The address on Xavier's business card led them to the private dining room at the St. Regis Singapore - the same hotel franchise where their paths had first collided five years ago. Aria appreciated the intentional symbolism as she strolled through the door to the elegantly appointed space at 8:00 pm. Although it was too late to be a business meeting, she intended to treat it as such, where GMT - the Marks manifesto time zone - was a professional courtesy as well as a psychological shield.
Xavier was already seated at the intimate table, dressed in the conference outfit - tie loosened and suit jacket on the back of his chair. Two glasses of whiskey awaited them on the table - same premium rye whiskey he had ordered for her on their first night together.
"You remember my preferences," said Aria while sitting in the empty slot across from Xavier, without waiting for an invitation.
"I recall everything about that evening," he said, his steel-grey eyes fixed to her face. "The more pressing question is, why did you disappear and for the past five years you have been methodically sabotaging the business expansion, while pretending we never met."
Aria lifted the whiskey glass, using the movement to buy herself time, to assess the situation. Xavier was composed but visibly annoyed - the professional blinds from the conference were lifting to reveal something far more consequential.
This wasn't just a CEO facing an adversarial business figure; this was a man who felt like he had been intentionally deceived.
"I didn't act as if we had never met," she said calmly. "I just didn't think our personal meeting would get in the way of my business duties."
Xavier chuckled mirthlessly. "Personal meeting? Is that how you term it?"
"It was one night. There were no names and no promises involved." Aria sipped the whiskey, holding his gaze. "I believed we agreed to those terms."
"Terms that obviously didn't stop you from mapping out who I was afterward," Xavier rebutted. "You knew who I was when you left that morning."
Aria felt a spark of surprise flare up. She had been careful in her quest for his keycard. She was sure he was asleep. "How did you—"
"I saw the keycard moved." Xavier smiled grim satisfaction about catching her off guard. "Just slightly, but enough to notice. You rummaged around in my things before you left."
This revelation changed the game for both of them. Xavier had known for five years that she discovered his identity before she left. Meaning that he had also known her tactical resistance to Knight Enterprises was not happenstance—it was personal.
"If you knew I had identified you, why did you not reach out to me directly?" Aria asked.
"I did." Xavier's voice sharpened slightly in annoyance. "You seemed to have gone off the map completely. No signs of Aria Chen with any of the marketing firms in San Francisco. It took me three months to figure out you had gone to Singapore, and you were already with Meridian Global, and you had already established strategies targeted to minimize my expansion efforts."
Aria's discomfort grew as she took in the information. Xavier had been following her, categorizing her work actions, watching her career progress from a distance. Everything she had assumed was protecting her careful anonymity turned out to be false.
"So, you came to Singapore to confront me?" she asked.
"I came to Singapore because it was a good place to do business for regional expansion," Xavier replied. "But I won't lie, I'm sure you can appreciate the opportunity to discover your motivations in person was, pleasant."
They paused in an uneasy silence, each studying one another from across the little table. The whiskey warmed Aria's throat, but did little to soften the tension wrapping itself around her chest.
This conversation was venturing into waters she wasn't sure she could swim.
"What do you want Xavier?" she asked directly.
"Answers." He said it quietly, but intensely. "Five years ago you left my hotel room without a word. Since then, you've fashioned your career to subvert mine. I need to know."
Aria could see that this was the "attack" part of their confrontation. Right now, determining how to respond would be the difference between a business conflict and a threat to the truth of both of their secret lives.
"You're representing a kinetic level of corporate violence that I've been deliberately working against my entire career," she said, specifying her words with intention. "The way you build a corporate acquisition strategy is brutally effective. But you can see how it undermines an environment that relies on collaboration. Someone has to oppose it."
"Philosophical disagreement doesn't equate to personal vendetta," Xavier argued, plainly. "This isn't just business opposition at all. It's systematic, planned, and direct. You have modeled your study of me more intently than any competitor I've ever worked against."
This made him uncomfortably accurate. Aria had modeled Xavier's business approach too intensely—partially due to necessity of work, partially because she could wrap around a level of intimacy to examine his personality in ways other competitors couldn't.
"Maybe I'm just better at this tactical stuff than your previous opponents," she redirected.
Xavier leaned in, suddenly focused. "Or maybe you're drawing on information that other tacticians don't have access to."
The subtext hung heavily between them. Aria imagined the conversation might be veering into dangerous territory involving the existence of Luna, and that she would have to tread extremely carefully.
"Like what?" she asked in a neutral voice.
"Like an awareness of how I came to those decisions that suggested personal knowledge rather than purely observational."
Aria felt her heartbeat quicken. Xavier was slowly reducing the space between their professional challenges and personal ones and was backing her into an embarrassing situation that could unravel everything she had worked for.
"You are giving me too much credit," she said. "Your patterns of doing business are simply more predictable than you're aware of."
"Are they?" Xavier reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a folder which he placed in the middle of the table. "Because I spent a considerable amount of time analyzing your counter-moves, and they show an understanding of my predilections as a businessman, that suggests you possess information beyond that which is publicly available."
Aria did not grab the folder, but she noticed the edge of documents stuck out, and it appeared to be deep research on her work history over the previous five years.
"You've been researching me," she said.
"Absolutely, as thoroughly as you've been researching me," Xavier said. "But I have been candid."
The self-disclosure intrinsically altered their relationship from a clandestine professional researcher and consultant in a relay race in separate geographic regions to bilateral surveillance, intelligence assessment and collecting travel agents cold war spanning across the cautiously fact-checking-charade of Singapore.
"What did you get?" Aria asked, although she was estimating what uncoverable lot could really be found using a banal corporate interrogation system and background check on an intelligence agency basis.
Xavier opened the folder to reveal documents that he undoubtedly had for years; starting with some records related to employment, residential history files, and some form of performance evaluation. Nothing that was going to threaten Luna's background, but enough that pointed to the volume of work he had done.
"Aria Chen, thirty-three years old, Executive Director, Strategy, Meridian Global Singapore," he was reading from the first page. "Formerly Executive Director, Pinnacle Marketing Group, San Francisco. Graduated summa cum laude from Stanford Business School. Parents deceased; no known immediate family."
Xavier's recitation of her meticulously constructed professional identity should have been comforting—he had uncovered nothing beyond typical corporate background information. But there was something in Xavier's tonal quality that appeared to indicate he had not finished.
"Unmarried," he went on, connecting his eyes to hers. "No romantic relationships on record since moving to Singapore. Lives by herself in a luxury apartment owned by her employer in the Marina Bay area."
Aria managed to maintain neutrality on her face, but she deliberately began to feel more uncomfortable. Xavier's intelligence was incomplete; his assessment had entirely omitted the most important aspect of her life. But the emphasis he put on her apparent isolation suggested he had discovered something noteworthy in what looked like a willfully detached social life.
"Is there a purpose to this recitation?" she asked him.
"The point is that Aria Chen, as represented in the official records, is remarkably isolated for a person in her professional position," he explained. "No family, no romantic connections, and no social connections outside of what is necessary for her professional relationships. It's almost as though you have put together a life of nearly no personal connections."
His interpretation was uncomfortably sharp. Aria had purposely maintained a careful social distance; her imbalance of social interactions was partly due to her natural disposition but mostly out of the need to keep Luna safe from situations in which other people might recognize her genetic similarity to someone else.
"Some people like privacy," she deflected.
"Or some people are hiding something that would take a lot of social isolation to still have," Xavier countered.
The observation hit too close to home. Aria finished her whiskey, using the action to make a deliberate break of eyeball contact and give herself a moment to assess her own plans. Xavier was methodically cutting down her defensive positions, closing in on conclusions that could threaten everything she was trying to keep protected.
"What do you mean?" she said.
Xavier folded the folder and leaned back in his chair, looking at her face the way a lion looks at prey. "I mean that our professional conflict probably has something to do with our personal history that you are less willing to recognize. And I mean that your vocational motivation for combatting my advancement is not in the entirely philosophical realm of bureaucratic business."
"Then, what is it?" Aria asked, not wanting to know.
Xavier paused before responding in a long moment of non-verbal dialogue with Aria, his grey eyes mazeing into hers, making her magic and paralyze at the same moment. When he finally broke the eye contact, she lost her breath with the chilling certainty of his statement.
"I mean, you've been holding onto a pretty crazy and distressful secret for five years. So much that you were willing to move an entire half of the world away and built your entire professional navigation script avoiding direct contact with me."
Aria felt the fortifications of her painstakingly assembled life were disintegrating. Xavier's analytical mind—intelligent and rationality in nager than reasoning—was boring in on the holes in her story and contradictions that were possibilities for some secret agenda.
"And how big a secret do you think requires all this drama?" she asked, though her own voice sounded drained.
Xavier leaned in again, their eyes locked together. "The kind of secret that changes everything once it's let loose."
The words hung in the air between them like a dare, with consequences neither had spoken. Aria realized she was beyond a categorical professional disagreement; her most prized truths were under siege.
Xavier Knight had spent five years unpacking how she had disappeared. He was after what she had been hiding all along.
And Aria was out of ways to ward off the secret that was sound asleep in her apartment, none the wiser that her father was coldly demolishing all the structures that had kept them apart for five years.