Chapter 1104: Needy Girl with Daddy Issues?

Was it spite?

Was it anger?

Or was it the small, undignified,

needy-girl

ache of a woman who had paid an obscene sum of money for a piece of art and had walked off the gallery floor with three things:

the art

itself, the bill, and a very humiliating way Eros might’ve as well told her

Be Gone Thot

when he ran off avoiding her, it was so thorough it would still be footnoted at her funeral.

Aurelia took another long sip of champagne and decided not to decide.

The pleasure of an obsession of this calibre was the

menu.

You didn’t pick a feeling. You

sampled.

She was on her fourth glass, and all the feelings were getting their turn at the table, and the

want

was the rowdiest of the bunch—sat in the corner, ordering more wine, refusing to leave.

The cabin hummed under her at thirty-eight thousand feet.

The boy was seventeens at best according to Senithe and came from nothing like literal being thrown in trash can and lockers... yet the

audacity!

It really was a

terrible

week to be Aurelia.

She’d been telling herself, in private, for sometime now, that the art piece had been

good.

This was important.

Aurelia was many things—

vain, vindictive,

allergic

to most forms of restraint—but she was not in the habit of lying to herself about art. The piece had been

very

good. Devastatingly good that it should have been hanging in a museum somewhere, behind glass, with a small printed card explaining its significance to schoolchildren.

She would have

infinitely

preferred if it were mediocre.

Mediocre would have given her an exit.

"I helped you buy a piece of trash piece when it was

beneath my standards from the outset and bought it millions... the least you can do is be there at my convivence."

The masterpiece, unfortunately, was a masterpiece.

Which meant the boy who’d engineered the entire humiliation around it had also produced a piece of art she would, given the slightest excuse and zero witnesses, hang above her bed and stare at for the rest of her life.

Both things were true.

She’d had days to make her peace with that. She had not made her peace with it. She had, however, learned to drink through it.

But Aurelia was not, she informed her champagne glass with a small lethal sip,

some defeated

minor villain

in a serial novel.

Introduced in Chapter two. Buried in Chapter twelve. Mentioned by the wife at brunch in Chapter twenty-three.

’No.’

She lifted a finger.

A few days ago her assistant slipped forward—silent, sharp, anticipatory—laid the leather portfolio on the polished glass between them and retreated into the cabin’s discreet shadows.

Aurelia opened it.

Inside was the

apology.

Three

companies.

Quietly distressed mid-cap acquisitions, three industries Aurelia had been circling for two weeks and never quite been able to swallow without raising regulators who wrote articles in their spare time.

The boards

mysteriously

pre-softened.

The activist shareholders inexplicably no longer activist. Clean envelopes, clean paperwork, like the deals had been

waiting

for her with their hats in their hands.

A small card pinned to the front, in calligraphy that would have given a museum curator a small heart attack.

With my regrets.

—

S

.

Aurelia had laughed for thirty seconds the first time she’d read it.

Genuinely

laughed. The woman was

funny,

she’d give her that. Three companies Aurelia had failed to acquire and a Paris junket as an

apology

for a defective

intel package.

In any other transaction, in any other century, the seller would have sent a refund.

...And a tasteful fruit basket.

Senithe had skipped the fruit basket and gone straight to

fixing Aurelia’s portfolio.

Aurelia had read the card while she finished her wine.

Aurelia had ordered her assistant to pack for two weeks and to upgrade the suite to the floor with the larger terrace, because if she was going to be

wooed

back, she was going to be

wooed.

**

NOW...

She turned the next page.

A photograph.

The boy crossing a street in his city, two women on his arm, a third trailing close. Caught candid by a lens at long range. Coat fitting him with the casual insolence of a coat that had given up trying to compete with the man inside it.

Aurelia’s pulse did something stupid.

She ignored it and turned the page. The next photograph showed him on a balcony with the icy CEO of Quantum Tech Aurelia had been losing to since

she

was twenty-six—leaning into him with the settled posture of a woman who had decided her position six months ago and saw no reason to renegotiate.

’Lovely.’

She turned the page faster.

The investigator, the artist she remembered very well, the redhead, his teacher at Lincoln High who looked,

suspiciously,

twenty-four, the nurse, the ballet dancer. The one with beautiful long legs. Three more she had not bothered to memorise yet because Aurelia did not memorise the names of an enemy’s harem until she had decided which one of them was the soft underbelly, and not a moment before.

She closed the portfolio.

Lifted her glass only to realise, with mild offence, that her glass was empty again.

Her assistant materialised. Refilled. Vanished.

Excellent

assistant.

She had been quite certain, going into this whole affair a few weeks ago, that her objective was the

company.

The technology. The lever. Her name on the next acquisition headline.

That had been the objective.

So.

When,

exactly,

had it

stopped

being only about the company?

When had the centre of her own private attention drifted, by some quiet treacherous

inch

a month, from a tech firm boardroom to a teenage boy’s smile in a candid photograph, and now she was on a private jet over the Atlantic?

When had Aurelia—started behaving, in the privacy of her own head, like a

needy

girl

with

Daddy Issues

?

The snide voice in the back of her skull, helpfully, suggested the term

daddy issues.

Aurelia killed the voice with a sip of champagne and went on with her thinking. She did not have

issues.

She had

appetites and

the appetite had grown, that was all.

It happened. It was, broadly, the appetite’s job. And what Aurelia did about her appetites—historically, with years track record nobody in three hemispheres had ever successfully challenged—was

acquire

them.

She would acquire him.

The method would suggest itself in Paris.

Methods always did.

She felt better.

The

trouble

was the small cold question that kept tapping her on the shoulder no matter how many times she informed it she was busy.

What did

Senithe

actually

want

from her.

Senithe was a goddess.

So. A goddess.

Of course.

Aurelia’s life was clearly entering its

escalation

arc.

Whatever Senithe was

moving against

—the boy, the women, the tower, the broader something Aurelia was being permitted to orbit like a

well-funded

extra

in someone else’s film—was, by every sign she could read,

also

on Senithe’s tier.

Things gods played for.

Which raised the question.

What did

Aurelia

—

mortal,

however

expensively

assembled—have, that a being like Senithe needed badly enough to spend three companies and a city

just to keep her unbothered?

Money? Senithe had no use for it.

Influence? She redirected influence with a wrist.

Art-world reach?

Gods made their own art.

Obsession with the boy? She had a roster of thirty-one of those in the immediate vicinity of the operation, all younger, all more useful.

By any honest accounting, Aurelia had

nothing

to

contribute.

By any other honest accounting, Aurelia on this trip was a

guest with no clear function.

And yet.

The companies. The apology. The card.

’With my regrets.’

Aurelia turned the wineglass.

She had built her life on knowing the value of every object she’d ever acquired

and

the price every other party in any room she had ever entered was secretly assigning to

her,

and the moment she was uncertain about either of those numbers was the moment she became

vulnerable

in a way she did not, ever, allow.

She did not know what number Senithe had assigned to her.

She did not know what Senithe was

buying.

Or what role she was being slid into on a board she could not see all of.

The Atlantic kept rolling by below the porthole, indifferent. The pink line in the east was widening into a whole shameless dawn.

A new question rose, slow, from the bottom of the glass.

Not

what does she want from me.

Not

what am I to her.

But—

What was Aurelia, really?

What was she

made

of, exactly... what was she

for.

What corner of what board did she occupy that a

goddess

had decided was worth keeping warm and happy.

Aurelia did not know.

For the first time in many,

many

years—

Aurelia did not know what Aurelia was

worth.

The jet flew east toward a sunrise she had paid for.

Her champagne, finally, went still in her hand.