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Vanished into the dark as quickly as he appeared.

I stand under the yellow wash of a street lamp, running both hands violently through my hair, my breath coming in ragged white plumes.

My insides ache with a terrifying, breathless certainty. He’s back. He’s here in this city, breathing the same air.

And this time, I will tear this entire town apart before I let him slip through my fingers again.

❧

The kitchen smells like garlic, rosemary, and something that should be comforting.

It isn’t.

I stand over the stove, stirring pasta I am no longer hungry for, watching the sauce move in slow red circles around the pan. The apartment is quiet except for the low hiss of heat and the muted traffic far below the windows.

Two weeks.

Two weeks since I saw Maksim at Jamie’s game. Two weeks since he looked at me with that guarded, wounded expression and disappeared before I could cross the distance between us.

He came back.

That should be enough to make the rest of it survivable.

It isn’t.

He is avoiding me like an incurable plague.

I’ve texted until my thumbs went numb. I’ve called until the automated voice told me the line was unavailable. I even drove out to the secluded hillside villa—the private hideout he’d shown me a month before everything fell apart. I sat in my idling car at the bottom of his driveway for two hours in the freezing rain, staring at the pitch-black windows, praying the lights would flicker on.

Nothing.

The silence is a living, breathing torture.

I turn off the stove, spoon the pasta into a bowl, and sit at the counter.

The first bite tastes like nothing.

Not bad. Not burnt. Just empty. Tomato, garlic, salt—my mouth recognizes all of it, but none of it reaches me. I chew because I made the food and because eating dinner is what normal people do when they have a quiet evening alone.

I swallow.

Then I put the fork down.

The silence in the apartment stretches around me.

For one fragile minute, I think I might make it through the night without speaking to anyone. No calls. No lawyers. No board members. No one asking where I was, what I was doing, or whether I have finally decided to behave like the version of myself they can understand.

Then the lock turns.

The front door swings open and slams shut.

I close my eyes briefly and let out a slow breath.

Of course.

Footsteps cut over the hardwood, quick and furious, growing louder as they cross the foyer. Jake appears at the kitchen entrance a second later.

His overcoat is open. His tie is pulled loose. His expression is already arranged into anger, but there is something strained underneath it, the kind of rage that comes from someone who has spent an evening being embarrassed in public and has decided I am the person who should pay for it.