Chapter 275: Chapter 275 – Do you like him?

Tallulah lifted her head slowly, and the moment her face came fully into view, something clicked behind Corvine’s eyes.

"You were one of the servers." His voice came out flat, more to himself than to her. "The drink service. That night."

Tallulah held his gaze for just a second, then dropped hers again.

Corvine said nothing else but something moved through his expression. Not anger, something quieter than that. More like the particular frustration of a man replaying a memory and finding all the places where he could have paid better attention.

If he had known back then, or if he had even considered the possibility that Seraphine would one day walk away from Ravyn, he would have looked closer. He would have seen more, and things would have been different.

"Okay." Seraphine’s voice came in clean and final, cutting through whatever the moment was turning into. "Let’s move."

Corvine pulled his attention back, got behind the wheel, and pulled out without another word.

In the rearview mirror, somewhere around the edge of outlanders’ territory, Voren’s car made a turn and disappeared. Seraphine’s eyes stayed forward.

✧༺♥༻✧

Emery answered her phone on the second ring and came downstairs still pulling her jacket on, clearly not expecting company on a random afternoon. She looked between Seraphine and the unfamiliar woman standing slightly behind her and waited. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Emery." Seraphine got straight to it. "This is Tallulah. She came from the outlands and she’s going to be staying with you for a while." No buildup, no softening. Just the facts handed over clean.

"Tomorrow you’re taking the day off and going shopping with her. This weekend, walk her through the basics, how things work here, what to expect. Monday she starts at the company."

Emery stood very still for a moment, processing the volume of information that had just landed on her. Then her eyes moved to Tallulah, and something settled in her face. Professional recognition. The look of a woman who understood a project.

"You’re right." Emery nodded slowly. "There’s a lot to work with. We’ll get it done." She glanced back at Seraphine. "Thank you for trusting me with this, boss."

Two days later, the hospital swallowed Seraphine whole the moment she walked through those doors, which was exactly what she needed.

Surgeries had already been scheduled and stacked, and she moved from one to the next with the focused efficiency.

By Monday, her energy was channeled to MindNest where a staff meeting had been arranged. Coffee cups, laptops, the low hum of too many conversations happening at once.

The all-staff meeting pulled everyone into the same room for the first time in a while, chairs filling up fast, people nodding across the table at each other.

Seraphine walked in and stopped.

She looked at the woman sitting two seats down and felt her brain stall completely. Corvine, one step behind her, went equally quiet.

Tallulah looked like a different person. Not just different clothes, but different entirely. Whatever Emery had done over the course of a weekend had reached the kind of results that required a full second look to confirm it was the same woman. The posture alone was different. The way she held her chin.

Neither of them said anything. They just looked at each other and then looked at Emery, who was sitting very composed and professional across the room right up until the moment she followed Seraphine’s line of sight and landed on Zane.

The color drained from her face immediately.

Seraphine crossed the room to her before the meeting got going and leaned in close. "Don’t fret." Her voice was quiet, just for Emery. "He’s not who he was. He’s changed, genuinely. Don’t let the old version of him mess with your head today."

Emery gave a small tight nod that said she heard it and wasn’t fully convinced but would try.

The meeting wrapped and the room started emptying out in the usual shuffle of chairs and phones being picked up.

Zane caught Emery near the doorway and opened his mouth and she walked around him like he was a piece of furniture that had been left in an inconvenient spot. No eye contact. No hesitation. Just gone.

Zane stood there for a second, then turned and looked at Seraphine.

She put both hands up.

"Don’t look at me." She was already backing toward the hallway. "That one is yours to figure out. I’m not getting in the middle of it and I’m not coaching you through it either. You know what you did. Work backwards from there."

He looked like he wanted to argue, but she didn’t give him a chance.

As soon as Seraphine stepped into the office, she began to check the stocks and the business plan she had been building around Voren’s capital — allocation strategy, projected returns, the phased rollout that she had mapped against the timeline of everything else she had in motion.

It was good work. Solid, careful, the kind of plan that held up when you stress-tested it.

Corvine sat across from her, going through his own paperwork, occasionally asking a question. They worked like that for a while in easy silence.

Then she mentioned the investment figures and Voren’s name came out of her mouth and something warm moved across her face without her permission. It was brief.

She caught it fast and pulled her expression back into neutral but she was not fast enough.

Corvine’s pen stopped moving.

He looked at her over the top of his papers with the patient, unhurried attention of someone who had just confirmed a theory he had been running for days. He didn’t say anything immediately. He let the silence sit there and do its work.

"Sera."

She kept her eyes on the screen. "What."

"You never told me what actually happened between you and Voren while you were at the pack."

"Nothing happened."

Her voice was even. Her eyes stayed on the screen in front of her. Her cheeks, though had other plans entirely, color rising in them like they were determined to tell the truth regardless of what her mouth was doing.

Corvine set his pen down.

"Right," he said, in the tone of a man who had already made up his mind. "I’m just going to call Damon then. Get his version."

Seraphine’s head came up so fast she nearly knocked her coffee over. "That’s... fine." She straightened in her chair. "Fine. I’ll tell you."

Corvine settled back, arms crossed, face completely neutral, doing an excellent job of hiding how much he was enjoying this.

She told him everything. All of it — the way Voren had carried her through the rain, the bathroom situation, the way she had broken down and he had held her through it without making it weird, how she had ended up sleeping on top of him the whole night without meaning to. And the kiss.

Every detail of the kiss, told in a flat, factual voice that was doing absolutely nothing to hide how much she had been thinking about it since.

Corvine didn’t interrupt once.

When she finished, a full silence stretched out for almost a minute. He sat there with his arms still crossed and his expression unreadable, which was somehow worse than if he had just reacted.

Then..."Sera."

"Don’t."

"I just want to ask one thing."

"Corvine—"

"Do you like him?"