The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 129

Chapter 116: First Meeting

Bella POV

Claim

Caleb had spent days preparing for this dinner the way he prepared for board meetings – quietly, thoroughly, and without saying much about it. I’d watched him check his phone more than usual, rearrange the reservation twice, and stand in the kitchen at six in the morning staring at nothing until Tom crashed into his legs demanding cereal.

I understood it. The sister he hadn’t seen in years was coming to dinner. If I was the one I would have been climbing the walls.

What I hadn’t expected was the feeling that settled into my stomach the moment Diana Black walked through the restaurant door.

She was tall – almost Caleb’s height – with the same sharp cheekbones and controlled posture. Dark hair cut short, cold blue eyes that moved across the room in one smooth sweep before landing on Caleb, and then, a half-second later, on me.

She smiled. It was a good smile – warm, a little tired, just uncertain enough to seem genuine.

Every instinct I had went quiet and alert. Careful, something in me said, in the same tone it had once used in a warehouse when I’d realized too late that the door behind me had locked.

“Caleb.” Her voice was low and even. She reached him first, and something complicated moved across her face before she let him pull her into a hug – brief but a little stiff on her end.

Caleb held on longer than she expected. When they stepped apart his jaw was tight. “Diana,” he said. “This is Bella.

She turned to me and extended her hand, and her grip was firm and cool. “I’ve read about you,” she said. “The Iron Empress. That can’t be a nickname you hate.”

“It has its uses,” I said.

She laughed, short and genuine, and something in my chest didn’t entirely relax.

We sat. Tom had stayed home with Maya – Caleb and I had agreed, without much discussion, that this first dinner should be adults only, at least until Diana was something more than a photograph in an investigator’s file.

Tom had accepted this with the gracious flexibility of a child who’d been promised extra dinosaur time and a bedtime story with sound effects.

The dinner was good, on the surface. Diana was intelligent and funny in a dry, sideways way that reminded me of Caleb at his least guarded. She told a story about a structural miscalculation on a project in Lisbon that had required her to personally climb scaffolding at two in the morning, and Caleb laughed – a real laugh, surprised out of him – and for a moment I could see the shape of what they might have been to each other as children, before his father had hollowed the house out.

But I watched her. I watched the way her eyes moved to Caleb when he wasn’t looking, assessing something. I watched her ask questions that were pitched perfectly – warm, interested, never quite

112

Chapter 116-Pirst Meeting

Claim

personal enough to seem intrusive and file the answers in a way that reminded me of myself in a negotiation, mapping the room. I watched her look at me across the table with that easy smile and say all the right things, and I thought: she is very good at this.

When Caleb excused himself to take a call about the Singapore numbers that apparently couldn’t wait forty minutes – Diana leaned back in her chair and looked at me with an expression that had shifted slightly.

“He’s different,” she said. “From what I expected.”

“People change,” I said.

“Some do.” She turned her wine glass slowly. “He told me a little about what happened. Between the two of you, I mean. The history.” She paused. “That must have taken an enormous amount of trust to come

back from.”

“We’re working on it,” I said, keeping my voice neutral.

“Of course.” She smiled, and it almost reached her eyes. “I just want you to know – I’ve spent a long time studying the Black family from a distance. I know what they’re capable of when things get difficult.” She held my gaze, her voice dropping just slightly. “He’ll disappoint you eventually. They all do. I’m not saying it to be cruel – I’m saying it because no one said it to me, and I wish they had.”

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