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The woman folds her hands in front of her. “He always comes running for me,” she says softly. “He always has.”

Something about the smug way she says it coils cold in my chest.

I text him under the desk while she waits.

Who is she? What is happening?

Nothing comes back. My flirty little messages sit right above the silence now, the skirt, the surprise, the line about my emergency contact, and all of it looks suddenly pathetic and cheap stacked on top of two questions he will not answer.

He’s probably driving, I tell myself, though he has a driver and never once lets anything knock him off his rhythm.

Twenty minutes later the door bursts open and Lev comes through it, and I have never seen him look like this. His tie is dragged loose and crooked. His silver hair is a mess. His chest is heaving as though he ran the last flight of stairs. The man I’ve watched stay glacier-calm through a broken nose and a ballroom full of dangerous men looks completely undone.

His eyes go straight to her and stay there. He doesn’t so much as glance at me even once.

Her eyes fill and redden the second she sees him. She crosses the room, and he catches her against his chest as though his arms already knew the exact shape of her, and she melts into him.

“I thought you would not want to see me,” she whispers.

I watch him fold her in, careful and tender, both hands spread wide across her back, and my eyes begin to sting.

“I will always want to see you,” he says, low, into her hair. “I walked out of that meeting the second they told me you were back.”

She tips her wet face up, and he brushes her tears away with his thumb, slow, as if she might break under too much pressure.

“Why are you crying?” he murmurs.

“I missed you,” she says, and more tears spill over.

My stomach drops through the floor. Every filthy thing I texted him an hour ago curdles into humiliation. That patience, that softness, the careful, worshipful way he holds her, I never once got any of it. Not like this.

Then she notices me. “Could I speak with Lev alone?” she asks him quietly. “Just the two of us.”

At last he looks at me, and his gaze is flat and empty and stranger’s-cold, and every warm thing between us over the last few weeks turns to paper in a single instant.

“Get out,” he says.

The words will not fit into my head. “What did you say?”

“Leave, right now.” His eyes have gone to something cold and terrible and unrecognizable, and I flinch back from it before I can think, and then my legs are moving on pure instinct and carrying me out the door.

I stop around the corner with my back against the wall. My nails have left little bloody crescents pressed into my palms. I curse myself for scurrying off like a scolded girl instead of planting my feet and demanding to know who the hell she is.

I have every right to ask. He called me his woman in front of the most powerful people in the city. He has fucked me in my own bed. I’m not going to slink off like some employee who got shouted at over a filing error.

I breathe until my hands stop shaking, and I walk back.

The door opens before I reach it, and she comes out with her arm threaded through his. She looks radiant, glowing with happiness, and even Lev’s hard mouth has softened at one corner.

The sight of them cuts clean across my throat like a blade, and for a moment I cannot make a sound.

She looks straight through me as though I’m a piece of the furniture. He doesn’t see me at all. His whole attention rests on her.

“My father wants to see you too,” she tells him. “He kept telling me I had to come back. He would not let it go.”

“Then let us go to him now,” Lev says, and his voice toward her is soft in a way I have never once heard aimed at me.

I plant myself in front of them, fists tight at my sides. “What is going on here?” My voice shakes worse than I want it to.