My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 9

The applause dies the way applause always dies in rooms like this — not all at once, but in a slow, coordinated retreat, as if even the sound knows when it has served its purpose.

Camille Arnaud stands beside Julian with her hand resting on his forearm, her posture so effortlessly composed that it makes the rest of us look like we're trying. The ivory silk catches the chandelier light and turns her into the kind of woman oil painters used to ruin their marriages over.

I am not looking at her. I am looking for Theo.

He is six feet to my left, exactly where he was when the doors opened, but the man standing there now is not the same man who stood there eleven seconds ago. His champagne flute hangs untouched between two fingers like he forgot he was holding it.

His jaw is locked. His shoulders carry the rigid geometry of a man bracing against a wall no one else can see.

And his eyes — fixed on Camille with an expression I have never witnessed on his face in three years of studying him across conference tables and town cars and candlelit dinners where I memorized every micro-shift of his features like a language I was teaching myself to read.

He loved her. I knew it before tonight — knew it the way you know a scar exists beneath a shirt without ever seeing the skin. But knowing and watching are different animals entirely, and the second one has teeth.

I cross the room and thread my arm through his, pressing my shoulder against his bicep, angling my body into his side the way a girlfriend would. The way I've rehearsed in mirrors and practiced in lobbies and perfected across enough family dinners to earn a degree in performance art.

"Dance with me," I say, keeping my voice light enough for any nearby ears. "Your grandfather is watching from the second table, and right now you look like a man who just saw a ghost walk through the front door."

Theo blinks. His gaze disconnects from Camille with the delayed reluctance of a muscle releasing a cramp, and he looks down at me as if remembering I exist.

"Of course." He sets the champagne on a passing tray and places his hand on my waist.

Half a second too late. I feel the delay in my ribs — the fraction of time between when his hand should have landed and when it actually does, the gap where instinct should live but doesn't.

His fingers press into the emerald fabric with the correct pressure in the correct location, and none of it is correct at all.

We move through the crowd. He smiles at a donor, nods to a board member, murmurs a greeting to Victor's oldest friend. Every gesture is technically flawless and emotionally vacant, assembled from the right components in the wrong order, like a sentence with perfect grammar that means nothing.

I steer us toward the east corridor where the crowd thins and the music softens into a muffled pulse behind closed doors. The hallway is marble and portraits and the kind of silence that amplifies everything you'd rather keep quiet.

I release his arm and turn to face him. "Who is she to you?"

Theo's composure holds. Barely. The way a dam holds when the water has already reached the lip and the engineers are watching the pressure gauges with expressions they're trying very hard to keep neutral.

"She's no one." His voice is measured, each word placed with the deliberate care of a man walking across ice he knows is thin. "Julian is making a statement. That's what Julian does — he finds the most dramatic entrance available and walks through it. It's theatre, Wren. Nothing more."

The lie sits between us, visible and heavy. I can see it in the tension strung across his shoulders like a wire pulled too tight.

She's no one. The same way I'm his most trusted person. The same way the kiss at the estate dinner was just convincing.

I want to push. I want to say I watched you stop breathing when she walked in, and I have spent six years learning the difference between your composure and your collapse, and that was collapse. I want to crack the surface and force him to look at me — really look — and tell me the truth about the woman whose name used to silence entire floors of his own company.

But the corridor isn't private enough. A caterer passes with a tray. Laughter drifts from the ballroom. And Theo's jaw carries the particular set that tells me pushing now will only drive him deeper behind the wall, not through it.

"Okay," I say, and the word costs me more than he will ever calculate. "We should get back."

He nods with visible relief, and the relief hurts worse than the lie.

We return to the gala separately — him toward a cluster of board members whose handshakes look more like lifelines than greetings, me toward the bar where my warm champagne waits like a friend who saw the whole thing and has the decency not to comment.

I mingle alone. I smile at strangers. I make small talk with a woman from the foundation's PR team who tells me my dress is stunning and asks how long Theo and I have been together, and I deliver our rehearsed timeline with such practiced ease that I almost forget I'm the only one still performing tonight.

I take a fresh champagne from a passing tray and position myself near one of the standing tables, hoping to look occupied rather than abandoned.

"You must be Wren." A woman in a midnight-blue wrap dress materializes at my elbow, her smile precise and practiced. She extends a hand heavy with sapphires. "Margaux Heller. I sit on the foundation's advisory board with Victor. He mentioned Theo had finally found someone worth bringing home."

"That's generous of him." I shake her hand and feel the rings press into my fingers like a test of grip strength. "I hope I'm living up to the introduction."

"Victor doesn't give generous introductions, dear. He gives accurate ones."

She takes a sip of her gin and studies me over the rim with the same cataloging attention Victor used at dinner — pale, clinical, the gaze of a woman who learned her social skills from the same generation.

"I have to say, I was surprised. After Camille, most of us assumed Theo would stay married to the quarterly reports. That woman did a number on him."

She glances across the room to where Camille stands with Julian, then back to me with an expression that lands somewhere between sympathy and inventory.

"But you're quite different from her, aren't you? More… approachable."

The word approachable settles against my sternum the way a compliment settles when it's really a measurement.

I know exactly what she means. Less beautiful. Less commanding. Less likely to occupy a room the way Camille does by merely standing in it.

"I like to think so," I say, and my smile holds because it has survived worse tonight than Margaux Heller's vocabulary.

She pats my arm — brief, firm, the gesture of a woman who has concluded her assessment — and drifts toward another table.

Theo doesn't come back. I catch glimpses of him across the room — always in conversation, always angled away from whatever direction Camille happens to be standing, his body language so aggressively social it reads less like networking and more like a man swimming toward any shore that isn't the one he just washed up from.

An hour passes before Julian materializes beside the coat check. I know it is him by the way his expression confirms it. Not the usual smirk. A quiet, settled satisfaction, the look of a man who lit a fuse an hour ago and has been enjoying the detonation from a comfortable distance.

Except as I turn fully toward him, even that satisfaction fades. He studies me with his hands in his pockets, his posture stripped of its usual provocation, and when he speaks, his voice is lower than I've heard it before.

"I didn't bring her to hurt you," he says. "I need you to know that, because I can see you standing over here running calculations, and at least one of them is wrong."

"Then who did you bring her to hurt?" I keep my gaze on the ballroom entrance because looking at him directly feels dangerous in ways I'm not equipped to navigate tonight.

"Theo." He says the name without flinching, without softening, without any of the rhetorical padding most people wrap around cruelty to make it presentable. "My brother took everything that was supposed to be shared. The company, the name, the old man's approval. He sat in that library every Sunday and earned it move by move while I was told my temperament wasn't suited to leadership."

His jaw shifts, and the edge that returns to his voice isn't anger — it's the scar tissue around something that never healed properly.

"Camille was the one thing he chose for himself. So I took her."

The honesty is so brutal and so unapologetic that it empties my lungs. No justification, no defensive reframing, no attempt to make the confession palatable.

Just the raw architecture of a grudge built over decades and maintained with the discipline of a man who learned early that the only currency his family respected was pain.

"Why are you telling me this?" My voice comes out quieter than I intended, stripped of the armor I usually carry into conversations with him.

Julian studies my face the way he studied me across the dinner table and in the moonlit garden — with that patient, disassembling attention that sees the seams other people miss.

"Because you're standing in the middle of a war you didn't start," he says, "and someone should at least tell you where the landmines are."

He pushes off the wall and walks back toward the ballroom without waiting for a response, and I watch him go with the unsettling awareness that the most honest person in this building tonight is the one I trust the least.