Page 46 of His Vow

I watched it move with each breath — lifting on the exhale, settling on the inhale, a rhythm so steady I could have set a clock by it. Her hand rested on my chest, fingers loosely curled against the fabric of a shirt I didn't remember putting on. Her lips were parted. A faint crease sat between her brows.

The apartment was different with her in it. The rosemary and vanilla had sunk into my sheets, my pillow, the air of a room that used to smell like nothing. Her book leaned against the lamp. Her scarf hung over the chair. The dish rack held two glasses, two forks, two plates — the second set still foreign against the first.

I didn't get up. I stayed.

My hand found her hair. I traced the line of her shoulder, the dip of her waist beneath the sheets, the warm skin at the small of her back where my palm settled and stayed. She stirred, and then she pressed closer — her body fitting against mine without adjustment and negotiation.

The ease was what cut.

Because this was what Adira had. A girl of nineteen who was warm and trusting and believed in the person holding her. Who woke up in someone's arms and pressed closer because the arms felt safe. And the Lattimores — Hugh, the family, the lawyers, and the NDAs — reached in and took it from her.

I looked at the face on my chest. The paint stain on her wrist. The crease between her brows smoothed as her dream released her. She was not a file photograph. She was not an access point. She was a woman who showed me paintings she'd never shown anyone, made terrible coffee, and tipped 50%. She designed reading rooms for children, fought with me, and stayed anyway.

I was doing to her what Hugh did to Adira. Using someone's trust as a tool. The thought climbed from my stomach to my chest and sat behind my teeth.

Her eyes opened. Brown, warm, unfocused for a second before they found mine. The crease between her brows disappeared. Then the smile came.

"You're staring."

"I'm looking."

She laughed and pulled me down by the collar of the shirt. Her mouth was warm and tasted like sleep and the mint she'd chewed before bed. My hand was still on the small of her back. She arched into it. The morning went slow after that.

She whispered my name against my jaw, and the sound dissolved the scheme in my chest for whole minutes at a time.

We agreed to meet that evening. I'd pick her up from the gallery at 7:00 p.m. She dressed in my bathroom, stole my toothbrush without asking, and kissed me at the door — quick, warm, her hand flat on my chest for a moment, pressing once before she pulled away.

"7:00 p.m.," she said.

"7:00 p.m."

She left. I stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the hall. She looked back once, smiled, and turned the corner. The apartment went cold around me like a room that had lost its heat source.

The Vanguard floor was quiet when I arrived. Elise nodded from the reception. Two analysts glanced up and back down. The corridor to my office was the same corridor I'd walked for years, and the familiarity of it pressed against me like a suit that no longer fit.

Declan's door was open. He sat at his desk with a pen in his hand and a legal brief spread in front of him, but he wasn't reading. He was watching the corridor. Watching me. He'd been waiting.

Julian leaned against his office doorframe across the hall, sleeves rolled, coffee in hand, casual as always.

"Conference room," Declan said. Not a question.

We filed in. The three of us around the table — the same configuration we'd occupied for years. The geometry of a partnership that used to function like a single organism. Declan was at the head. Julian to his right. Me to his left. The distance I'd created was visible. An empty chair between the men I'd built this with and the man I'd become inside the Lattimore building.

Julian opened his laptop. "The ghost returns. Someone tell security."

Light. Pointed. On the surface, Julian's observations were funny, but beneath that, they drew blood.

"The Alderton close," I said. "The management termination timeline needs adjustment. Prescott's counsel is stalling on the non-compete language."

I gave them business. I was competent, focused, and present enough to function. My hands moved through the files. My voice delivered the analysis. The machine worked. But Declan's eyes stayed on me across the table — blue, sharp, the look that came before the question nobody wanted.

"You're somewhere else," he said. "You've been somewhere else for weeks."

"I've been at Lattimore."

"That's not what I mean."

Julian's pen stopped tapping. The room went still. Two men who had watched me build myself into a weapon over fifteen years, who had stood beside me through every acquisition and every hostile restructuring, were looking at me now with the particular attention of people who had noticed a crack and were deciding whether to press it.