Chapter 4
"That isn't noble, Sloane," he breathed, his gaze dropping to my mouth with an intensity that felt like a physical touch. "It’s suicide."
"Then let me burn."
"I can't," he muttered, sounding furious with himself, furious with the room, furious with the ten-year shadow of his father hanging over us both. "God help me, I can't."
He reached out, his fingers sliding into the hair at the nape of my neck. His hand was warm, slightly rough from thumbing through hundreds of vellum folios, his grip steady yet trembling with an electric restraint that finally shattered.
When his mouth met mine, it wasn't the measured calculation of an auditor. It was hot, demanding, and laced with an ache that had been building since we were twenty-four and standing on that balcony in Manhattan, watching the rain and talking about things we were both too ambitious to claim.
I parted my lips with a soft gasp, and Kieran pulled me against him, lifting me slightly until my heels left the damp concrete floor. His tongue tasted of bitter coffee and sweet bourbon, a dark, addictive friction that made my head spin. I tangled my hands in his thick hair, feeling the tight knot in his shoulders loosen under my touch. Every logical cell in my brain shouted that this was dangerous—that confusing the game with the player was how operations failed—but my body refused to care.
He groaned against my mouth, backing me against the ancient wood of a folio cabinet, his body pressing into mine with an unyielding, protective weight. For a long, breathless minute, there were no balance sheets, no leveraged buyouts, no dying legacy presses or predatory conglomerates. There was only Kieran: the boy who had loved the feel of bronze type, the man who was tearing himself to pieces trying to build a shield for a woman who was quietly loading the cannon behind his back.
He broke the kiss slowly, his forehead resting against mine, his breathing ragged and uneven. His eyes were wide, dark, and utterly stripped of arrogance.
"I need to see the main press," he said hoarsely, his thumb tracing the curve of my cheekbone, wiping away a smear of gray binder dust.
"Now? It's three in the morning."
"The rain has stopped," he said, stepping back with obvious effort, as if pulling his skin away from an open flame. He straightened his vest, though his fingers were clumsy. "If I’m going to sign off on the technical default report for Arthur on Friday, I need to see the mechanical assets with my own eyes. I won't liquidate what I haven't seen."
***
The historical bindery was housed in a separate red-brick annex across the cobblestone courtyard, adjacent to the old river canal that had once powered our nineteenth-century presses. The air outside was sharp and clean, smelling of wet asphalt and October rot, but the sky had cleared into a hard, starry indigo.
I unlocked the heavy oak doors of the bindery with an iron skeleton key.
Inside, the machinery slept like great, dormant iron beasts. The room smelled entirely different from the archive: here, the atmosphere was saturated with machine oil, beeswax, turpentine, and the sharp, clean tannin of cured calfskin.
Kieran flipped the master switch. A series of low-hanging enamel lamps flickered to life, casting golden cones of light over the massive cast-iron presses. The centerpiece was our 1888 Koenig & Bauer flatbed cylinder press, its polished brass gears gleaming in the amber light.
He walked toward it slowly, his corporate persona completely dissolved. He approached the machine the way a believer enters a cathedral.
"It still operates?" he asked, running his palm over the cold curved iron of the cylinder.
"Every Tuesday and Thursday," I said, leaning against a high sorting table covered in sheets of marbled endpapers. "We use it for our limited edition poetry folios and collector’s translations. We hand-set the type in lead. It takes four weeks to print three hundred copies."
Kieran gave a short, bitter laugh. "Mercer Digital runs forty thousand units an hour through the automated facilities in New Jersey. They use synthetic glue that cures in twelve seconds under ultraviolet lamps."
"And the pages fall out after three years," I remarked gently.
"Nobody keeps a book for three years anymore, Sloane," he said, turning to look at me across the machine. "The market reads, digests, deletes, and buys the next subscription bundle. It’s churn. Everything is churn."
"You don't believe that."
He looked down at his shoes, then back up at the high timber rafters of the bindery. "It doesn't matter what I believe. I work for a company that trades on multiples of cash flow. If I tell my father that this machine has value, he’ll ask me for its scrap weight."
"Is that why you do it?" I asked, stepping closer to him, keeping my voice gentle, conversational, stripping every drop of corporate hostility from the space between us. "To please him?"
Kieran’s jaw set. He picked up an ivory bone folder from the worktable, turning the smooth, tapered tool over in his fingers.
"When I was fourteen," he said, his voice flat, drained of color, "my father bought out my mother’s family newspaper in Vermont. It had been in her family for four generations. She begged him at the dinner table not to sell the printing plant to a regional packaging syndicate. She cried in front of the servants."
I held my breath. In all the dossiers my investigators had compiled on the Mercer family, this story had never appeared.
"What did he do?"
"He waited until Monday morning," Kieran said, his fingers tightening on the bone tool until his knuckles turned white. "He called an emergency meeting of the creditor committee, exercised the junior pledge, and fired my grandfather by registered courier before lunch. That evening, he came home, poured a scotch, and told me that sentimentality in business is a genetic defect. He told me that if I ever let an emotion stand between me and an operational balance sheet, he would leave the voting shares to a charitable foundation and cut me out of the trust before the ink dried."
He looked at me then, his gray eyes wounded and defiant.
"I’ve spent fifteen years proving to him that I don't have the defect, Sloane. I built the acquisition models that took Mercer Group from a regional mid-tier publisher to a three-billion-dollar juggernaut. I’ve gutted forty-two imprints. I’ve fired editors who gave me my first internships. And every time I do it, he looks at me across the boardroom table, nods once, and assigns me the next kill."
"And Vance & Thorne was supposed to be the final test before the IPO," I said, understanding snapping into place with cold, devastating clarity.
"If I deliver your assets without a court battle," Kieran said quietly, "Arthur steps down as Chairman after the public offering. I get the Chief Executive seat. I get the voting control. I get to run the company without him breathing down my neck."
He dropped the bone folder back onto the table. It made a dull, heavy thud against the wood.
"And all it costs you," I whispered, "is my company."
