Chapter 3 A Plan Without Outsiders

Aria didn't tell her father about the gala.

She told herself it was because nothing might come of it, and she didn't want to give him false hope. The truer reason was that Ethan Bennett would never forgive himself if his daughter had to beg a stranger for his company's survival and Aria couldn't bear to watch that shame settle onto his face.

So for three days, she worked the problem the way she worked everything: quietly, methodically, without asking anyone for help she hadn't earned the right to ask for.

She drafted a business proposal in her evenings after work, staying up until two in the morning building spreadsheets that laid out Bennett Textiles' assets, its skilled workforce, its decades of client relationships. She wasn't naive enough to think passion alone would save the company. She needed numbers. She needed a case that made financial sense to someone who thought only in numbers.

She called three regional banks and was declined by all three.

She reached out to a former business school classmate who now worked in private equity, only to be told, gently, that funds like his didn't touch companies already in default.

She even sat, late one night, staring at a blank email addressed to no one, trying to think of any favor she could call in, any door she hadn't already knocked on.

By the fourth night, exhausted and low on options, Aria admitted to herself what Mia had already seen clearly: there was no clever workaround, no hidden solution that avoided involving someone with real capital. Bennett Textiles needed an infusion of money so large that only a handful of people in the entire city could provide it. And every path Aria researched led, eventually, back to the same name.

Blackwood International.

She hated how neatly the pieces fit - how her father's crisis and Mia's cousin's gala had collided at exactly the right moment, as if fate had a sense of humor. Aria didn't believe much in fate. She believed in preparation, and so she prepared.

She rewrote her proposal for the fifth time, cutting anything that sounded like begging and keeping only what sounded like opportunity: a skilled labor force at a competitive cost, decades of manufacturing relationships already in place, a factory that could be modernised rather than built from nothing. She wasn't asking for charity. She was offering a deal, even if the deal came from desperation.

The night before the gala, she laid out the single formal dress she owned, a deep green gown she'd worn to a cousin's wedding two years earlier  and stared at it like it was armour.

"Just five minutes," she murmured to her reflection in the mirror. "That's all I need."

She didn't know yet that Damien Blackwood didn't grant five minutes to strangers.

She didn't know that she wasn't a stranger to him at all.