Sienna's POV
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I didn't sleep.
Not even close.
I lay on the hotel bed staring at the ceiling while Leo breathed softly beside me, one arm thrown over his face the way he always slept, and I replayed the photograph in my head over and over like a film stuck on the same terrible scene.
Damien Mercer.
The masked stranger.
Leo's father.
All three of those things were the same person and my brain kept rejecting it the way a body rejects something poisonous. It couldn't be true. It was too big. Too impossible. Too completely and utterly catastrophic for it to be real.
But the photograph didn't care about any of that.
And neither did Leo's amber eyes.
By five in the morning I had made a decision. I was not going to fall apart. Falling apart was a luxury I could not afford — not with the board meeting tomorrow, not with six weeks until court, not with a company bleeding out while my stepsister played empress on my father's floor. I would file that information about Damien away in the most locked room in my mind and I would deal with it later.
Later.
First, I had to walk back into Vale Enterprises.
---
I dropped Leo with Petra after breakfast. He went happily — Petra had promised cartoons and chocolate milk, which in Leo's world was basically a five-star resort. He kissed my cheek, grabbed his small backpack, and didn't look back once.
I stood outside the hotel for a moment after the door closed.
Breathed in.
Breathed out.
Then I walked.
---
Vale Enterprises headquarters stood exactly where it always had. I didn't look up at the building when I arrived. I just pushed through the front door and walked straight to the reception desk.
The receptionist looked up.
Her mouth opened slightly.
She recognized me. Of course she did. I had grown up in this building. I had done homework in the waiting areas and eaten lunch in the staff canteen and watched my father shake hands in this lobby a hundred times.
She looked at me like she was seeing a ghost.
"Ms. Vale," she said carefully.
"Good morning," I said. Calm. Even. Like I had never left.
I walked past her toward the elevators.
The whispers started before I reached the button.
I heard my name — not loud, just a murmur moving through the lobby like a wave. People turning. People nudging each other. A woman by the coffee station put her cup down and stared openly. A man near the stairs said something into his phone and glanced at me twice.
I looked at none of them.
I pressed the button for the forty-second floor.
I got in the elevator alone.
The doors closed and for exactly three seconds — the only three seconds I allowed myself — I pressed my back against the elevator wall and squeezed my eyes shut and felt everything I was holding.
My father's voice on the phone. This company will be yours, Sienna. I promise.
Cole's face the night I found him with Mira. That horrible blank second before the guilt hit him.
The flight out of the country. Leo kicking inside me, small and secret, the only thing I was sure of.
The elevator dinged.
I opened my eyes.
Stood straight.
Walked out.
---
My father's office was at the end of the hall. The door was half open. I pushed it and stepped inside.
The first thing that hit me was the smell.
Mira's perfume — thick and expensive and completely wrong for this room. My father's office had always smelled like old books and the specific kind of coffee he drank every morning. Now it smelled like someone had decided to erase him and replace him with something prettier.
Cole's coffee mug sat on the corner of the desk. His handwriting on a sticky note beside it. Like he owned the space. Like he had always owned it.
I stood in the middle of the room and I did not touch anything.
I just breathed.
My father had sat behind that desk for twenty-three years. He had built Vale Enterprises from a small trading firm into something the whole city respected. He had done it with patience and stubbornness and an inability to quit that I had apparently inherited directly.
He deserved better than this.
He deserved better than a daughter who wasn't there when he died.
That one I would carry for the rest of my life.
But the company — the company I could still fix.
I opened my bag and pulled out the will contestation documents. Thick. Precise. Built carefully over months with my lawyer, every word chosen, every clause backed by evidence. I set them on the desk — right in the middle, right where Cole's sticky note was — and I looked at them.
It begins now.
I pulled out my phone and called my lawyer to confirm tomorrow's filing time. She answered on the second ring, ran through the schedule, confirmed everything was in order.
"There's one thing," she said before we hung up.
I went still. "What thing?"
"I got a call this morning from the court clerk's office. Someone submitted a counter-filing last night. Challenging your right to contest on the basis of abandonment." A pause. "The filing claims you voluntarily removed yourself from Vale family affairs and therefore forfeited inheritance rights under a secondary clause in your father's estate agreement."
My hand tightened on the phone.
"Who filed it?" I said.
"It was filed under Vale Enterprises' corporate legal team." Another pause. Careful. "Sienna, the signature on the filing — it's not Mira's."
I waited.
"It's your father's old lawyer," she said. "Gerald Paine. He represented your father for fifteen years. He knew everything about the original will. He knew every clause, every protection, every loophole." Her voice was quiet. "He filed against you."
The room felt like it tilted.
Gerald Paine had held my hand at my father's funeral — or so Petra told me, since I wasn't there. He had sent me a condolence message abroad. He had acted like someone on my side.
He had been building a case against me the entire time.
Which meant someone had turned him.
Or paid him.
Or threatened him.
"Sienna," my lawyer said. "This changes our timeline."
"I know," I said.
"It also means someone knew you were filing before you filed. Someone inside your circle —"
"I know," I said again.
I hung up.
I stood in my father's office, surrounded by someone else's perfume and someone else's coffee mug, holding documents that were now slightly less powerful than they were this morning, and I understood something very clearly.
This wasn't just a fight for a company.
This was a trap.
And whoever built it had been watching me long before I stepped off that plane.
My phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number.
Five words.
"Welcome home. We've been waiting."