The boardroom screens bled red.
Figures slid down charts in jagged lines, contracts flashing error alerts in the corner. On the long polished table, a dozen directors leaned forward at once, voices overlapping—sharp, anxious, defensive.
"It's the merger clause," one snapped, tapping the paper as if the ink itself were guilty.
"They buried a penalty in subsection twelve—three months hidden in translation."
"If we don't patch this, the loss will gut third-quarter projections."
Lunox sat at the head of the table, spine unbending, fingers laced neatly on the desk. White silk cuffs gleamed beneath the boardroom light, her diamond pin catching faint sparks. Her expression never shifted, though the red glow of the charts painted her face like fire.
She had heard enough. Not now. Not after this.
Because outside these walls, scandal still roared. Every phone screen in the city still looped the same rooftop kiss: Freya draped across Orion, storm-steady beneath fire. And already, the directors' eyes had cut toward her more than once this morning—sidelong, speculative.
"If only our contracts were as bold as last night's headlines," a senior director muttered under his breath, the sarcasm aimed too carelessly.
The air chilled.
Lunox turned her head slowly, black gaze slicing through him. "You are here to manage numbers, not gossip," she said, voice crisp as frost. "If you cannot distinguish the two, I will find someone who can."
Silence rippled down the table. The man shrank back, his mouth snapping shut.
Still, the damage pressed against her ribs. A crack widening. She straightened the file in front of her, nails grazing the leather folder harder than intended.
"Proceed," she ordered.
Another director cleared his throat. "If Helios retracts, the partnership collapses. We'll bleed four hundred million before summer closes."
The numbers flared again on the screen, merciless. Red against white. Ather bleeding in public.
Lunox's pulse kicked once, hard. She smoothed her blouse cuff, let her gaze drift deliberately across the table. Ice in her eyes. Control in every line of her body. No more cracks. Not here. Not now.
And yet, in the reflection of the screen, she saw it—the faint tremor in her hand when she reached for the pen.
The directors saw only the frost. But she knew better.
The Ice Queen was burning beneath glass.
The doors opened without ceremony.
Orion crossed the threshold with a folder under his arm and that same unhurried stride that made rooms measure themselves against him. He didn't search for permission; he moved to the console and set his folder down like a metronome finding the beat.
"Put subsection twelve up," he said to the analyst at the screen. Not loud. Not hesitant.
The analyst looked at Lunox. She gave the smallest nod. The chart flipped: paragraphs of legalese in mirrored columns, English and the partner's language side by side, a red box around a block of text that had already knotted the board's throats.
A senior director—Barton, striped tie drawn too tight—leaned back with the impatience of rank. "This is not an intern's classroom," he said, voice oily with condescension. "We are discussing liability, not onboarding."
Orion didn't look at him yet. He tapped the red box with the edge of a silver pen. "Liability begins where you stopped reading."
A few heads turned. A cough died at the far end of the table.
Barton's smile sharpened. "And where did you imagine we stopped, Mr…?"
"Light," Orion said. "And here." He highlighted a single word in the partner text, then its translation on the right. "Your vendor counsel rendered 'until completion' as 'not less than.' Those are not synonyms. In the original, the clause caps exposure at ninety days post-failure. Your version extends the penalty indefinitely."
The room stilled as if the HVAC had cut.
Lunox's fingers relaxed a fraction against the folder's spine. Show me, storm. Make the noise obey.
Barton's jaw worked. "That's a dramatic interpretation."
"No." Orion's tone was steel wrapped in linen. He advanced the slide to a pulled email chain. "Here is the associate who signed off at 2:09 a.m. last Wednesday. Here is the dictionary they cited. Here is the section of that same dictionary clarifying contextual usage—skipped. And here," he flipped to a third slide, "is the partner's domestic contract using the original phrase with a fixed cap in a wholly separate deal, which their courts have already treated as ninety days."
The director at finance squinted, then looked down, cheeks coloring. Someone farther down whispered, "How did we miss that?"
Barton sat forward, dangerous now. "We do not accept evidence scavenged off the internet and—"
"It's from their filings." Orion didn't blink. "Public, stamped, and, unfortunately for us, consistent."
A vein in Barton's temple ticked. "Even if your quibble is correct, it doesn't solve the opt-out window. They can still trigger it and wipe our leverage."
Orion finally looked at him. The air in the room shifted one degree colder.
"It does if you stop offering them a target," he said. "We're presenting the penalty as a dare. They'll take it." He turned to the analyst. "Next slide."
A new chart bloomed—shipment timelines, currency overlays, penalty curves. Orion sketched the path with the pen, connecting dots like a cartographer turning wilderness into map.
"Stop all northbound SKUs for seven days," he said. "Backfill with inland stock routed through Etruscan. It spikes our short-term freight, but it also removes the triggers they're salivating over. In the same week, we frontload the Helios co-marketing push—make noise big enough that their shareholders see any public penalty as self-harm. Then we give them a choice: accept the ninety-day cap we've just… found for them, or explain to their board why they deliberately set their own house on fire."
A younger director half-rose. "You're— you're using their optics against them."
"I'm using their reflex." Orion looked back to the table. "They want to punish us. Make punishing us look like punishing themselves."
Silence, again. This time it wasn't shock; it was calculation.
Barton rallied. "And the cash bleed while we reroute? You'll ask the treasury to pray, I suppose?"
Orion rolled the pen once across his knuckles, then set it parallel to the console. "No prayers. A cross-hedge on the route's FX exposure—here." Another slide: two lines converging like jaws closing. "We buy the dip they created when they leaked this clause to the trade rags. By the time they realize the penalty is capped, we've already paid for the reroute with their panic."
A low, involuntary sound—almost a laugh—escaped someone from legal. "That's… vicious."
"Efficient," Orion corrected.
He finally turned toward Lunox. The distance between them didn't change, but the room felt smaller for it.
"Authorize the hold for seven days," he said. "I'll take Helios on the co-marketing play today, personally. And we send their language back to them with the cap in bold. If they intend to fight, make them fight on ground they paved."
The table waited for Lunox to speak. Even the screens seemed to dim around the edges, as if the building itself leaned closer.
Her expression was still stone. But inside, a gear that had been grinding against itself all morning slid into place. The crack didn't vanish; it cooled.
"Finance," she said, eyes never leaving Orion, "model the cash swing with his FX hedge and put it on my screen in ten minutes."
"Yes, Ms. Ather."
"Legal, draft the redline with the cap language he cited, reference their public filing. I want it ready by the time Helios answers."
"Yes, Ms. Ather."
She let the quiet run one beat longer, the kind that tells a room where power actually sits. Then:
"Mr. Light," she said, voice even, "you will brief Helios with me."
A flicker—small, but there—in his eyes. He inclined his head. "Understood."
Barton couldn't quite help himself. "Ms. Ather, if this gambit fails—"
"It won't," Lunox said without looking at him. "And if it does, we will fail forward, not sideways."
A breathless hush. Somewhere, a chair creaked like a confession.
Orion closed his folder. He didn't smile. But something at the corner of his mouth acknowledged the moment—the way storms sometimes acknowledge lightning.
Lunox slid her pen into alignment with the leather edge, restoring a line that had simple, ruthless meaning: the room was back in order.
"Ten minutes," she said. "Move."
Chairs scraped. Screens flipped. The boardroom became a machine again, red bleeding to a measured orange as numbers recalibrated.
Orion paused at the console, waiting. Lunox didn't ask him to. She didn't have to. When she finally rose, the frost in her voice could have cut glass, but it didn't touch him.
"Walk with me," she said.
He did. And as the door sighed shut behind them, the directors exhaled in a single, uneven wave—as if someone had opened a window and let the weather out.
The air in the boardroom hadn't settled.
The numbers still glowed red-to-orange on the wall screens, the table heavy with silence. Then Barton leaned forward, tie crooked from his own fuming. His hand struck the table with a flat thud.
"This is lunacy," he snapped. "You expect us to stake a hundred-year reputation on a boy's midnight improvisation? This isn't chess, it's a company. We don't gamble with legacy."
Orion didn't flinch. He rolled the pen across his knuckles once, then set it down with exact precision against the folder edge. His gaze met Barton's with the same steadiness as before, voice calm as if he'd been asked the weather.
"It isn't bravado," he said, quiet but cutting. "Doing nothing bleeds more. In silence or in scandal, the numbers bleed the same. Pretending otherwise—" his gaze flicked deliberately to the red curve on the screen, "—that's the gamble."
The words landed. A pause, uncomfortable. Several directors shifted in their chairs, eyes darting between the two men. One muttered something under his breath but didn't finish it.
The door opened.
Heels struck marble, crisp and confident.
Freya swept in as though she'd been invited, blazer draped over her shoulders, maroon dress cutting sharp against the sterile boardroom light. Sunglasses dangled from her fingers, gold hair pulled back just enough to sharpen the edge of her face.
"Apologies," she said lightly, not sorry at all. "Traffic. You wouldn't believe how loud the city is when you're the headline."
Barton half-rose. "Ms. Ather, this is a closed—"
Freya cut him with a smile, wicked and bright. "Oh, come on. Let the boy speak. You're all just scared he's right."
A ripple down the table—half stifled coughs, half nervous laughs.
Orion didn't turn toward her. He stayed steady at the console, eyes on the data, as if her entrance were weather expected.
Lunox's hand tightened against her folder. Her voice cut through before the noise could swell again.
"Enough."
The room stilled.
Her gaze swept the table, cold and sharp, before fixing on the screen. "Show me the numbers."
The analyst jolted into action, flipping slides. Graphs shifted, projections updated, the air buzzing with recalculations.
No one dared argue further.
Only Freya leaned back in her chair, grin curling as her eyes flicked between her sister and the storm at the console. Sparks played in the corner of her smile.
And Lunox, spine rigid, eyes locked forward, let the silence hold—her voice had ended the argument, but the echo that lingered wasn't Barton's bluster.
It was his. The storm's calm. The way it needled at her more than fire ever had.
The screen obeyed him.
At Orion's nod, the analyst advanced the deck. Red columns flattened, reformed; penalty curves arced like hooked talons before smoothing into disciplined lines. A map slid onto the wall—ports, inland hubs, the ghost of a continent traced with blue arteries. He took the pen and used its shadow to draw a route only he seemed to see.
"Freeze all northbound SKUs for seven days," he said. "The gap is surgical, not fatal. We fill from Etruscan inland stock." A tap—another slide. "Short-term freight cost spikes here, yes—" a red triangle pulsed, "—but we neutralize the pain with the hedge. Treasury buys the dip created by the leak they pushed to the trade rags yesterday at 14:17." The time stamp blinked in the corner like a confession. "When their penalty collapses to the ninety-day cap, the currency corrects. We've already banked the rebound."
No one breathed loudly. Chairs no longer creaked; wrists stilled above legal pads.
He moved on. "Optics: co-marketing with Helios isn't fluff. It's floodlight." The deck replaced numbers with noise—mock headlines, mocked-up landing pages, a calendar packed so tight it looked belligerent. "We make it expensive for them to punish us in public. Shareholders don't love self-sabotage."
A director from compliance stirred, then thought better of it. Someone from legal pinched the bridge of his nose, the gesture almost a bow.
"Contingency," Orion continued. "If they refuse the cap, we don't litigate first—we exhibit. Their own domestic contract uses this exact phrase with a fixed ninety. We circulate the comparison, quietly but not invisibly, to three outlets that care about contract hygiene. Not scandal sheets." His glance skimmed the table; a few faces colored. "Trade journals. The kind your peers read. Their counsel blinks, or their board does."
He let the pen fall to rest against the console, parallel with the clicker. "All of this holds only if execution is clean. If we smear the edges, they'll find them. Seven days, not eight. Noise, not chaos. Discipline, not drama."
The last word did not look at Freya, but she smiled anyway, unoffended and entertained.
On the wall, the simulation ticked forward. Numbers reeled through a week's worth of movement in a breath: shipments pausing, inventory sliding into new lanes, a currency line dipping and springing back like a wire under tension. Red shrank. Orange cooled. A thin vein of green began to thread the projections—a suggestion at first, then a path.
No one clapped. No one dared. But the boardroom shifted around a gravity that wasn't Barton's title, nor the old portrait glowering on the far wall. It was the simple geometry of competence.
Lunox watched it happen.
Watched the room—men who'd dined on the company's legacy for years—tilt, marginally, toward the storm they'd wanted to dismiss. Watched the heat in her chest, ridiculous and inconvenient, ease as the lines behaved. Watched her hand, traitorously, loosen on the folder's spine.
He makes chaos look like control, she thought. And control is a language I understand.
The next thought slid in before she could bar the door: Why does that steady me more than it should? After last night. After their headlines. After—
"Ms. Ather?" The analyst's voice, careful. "Proceed with the modeled route?"
Lunox blinked once. The screen's light cut facets across her diamond pin; it flashed like the idea of a blade.
She rose. The motion was a verdict all by itself. Around the table, chairs shifted in tiny, involuntary acknowledgments—people making room for the decision before she spoke it. She let the silence stretch, not to punish, but to write the hierarchy back into the air.
"Legal," she said, "deliver the redline with the cap and cite their filing. Use the page and paragraph he referenced. No adjectives."
"Yes, Ms. Ather."
"Treasury, place the hedge in tranches. Don't get greedy. We are not here to prove we're smartest; we are here to be right."
"Yes, Ms. Ather."
"Ops, reroute per the seven-day plan. If anything slips even an hour, I want to hear it from you before the clock does."
"Yes, Ms. Ather."
Only then did she look at Orion. Not long. Not soft. Long enough to acknowledge the shape of what he'd done.
"You'll brief Helios with me," she said. The room heard the with.
A muscle jumped in Barton's jaw. Freya's grin widened, bright and a little wicked. Orion inclined his head, stormlight held behind glass.
On the wall, green edged another line.
Lunox sat, smoothing a non-existent wrinkle from her skirt, reclaiming the geometry of the room one angle at a time. The crack inside her didn't vanish. But for the first time today, it didn't feel like a fault line. It felt like a window.
Discipline, not drama, she repeated in her head, this time to herself. Hold the edges.
The boardroom did what boardrooms do when a center asserts itself. It returned to motion—orders relayed, calls placed, keyboards tapping in precise staccato. The old portrait, unused to being ignored, faded into decor.
Orion clicked the deck dark. He didn't look triumphant. He looked like weather after rain—clean, unadorned, dangerous only if you forgot what it could do.
Freya caught his eye across the table and tipped two fingers at her temple in a casual salute: nicely done. He didn't return it, but the corner of his mouth moved, a private hinge.
Lunox allowed herself a breath she hadn't intended to need. The taste of ozone lingered—impossible, in recycled air—but there all the same.
"Next," she said.
And the room, at last, obeyed.
The boardroom emptied in pieces. Directors murmured into phones, aides swept up notes, the last slide blinked to black. Within minutes, the storm of voices was gone, leaving only the faint whir of the projector cooling.
Lunox remained at the head of the table. One hand on the leather blotter, the other aligning a stack of papers that didn't need aligning. Control demanded order, even in silence.
Across the room, Orion closed his folder with the same precision he'd used all morning. No wasted movement, no performance. Just quiet finality.
For a while, neither spoke. The tower hummed around them, the world outside already shifting headlines from scandal to speculation—fire and storm in the night, storm and ice in the day.
Lunox finally rose. Her heels struck the marble once, twice, then stilled as she looked at him. The words she might have spoken hovered, treacherous, behind her teeth. Thank you. Simple. Dangerous. She swallowed them back.
Instead: "Helios will expect confidence. Don't give them anything else."
Orion met her gaze. Stormlight steady. "I won't."
She should have turned away then. Should have closed the door, should have reclaimed her armor fully. But her eyes lingered a beat too long, caught in his. Not respect alone. Not suspicion alone. Something heavier. Something binding.
I owe him. I hate that I do… but I owe him.
The admission lived only in her chest. Out loud, she gave nothing. She gathered her folder, straightened the cuff of her blouse, and moved toward the door.
Orion's voice followed her, softer than the storm he carried. "You carry the weight well."
Her step faltered. Just slightly. The words weren't flattery, weren't challenge. They were recognition.
She didn't look back. "Weights are meant to be carried." The line was ice, but the echo in her chest was not.
Behind her, she didn't see the faint curve of his mouth—the storm's smile, subtle and knowing. Not triumph. Not mockery. The kind of smile that acknowledged debts and futures alike.
By the time she reached the door, her reflection in the glass betrayed her again: shoulders squared, eyes sharp, but a crack of warmth glowed in the frost.
The Ice Queen walked out, perfect and untouchable.
The woman inside, for the first time, carried more than her own armor.