Page 73

An hour after the meeting. A side street in the Village — her choice, her location, a café with cracked tile floors and bad lighting where nobody looks at anyone twice. She sits at a corner table with her black journal open, a coffee she hasn’t touched, and eyes tracking the door the way her father’s eyes track rooms. Watching for what’s coming. Reading the architecture of every person who enters.

She sees me, and something shifts in her face. The fury is still there—it lives in her jaw, in the set of her shoulders, in the way her fingers grip the pen she’s been writing with. The fury never leaves. It is structural. Weight-bearing. The thing that holds Liana Maritz upright when everything else is cracking.

But underneath it — buried so deep I almost miss it — something else. Something I have never seen on her face in six months of reading her frequency across dark streets and apartment counters and the backseat of a car where her body arched against mine and her defiance burned so hot it scorched us both.

Relief.

She is relieved to see me. And the relief terrifies her more than the fury ever did.

“Your father agreed to an armistice,” I say. Sitting across from her. Close enough to smell her perfume — the same scent from every time, sharp and clean, the kind of fragrance a woman chooses when she wants to be remembered by the mark she leaves on the air after she walks away.

“I don’t give a fuck about my father’s armistice.” Her voice is low. Steady. The words carry the specific, devastating calm of a woman who confronted a king yesterday, walked out of his kingdom today, and is sitting in a café deciding what to burn next. “I give a fuck about what you told him. About me. About us. About the six months you kept from your own brother and then handed to my father on a fucking platter.”

“I handed him the intelligence. I kept everything else.”

Her eyes find mine. Dark. Searching. The Exclusion frequency running at full power — reading what I am holding back, mapping the distance between what I said in that room and what I did not say, measuring the gap the way she measures every gap in every architecture she has ever encountered.

“Everything else,” she repeats.

“Everything.”

The word sits between us. Heavy. Loaded. Her hand moves across the table. Finds mine. Her fingers close around my wrist — the pulse point, the place where the blood runs closest to the surface. She holds on. Tight. The grip of a woman who spent twenty years inside locked rooms and has decided that the only door worth walking through is the one that leads to the man sitting across from her with his dead father’s jaw and his living mother’s eyes and a heartbeat she can feel hammering against her fingertips. She looks deep into my eyes.

“Come with me,” she says.

I do not ask where.

The apartment door clicks shut behind us, the sound sharp in the heavy afternoon silence. Liana doesn’t turn to look at me, just strides forward. The place smells like her—some mix of dark coffee and something sweet, like vanilla or maybe just the lingering scent of her skin. The windows are half-drawn, casting long shadows across the hardwood floor.

I follow, watching the way her hips move beneath the thin fabric of her dress. It’s loose, but it still clings in all the right places, teasing at the curves I remember from the backseat of that car. The memory of her lips on mine, angry and hungry at the same time, flickers through my mind. She’d been furious at me then, but that hadn’t stopped her from kissing me like she wanted to devour me.

She stops at the kitchen counter, her fingers brushing against the edge as if she’s considering pouring a drink. But she doesn’t. Instead, she exhales, a sharp, frustrated sound, and turns.

Her breath catches when she realizes how close I am. Barely any space separates us. I can see the pulse in her throat, her dark eyes flickering with something between defiance and desire.

“You’re in my space,” she says, but there’s no real bite. Just a challenge.

I don’t answer. Instead, I reach out, my fingers curling around her waist, and drag her against me. Her body presses flush to mine, and for a second, she goes still, like she’s deciding whether to push me away or pull me closer.

Then she looks up.

Her lips are parted, her chest rising and falling too fast. I can see the moment she gives in—the way her shoulders relax just a fraction, the way her eyes darken. Before she can say another word, I kiss her.

It’s not gentle. It’s the kind of kiss that’s been building since the last time we touched, since the last time I felt her nails dig into my skin. She melts into me, her hands coming up to my chest before sliding beneath my shirt, her palms hot against my skin. She’s not gentle either. Her fingers trace the ridges of my muscles, the scar along my ribs, like she’s memorizing me all over again.

I groan into her mouth, my hands sliding down her back, following the dip of her spine. She’s nervous—I can feel it in the way her breath hitches, in the way her fingers tremble slightly against my skin. But she doesn’t stop me.

“Why are you trembling?” I murmur against her lips.

She answers by kissing me harder, her teeth nipping my lower lip. Fuck. I want her. Now.

My hands find the slit in her dress, and I don’t hesitate. I slide my palm up her thigh, feeling the heat of her skin, the way she shivers as my fingers brush higher. She moans into my mouth, the sound low and needy, and my cock throbs in response. When I cup her ass, squeezing the firm flesh through the thin lace of her underwear, she arches into me, her body practically vibrating with want.

I need to see her.

I pull back just enough to tug the straps of her dress off her shoulders. The fabric slithers down her body, pooling at her feet. She is wearing red lace underwear, no bra, only a transparent G-string that sets my skin on fire with lust.

“You’re fucking perfect,” I say, my voice rough.