PRECIOUS DECEIT. pt.1

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AUREVI A GEMSTONES I NTERNATI ONAL PRECIOUS PRECIOUS DECEIT DECEIT ✦ ✦ ✦ A Captivating Story of Love, Lies, and Emerald Secrets The CEO. The Newcomer. The Mother. The Trap. An explosive drama set in the heart of a gemstone empire. 2

B CHAP T E R 1 Bloodline and Brass efore Ethan Voss was CEO, before he was even Ethan, he was a small boy standing at his mother's elbow in a shop on Broad Street that smelled of polish and old paper, watching her turn a raw emerald over and over in her palm like she was reading it. Adaeze Voss, née Adaeze Okonkwo-Bello, had not been born into gemstones. She was born in Onitsha, third daughter of a textile trader, in a house where money came in unpredictable waves and everybody learned early to swim or sink. She met Klaus Voss, a Belgian gem buyer twenty years her senior, when she was twenty-three and selling coral beads to tourists near the Lagos marina to pay her way through university. He thought she had an eye. She thought he had capital. They were both right, and within six years they had built Aurevia out of a single rented stall into a company with its name on a glass tower in Victoria Island. Klaus died when Ethan was fourteen. Heart, sudden, in the middle of a phone call about a shipment from Kono. Adaeze did not cry in front of anybody, not even Ethan. She buried her husband on a Saturday and was back in the office by Monday, because, as she told her son without looking up from her desk, "Grief does not pay staff salaries." ✦ 3

V That was the lesson Ethan absorbed before any other: feeling things was a private matter, and business did not wait for anybody's heart to catch up. By the time he was thirty and sitting behind his father's old desk, now his own, Ethan had learned to carry his mother's steel and his father's precision in the same body. He did not remember a version of himself that did not belong to Aurevia. He had never taken a real holiday. He did not know, if he was honest with himself in the two or three minutes before sleep took him each night, whether he had ever wanted one. His mother, for her part, had decided long ago that a man with that much control over a boardroom needed a woman to manage everything a boardroom could not. That was where Victoria came in. ✦ ictoria Laurent had grown up in Ikoyi, in a house with two generators and a gateman who called her "Aunty Vicky" from the time she could walk. Her father was a retired permanent secretary; her mother sat on the boards of three charities and one bank. Victoria had gone to boarding school in Surrey and university in Lagos, because her mother believed a girl needed the polish of abroad and the roots of home in equal measure, and she had returned with both a British accent she wore like jewellery and an unshakable sense that certain things were simply owed to her. ✦ 4

N She was not stupid. People underestimated her for the handbags and the lashes and mistook her silence in meetings for having nothing to say, when in fact she was usually deciding whether a thing was worth her breath. She had worked hard to earn her position at Aurevia, harder than anybody in that glass tower gave her credit for. But somewhere along the way, being Ethan's girlfriend had become easier than being merely excellent, and Victoria, like most people…