Chapter 10

Celia's POV

My eyes landed on him for less than two seconds before I pulled them away.

"Celia," Jane said, with a slight shift in posture that I noted, "this is a colleague of ours — he's in town and wanted to sit in today."

The phrasing was careful in a way that told me the care was intentional.

The man looked at me for one unhurried second, then returned his gaze to the table. He hadn't offered his hand. I'd already processed the gloves and made my adjustment before the absence of the gesture registered as something to navigate.

I kept my voice easy. "Celia Hale. Brand partnership representative for Aura Bio-Beauty." I'd made a small calculation on the walk in — brand partnership representative sat better than VP of Brand in a room where my actual standing at that company was currently in the process of being renegotiated in real time.

The man raised his eyes again. "Silas Voss," he said, and the word came at the pace of something that had been measured before being set down. "I handle various matters within the industry."

I processed that sentence with the same attention I'd have given to a compound with an unusual molecular profile. Various matters within the industry — vague enough to mean anything, specific enough to sound like a real answer.

I glanced at him again — the suit that fit a little too well, the easy way he held his glass, the complete absence of any need to justify his presence in the room. The conclusion assembled itself without much effort: a well-placed family connection, a title arranged rather than earned.

I had met enough of them at enough of these events to recognize the type — someone's nephew, most likely, or a favor repaid in the form of a business card. He was probably perfectly pleasant about it, which was almost worse.

I nodded once. "Mr. Voss." I reached for my water glass, and in doing so quietly retired the handshake question without anyone needing to notice it had come up.

He noticed. I saw the fractional pause in his attention — not surprise, exactly, but a kind of recalibration. I couldn't read what he'd recalibrated toward.

Jane opened her folder and moved us into the substance of the meeting. I'd put the Aura presentation together in twenty minutes — clean, organized, everything where it needed to be. I knew how to make a case.

I also knew, with the honesty that comes from spending enough time looking at data, that the case had limits. The product line was solid. It was not, by the standards Meridian Global applied to its partners, ready. I was here to place a marker and leave with more information than I'd arrived with. That was the real objective.

Jane listened carefully. When I finished, she looked at me directly. "Your presentation is thorough," she said. "Though that's not actually the primary reason I wanted to meet today."

I waited, keeping my expression neutral.

"Meridian's research division has been in an active scouting phase," Jane continued, and her tone shifted incrementally — still professional, but with something underneath it that had the quality of a question being asked indirectly.

"We've become very interested in a particular direction in bioformulation. The work being done on next-generation peptide complexes, specifically. We have strong reason to believe there's a formulator working in that space whose output has already started reshaping how the serious players are thinking about the next product cycle."

She paused again. "Your background is a matter of record. MIT biochemistry. Hale Botanical's proprietary extraction work. We think there's a conversation here worth having — not about Aura's current line, but about you."

The sentence landed quietly, and I let it.

She was describing Formula X. She didn't know that. She was describing the account I'd been running anonymously for six years on a forum that the major houses monitored without acknowledging they monitored, posting theoretical formulation work that I'd always assumed reached the right people without any clear line back to me. That assumption had just been revised.

I kept my face composed and let two seconds pass before responding. "That's an interesting direction." I said it in the same register I'd use to note that a data point was worth examining — not dismissive, not eager, genuinely considered. "I'd be open to understanding what that conversation would look like."

Jane nodded, made a note, and I took the moment to look across the table.

Silas was watching me. He hadn't looked away when I'd glanced over, and he didn't look away now. His expression hadn't changed in any direction I could map.

I held his gaze for one even second, then turned back to Jane and asked a measured follow-up question about the research division's current partnership structure.

The meeting concluded without either side having fully shown their hand, which I took as the correct outcome for a first contact. Jane and I shook hands at the door. I said I'd follow up by end of week. She said she'd be in touch.

I stepped into the corridor and took out my phone. Vanna had sent a message forty minutes ago:

Celia! Dinner's on me tonight — department get-together at Lumière, 7:30. Hope you can make it. Would be great to have everyone together.

A short laugh escaped me before I could stop it — the quiet, humorless kind.

Vanna treating the department to dinner had never once been about the department. There would be something she wanted seen tonight, some small shift she'd been quietly engineering and now wanted witnessed. The only question was what she was staging this time.

I typed back: I'll be there on time.

"Excuse me."

I turned. Silas had come out of the conference room and stopped at a comfortable distance, unhurried, the way he'd been unhurried throughout the entire meeting. Up close, the white gloves were even more precisely tailored than they'd appeared from across the table.

"Would you be open to exchanging contact information?" he asked.

"Of course," I said, and unlocked my phone.

We exchanged numbers. He didn't make conversation while we did it, didn't fill the space with the social lubrication that most people reached for when they were doing something that might be construed as a professional overture. He was simply doing the thing he'd decided to do, and the absence of performance around it was, in its own way, more disarming than a polished approach would have been.

I put my phone away and was about to take my leave when he spoke again.