Chapter 4: The Boardroom and the Bedroom

Chapter 4: The Boardroom and the Bedroom

Forty-eight floors above the city, Liam Blackwood’s office was a shrine to sterile, absolute power. It wasn't a room; it was a weapon. Polished chrome, black marble, and a wall of seamless glass offered a panoramic view of the metropolis he was actively conquering. The air was chilled and filtered, smelling of nothing at all. It was the complete antithesis of his home—of the jasmine-scented, sun-drenched bedroom where he’d left his soul just a few hours ago.

He sat behind a desk the size of a small car, the cold leather of his chair a familiar brace against his back. On the holographic display shimmering in the air before him, the final holdouts of the Miyazaki-Tanaka merger sputtered their last protests.

"Mr. Blackwood," said the shimmering, three-dimensional avatar of a man in Tokyo, his voice tinny and strained, "our board feels your final valuation is… aggressive. We require more time to deliberate."

Liam didn’t blink. His mind was a fractured landscape—half here, dissecting the corporate body on his table, half back in his bed, tasting Chloe’s surrender. The tension from their morning argument, the silent challenge in her eyes as she’d pressed her hands to his chest, was a low thrum beneath the surface of his calm.

"Mr. Tanaka," Liam's voice was ice. "This is Blackwood Dynamics, not a debating society. The offer on the table is not a conversation starter. It is a conclusion. You have ninety seconds to accept it before I retract it and begin the process of hostile absorption of your market share. A process, I assure you, that will be far more… aggressive."

The silence that followed was absolute. Liam watched the man’s avatar pale, the blood draining from his holographic face. In that moment of dominance, the thrill of the kill, Liam felt a flicker of the control he so desperately craved. He was crushing an opponent, bending a multi-billion dollar corporation to his will with nothing but words and the weight of his reputation.

An invitation to sin.

The thought intruded, sharp and unwelcome, slicing through his victory. He saw Chloe’s face, not as he’d left her—confident and challenging—but as a flicker of memory from a party a year ago. A masquerade at a Venetian-style palazzo. She’d been in a blood-red gown, her mask hiding nothing of the sensual curve of her smile. The thrill of it had been intoxicating: watching other men, powerful men, follow her with their eyes, completely unaware that she was his private universe. The secret knowledge was its own form of power, a shared joke between them in a room full of strangers. That was the upside. The drug he sometimes craved.

The avatar in front of him bowed. "We accept your terms, Mr. Blackwood."

"Good," Liam said, and with a flick of his finger, terminated the call. The hologram vanished, leaving him alone in the crushing silence of his success.

The victory felt hollow. Sterile.

He swiveled his chair to face the window, looking down on the city below. He owned a significant piece of that skyline. He could move markets with a whisper, ruin dynasties with a phone call. He was a king in this glass and steel tower.

But then another memory, darker and more venomous, surfaced. A different party. The Astors’ name had been whispered there, too, though they hadn't been the hosts. It was at a summer gala in the Hamptons. A European prince with a slick smile and hands that roamed too freely had cornered Chloe by the champagne fountain. Liam had been across the lawn, trapped in a conversation with a senator. He watched the prince lean in, his lips brushing Chloe's ear, his hand sliding from her waist to the small of her back—a gesture of casual, unearned intimacy.

Liam’s memory of the moment was visceral. The champagne flute in his hand had nearly shattered from the pressure of his grip. A white-hot, primal jealousy had surged through him, so potent it almost buckled his knees. He had wanted to cross that lawn and tear the man’s arm from its socket. Chloe, ever poised, had handled it with a cool grace, stepping away and diffusing the situation before he could intervene. But the feeling… the feeling of losing control, of his carefully constructed world tilting on the axis of another man’s audacity, had haunted him for weeks.

That was the risk. That was the spark that could ignite his worst impulses.

He looked at his hands, the hands that had just sealed a deal worth more than some nations’ GDP. He could command empires from this sterile room, but the thought of one man’s hand on his wife’s back could undo him. The power he wielded here felt like a proxy, a sad substitute for the absolute, primal control he craved over his own heart, his own world, his own wife. Crushing Tanaka was easy. Resisting the urge to lock Chloe away from the world was the real war, fought every single day.

Chloe’s words from the morning echoed in his mind, cutting through the memory of his own fear.

”Isn’t that the ultimate test? The ultimate proof of what we are?”

He had seen the invitation as a threat. A trespass. But she saw it as an opportunity. A stage. She wasn't asking for freedom from him; she was challenging him to demonstrate his ownership in front of the world. To walk into the lion’s den with her on his arm and have every man in the room know, without a single word being spoken, that she was untouchable. His.

A slow, dangerous smile touched Liam’s lips. The conflict within him didn't just resolve; it crystallized into a new, hard-edged resolve.

He had been thinking about it all wrong. He was trying to protect her by caging her. But a queen isn't protected by being hidden in a tower. She is protected by the sheer, terrifying power of her king.

He swiveled back to his desk and pressed the intercom. "Eleanor."

"Yes, Mr. Blackwood?" his assistant's crisp voice replied instantly.

"Clear my schedule for the rest of the day. All of it. I'm going home."

"Sir, you have the quarterly review at three and—"

"Handle it," he commanded, his tone leaving no room for argument. He stood up, shrugging on the suit jacket he’d left draped over a chair.

He strode toward the door, his mind already racing, formulating a new strategy. He wasn’t going to the Astors' party to indulge their decadent whims or to nervously watch from the sidelines. He was going on his own terms. He was going to put his wife in the most beautiful dress money could buy, adorn her with jewels that would blind their rivals, and walk into that nest of vipers with a singular purpose.

He was going to prove to everyone, to the Astors, to any would-be princes, and most of all to Chloe herself, who she belonged to. Tonight wasn't an invitation to sin. It was a declaration of his reign.