but he could see the calculation in her eyes. She was already running the same numbers he was.
Damien didn't blink. "It's not a fortress. It's a stage."
The Arrangement
She stared at him across the obsidian table. The city sprawled below them through floor-to-ceiling windows, a glittering web of ambition and consequence. Then she sat back in her chair, legs crossing slowly, deliberately—a gesture that spoke of power held in check rather than power surrendered.
She could walk away. She should. The smart play was to maintain her independence, keep her own territory, control her own narrative.
But optics were armor—and right now, she needed all she could get.
"Fine," she said coolly. "Separate bedrooms. My staff. No cameras in private quarters."
He nodded. "Done."
The negotiation was complete. Seven pages of legal precision, handshakes that felt like treaties, and the understanding that they were both walking into something that could either save them or destroy them entirely.
Neither mentioned the obvious: that living in the same space would mean sharing more than just strategy sessions. That proximity bred either intimacy or hatred, and sometimes both.
Neither mentioned that this arrangement would put them in each other's orbits during the most vulnerable hours—early mornings, late nights, the spaces between public performances where masks slipped and real intentions showed.
They were both too smart not to know. Too strategic not to have planned for it.
But as they gathered their things and prepared to return to their separate worlds for the last time as independent operators, both carried the same unspoken question:
In a game where trust was the ultimate luxury and betrayal was just another business tool, what happened when the players had to share the same bed?
Even if they never planned to sleep in it together.