Chapter 3

The estate went quiet after midnight, the kind of quiet you only get when dangerous men are asleep.

I couldn’t sleep.

My body hurt. My mind refused to stop replaying the picture. Rudolf’s arm around Valerie. The intimacy in the angle of his head.

So I walked the corridor barefoot, following the faint sound of voices like a ghost.

The balcony doors were cracked open.

Light spilled out.

I stopped in the shadow of a pillar and looked through.

Rudolf stood with his back to the room, cigarette unlit between his fingers. Valerie faced him, her hands clasped together like she was praying.

Then she stepped closer and kissed him.

Not a drunken mistake. Not a stolen second.

A kiss that belonged to them.

Rudolf’s hand slid into her hair, pulling her in like he’d waited years for permission.

My lungs forgot how to work.

When they broke apart, Valerie’s voice trembled. “I hated being away.”

“You were safer,” Rudolf said.

Valerie swallowed. “You made it happen so fast. The grad program, the visa, the housing… I thought it was just… luck.”

Rudolf’s mouth curved—tender, private. “It wasn’t luck.”

It was him. His money. His power. His planning.

My best friend hadn’t vanished overseas on a whim.

He’d placed her there like a jewel in a vault.

Valerie touched his chest. “You did all that for me.”

“I’d do worse,” he said. “I have done worse.”

She looked down, voice smaller. “Naomi… she’s good. She doesn’t deserve—”

Rudolf cut her off instantly, like the word “deserve” annoyed him.

“Don’t,” he said. “You don’t owe her anything.”

Valerie blinked. “I— I do. She’s my friend.”

Rudolf’s face hardened into something cold and absolute.

“She’s a civilian,” he said flatly. “A normal woman. She got to wear my name. She got to live in my house, safe, rich, adored—”

He leaned in, voice dropping like a knife.

“For someone like her, being the public wife of a man like me is already a kind of luck.”

My stomach clenched. Not from pain.

From humiliation so sharp it felt physical.

Valerie’s eyes filled. “But you’re married.”

Rudolf’s thumb wiped beneath her lower lip, intimate, possessive.

“I married a title,” he said. “Not a heart.”

Then he kissed her again, slower this time, and murmured against her mouth:

“Only you are my love.”

I stood in the darkness, swallowing the sound I wanted to make.

Because if I made a noise, I’d become a scene.

And if I became a scene, Rudolf would control it.

So I did the only thing left.

I turned away without being seen.

In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the ceiling until dawn.

And when the sun rose, I wasn’t Naomi Cole anymore.

I was a woman with a signed divorce in her drawer, a secret medical record in her coat pocket, and a single mission:

Leave without letting him stop me.