Chapter 2

I made the flight by four minutes.

I found a window seat, dropped my bag in the overhead, and sat down too fast. The cabin tilted slightly. I pressed two fingers to my temple and breathed.

I hadn't eaten since yesterday.

Out of habit, my hand went to my coat pocket.

Three chocolates. Small, round, wrapped in dark foil. The kind you could only get from the patisserie on Meridian that didn't take walk-ins.

Caelian had started doing it after the gala at the Ferrante estate — three winters ago, when I'd locked my knees standing for four hours and gone down hard on the marble floor in front of half the city's organized crime leadership. He'd gotten to me before anyone else could, one hand under my jaw, the other pressing something sweet against my lips, his voice doing something it almost never did.

Stay with me. Eyes on me.

After that, he just started putting them in my pockets. Every morning, without saying anything about it. I'd find them in coat pockets, jacket linings, once tucked inside my gloves. He never mentioned it and I never thanked him and somehow that made it feel more real than most things he said out loud.

I unwrapped one now.

The chocolate dissolved on my tongue — dark, barely sweet, the specific kind that worked fast. The dizziness began to pull back from the edges.

Then the other thing moved in to replace it.

I looked out the oval window at the tarmac.

Seven years.

How does seven years become this?

I'd told myself the story so many times I knew exactly where it started to come apart.

Sienna Raines had joined the Porto operation eighteen months into our relationship. Caelian's explanation was clean and reasonable: her father Vincent Raines commanded the eastern corridor, the alliance predated both of them, there were obligations to manage. She came in as a liaison — technically under two senior captains, practically untouchable.

I watched it happen in increments so small I kept second-guessing my own eyes.

The floor director who'd been making my work life quietly difficult for a year — reassigned. Gone. Nobody said anything about it. The associate who made one offhand comment about Sienna's filing in a room where the wrong person was standing — terminated by end of day. People learned fast. The kind of fast that sticks.

They started calling her la patrona in the lower offices. Not to my face, usually. But close enough that I was supposed to hear.

I was Caelian's girl. I had been for years. I wore no ring, attended no official functions, appeared in no photographs. That was the arrangement and I had understood it and accepted it and told myself it was enough.

Sienna Raines appeared in all the photographs.

And still I explained it to myself. Obligations. Optics. The weight of old alliances.

I kept explaining it right up until the photo.

It came through the company's internal group — someone who either didn't know or didn't care had posted it thinking it was harmless. A midnight showing of The Last Thing I Promised. The one I'd spent three months gently, then not so gently, trying to get Caelian to see with me.

He'd looked at me with genuine bewilderment. You want me to sit in a dark room for two hours watching people cry at each other? He hadn't even softened it. That's a waste of a night, Leah.

In the photo, he was laughing.

Not the controlled, public-facing version he deployed at alliance dinners. Actually laughing — head tilted back, one hand in his jacket pocket, completely at ease. Sienna's shoulder was near his. The theater lobby lights caught the side of his face like something arranged.

The chat messages scrolled and blurred.

I sat on the kitchen counter with my phone in my lap and waited for him to come home.

When the door opened I didn't move. I watched him cross the room — jacket over one arm, completely composed, the specific unhurried movement of a man who has never once been caught off-guard — and I said:

"How was it?"

He stopped.

"How was what."

"The Last Thing I Promised." I kept my voice flat. "Was it worth the late night?"

Something moved behind his eyes. Brief. Gone.

"You followed me."

"Your men posted it in the company group, Caelian." I slid off the counter. "Half the operation saw you before I did."

"Then you already have your version of events." He set his jacket over the back of a chair. Unhurried. "If you've already decided what it means, I don't see the point of the conversation."

"The point—"

"I've been working since six this morning." His voice didn't rise. It never rose. That was somehow the worst part. "I don't have the energy for this tonight."

"Then tell me it's nothing. Just say it. Look at me and say it's nothing."

He looked at me.

Said nothing.

The paper bag was still in his hand — cream-colored, tied with a thin ribbon, the theater's logo printed neatly on the side. He set it on the counter the way he set everything down. Deliberately. Like it was just a thing in a room.

I grabbed it.

The knot gave on the first pull and the bag came open and everything inside scattered — rolling across the tile in small quick circles, knocking against the cabinet legs, coming to rest in the spaces between things.

I stood there breathing.

Then I looked down.

Handmade chocolates. Two dozen at least, dark and round, wrapped in the same foil as the ones in my coat pocket. From the same patisserie. The ones you couldn't get without a standing order.

He'd been at a midnight showing of the movie I'd asked him to see.

He'd bought me chocolates on the way home.

I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor with his name stuck somewhere in my throat and could not make a single part of that fit together into something I knew how to carry.