He had noticed.

They both had.

What grew between them was slow and careful and entirely private, and Adele had guarded that privacy with everything she had, because she understood her family with a clarity they would have found insulting.

If Leopold had known, from the start, that his daughter was involved with a man who quietly controlled the debt of half the region’s mid-sized companies, he would not have been horrified.

He would have been delighted.

He would have tried to use it — to broker it, to leverage it, to fold Bram and everything he controlled into the family’s endless hunger.