Chapter 246: It’s time
The Saturday afternoon sun fell heavy through the tall windows of the Pedro mansion, throwing long gold bars of light across the marble floors. It was the kind of quiet that only money could buy: no traffic, no noise, just the distant hum of the air conditioning and the soft sound of Amara’s heels as she paced the length of the sitting room.
She had the phone pressed to her ear.
"Ms. Amara." James’ voice came through calm and even, the way it always did when he had already made up his mind about something. "It’s time."
She stopped walking.
"Time," she repeated, not as a question.
"We have majority shares in Creed Tech now." A pause. "It’s time to take Sebastian out of the game."
Amara was quiet for a moment. She moved to the window and looked out at the garden, the perfectly trimmed hedges, the stone fountain that had not been turned on in weeks. She had been waiting for this call. Longer than she had expected, if she was honest with herself.
A month.
It had been a full month since Sebastian had gone silent. No calls, no messages, no second-hand whispers from people who owed him favours. Just nothing. A man who had never once in his life shut his mouth was now nothing. And Seren hadn’t called either. That was the part that sat with her the most. Seren always called. The silence from both of them together meant something.
It meant whatever Sebastian was planning was big.
"I agree," Amara said finally, her voice smooth and unbothered, like she was agreeing to change the curtains.
"You sure?" James asked. "Because once we move.."
"James." She said his name the way you set down a glass, gently, deliberately. "I said I agree."
He let out a short breath. Not relief exactly. More like satisfaction. "Alright. But we don’t reveal ourselves yet. Let me be clear about that. We hold our position until I say otherwise."
"Understood."
"Getting enough shares to take management from him..." James paused, and she could hear the smile underneath the words, even if he would never let it reach his voice. "That alone is enough for now. Let him sit with it."
Amara said nothing because she didn’t need to. She understood completely.
She walked slowly to the sofa and sat down, crossing one leg over the other, and she let herself think about Sebastian Creed for the first time in days.
Really think about him. Not the version he liked to perform for boardrooms and dinner tables, the charming one, the sharp one, the one who laughed too loudly and always made sure everyone in the room knew he was the most important person in it. She thought about the real Sebastian Creed.
The one she had watched up close for long enough to know exactly what he was.
A snake, she thought.
She had seen it before: people who dealt with men like Sebastian making the same mistake that she did. They got close enough to hurt him, and then they pulled back.
Thought they had won. Thought the thing was finished. And then it wasn’t finished. It never was, because you could wound a snake, you could even break its body, but if you left the head, if you left the head, it would come back around. It always came back around.
Not this time.
This time she was not pulling back. She was going to crush it. Completely. And when it was done, she was going to cut off the head and make sure there was nothing left to rise again. No sympathy. No second thoughts.
Sebastian was already on his way down; she hadn’t put him there, that was his own doing, but she was going to make sure the fall was final.
She didn’t feel anything particular about it. Not satisfaction, not guilt. Just the clean, quiet certainty of someone finishing a job they had started a long time ago.
She set the phone face-down on the cushion beside her. The room was still. And then, three slow, unhurried steps at the door.
Amara did not turn her head right away. She let it sit in the air for a second, the way you let a word hang before you respond to it.
Then she looked toward the entrance of the sitting room.
Julian stood in the doorway.
He leaned against the frame with his hands in his pockets, wearing that expression he always wore when he had decided something was amusing and wasn’t quite ready to say what it was. He looked at her the way you look at someone you have known long enough to read without asking.
"Didn’t hear me come in?" he said.
"I heard you," Amara said. "I was thinking."
Julian pushed off the doorframe and walked in slowly, looking around the room as if he were taking stock of it, before his eyes came back to her. He tilted his head slightly.
"James?" he asked, nodding toward the phone on the cushion.
"Yes."
He sat down across from her, easy and unhurried, like a man who had nowhere else to be.
Julian’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind his eyes shifted, the kind of shift that happens when a man realises he has said more than he intended.
He leaned forward slowly, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked at her for a moment before he spoke.
"AP Enterprise." He said it the way you repeat a word, I should have figured that out a long time ago. Shook his head once.
"AP Enterprise." A quiet laugh escaped him, not mocking, just the laugh of a man genuinely caught off guard by something. "Amara Piers. AP. Short and clean." He looked up at her. "Nice move, Mrs. Vale."
The soft smile stayed on his face as he said it, but there was something underneath it. Not anger. More like the feeling of finding a room in a house you thought you knew completely.
