Chapter 23 - Wren
The common area off the kitchen smells like coffee and whatever Sera prepped this morning — garlic and something sweet underneath.
She cooks the way other people breathe. La Sirena at ten in the morning has this quality of exposed machinery: the chandeliers hauled up to cleaning height, the stage dark, the bar gleaming with bottles nobody’s touching yet. I find I like it better this way.
I finally left that day bed in Logan’s office.
I'm on the couch by the window with my notebook and the pencil stub in my left hand, working on Marisol's face from memory.
It's harder than I expected — that golden energy, the way warmth moves through her before she's finished a sentence.
My left hand doesn't know its own pressure yet, keeps going too heavy on the smudging, and I've started the curve of her jaw four times.
A shadow falls across the page.
I look up.
Juliet Price. Soft hazel eyes, a little sleep-rumpled, the warmth in her face unguarded.
She's carrying a mug in one hand and a leather-bound notebook in the other — the work she's been doing for Logan, numbers and annotated columns that she's been living inside for three days.
She looks at my notebook with genuine attention — not the polite sideways glance most people give. She's actually looking.
"Can I?" A gesture at the chair across from me.
I nod.
She sits, sets both mug and notebook on the side table, pulls her legs up. "What are you drawing?"
Not is that your sketchbook, not do you draw — straight to the real question.
I turn the notebook so she can see. The half-finished face, the smudged jaw, the graphite tracking too dark down the left side where I don't have the control yet.
She leans in slightly. "You work from memory?"
"Usually."
We talk about the sketches for a few more minutes.
What I draw, whether the left-hand work feels different — it does, I tell her, it's like trying to write in a foreign language where I know all the words but the syntax is wrong.
She asks whether I've always been an artist, and I say I used to be, which is more truth than I planned, and she doesn't push on the used to the way some people would.
Then she glances at her own notebook, that reflexive check of someone who has a deadline running in the background, and I see her register it and set it aside — choosing the conversation, but not forgetting the work.
The whole time, I'm aware of it. This morning, I watched Isa bring Juliet coffee. Not set it on the counter. Bring it — cross the room with the mug in both hands, say something that made Juliet smile, linger for a moment in a way Isa doesn't linger.
Isa still treats me like I’m furniture, or worse. I don’t particularly like the woman, but I don’t understand why she can barely bring herself to be civil to me.
Juliet is talking about something — the way charcoal works differently from graphite, the smudging, how she used to draw as a kid — and she is, demonstrably, a good person.
The kind who asks real questions and listens to the answers and doesn't make you feel like you're being interviewed.
I can see exactly why Isa smiled at her.
I can see exactly why Adrian called her princesa this morning like he's known her for years, why the building already seems to have made room for her.
She moves on eventually, warm and unhurried, picking up her work notebook as she stands — back to the ledger, back to Logan's accounting problem, the forensic trail she's been running.
My coffee has gone cold without my noticing. The pencil stub is still in my left hand, not moving. The half-finished Marisol looks up at me from the page with an expression I haven't managed to get right yet — something in the eyes that I keep losing.
I like her. Genuinely, annoyingly, against my intentions, I like Juliet Price.
I had been ready to resent her. It would have been so much cleaner — the girl who walked in and was immediately loved, so easy to push away from behind a wall of resentment.
Instead I'm sitting here with cold coffee and a smudged notebook page, and the irritation I feel is entirely directed at myself for being unable to manufacture a feeling I needed.
It’s almost funny.
Almost.
I go to Logan’s office.
He's at the desk, one monitor lit with accounting files, his pen moving in that neat controlled hand. He looks up when I come in. I settle on the edge of the daybed.
The question has been sitting in my chest since this morning, small and sharp.
I try to keep the hurt out of my voice. I am not entirely successful.
"Isa brought Juliet coffee this morning." I look at the window instead of him. "She's been here two days." A pause. I make myself look at him. "She's never brought me coffee."
He sets his pen down. He turns toward me and gives me his full attention.
"You know who Juliet is." Not a question — he was there when Nico introduced her, he knows I was awake for it. "The Rosetti connection."
"I know the name." I look at the window.
He's quiet for a moment. "Her sister Eleanor married Leonardo Rosetti. The New York family." A beat. "That makes Juliet legible to Isa in a way that has nothing to do with who she actually is. There's a system, and Juliet arrived already inside it. Isa recognizes that on sight."
"And I didn't arrive inside anything."
He holds my eyes. "You came through me." Not an apology in it. Not a softening. Just the fact, stated clean.
“Okay.”
"Isa reads institutional backing because that's how she reads safety. You didn't come with any. Just mine."
Just mine.
The words land in the center of my chest. Not as consolation. As a fact that is simply true — flat, certain, requiring no defense.
Neither of us moves for a moment.
Then I stand, and he pushes back from the desk, and we close the distance simultaneously. He catches my face in both hands. My left hand reaches for the lapel of his jacket; my right arm, braced and careful, settles against his chest. Neither of us hesitated, and that almost undoes me.
He kisses me slowly.
Not the consuming urgency of the forest — that was hunger given permission after weeks of containment.
Not the drowning quality of the shower at dawn.
This is something else, something that is choosing to take its time.
His mouth is warm and deliberate, and I feel my eyes close and my left hand tightens on his lapel, and the pencil stub is somewhere on the daybed, and the world has contracted to this room and this man and his mouth against mine.
He pulls back, just far enough.
"Lock the door," he says.
I go lock the door.
He undresses me slowly, starting with the jacket — lifting it off my shoulders with careful attention to the brace on my arm, working around it without making a thing of it. The jacket goes over the desk chair. His hands move to the hem of my shirt.
"Here?" The slightest question in it.
"Yes."
The shirt comes off. He looks at me in the afternoon light.
The bruising at my ribs has yellowed but it's still visible, still there, the map of the blast's reach across my body.
He raises his hand and traces the edge of the bruising with two fingers — light, unhurried.
Not a clinical inspection. A reckoning. The touch lasts two full seconds, maybe three.
He doesn't say anything. I place my hand over his and hold it there, and for a moment neither of us breathes.
Then his hand turns under mine and he's reaching for the clasp of my bra.
I reach for his shirt buttons in return.
He goes still and lets me work through them, down the line of them, my left hand managing the buttons while my braced right arm rests against his chest. The suit shirt falls open to reveal the swimmer's chest I've been drawing from memory, the scars I know now by touch and by sight and by the story behind each one.
I push the shirt off his shoulders. He lets it drop to the floor, which is unlike him — he has opinions about floors.
He unclasps my bra and slides it off my arms, careful of the brace.
I unhook his belt. My left hand makes a clumsy pass at the buckle and he covers my hand with his, helps without comment, and then the rest follows and we're standing here in the afternoon light in his locked office and I can see all of him. I've drawn all of it. I know it like a map.
I run my palm over his chest, slow, and he stays still for it.
Then he reaches for me — both hands at my waist, lifting me, walking me back to the daybed, settling me on it.
He kneels in front of me on the rug. The deliberateness of it.
The afternoon light through the high office window.
He pulls my jeans off slowly, the brace not an obstacle in his careful hands, and then my underwear, and then he is between my knees and I am the only thing in the room.
He spreads my knees apart with his palms and settles between my thighs.
The first stroke of his tongue pulls a sound out of me that the office walls barely contain.
He's not searching. That's what registers first, underneath the immediate rush of sensation — he's knowing, attentive, applying what he's already learned.
Slow, deliberate strokes that build rather than rush.
Reading every shift in my breathing, every involuntary press of my hips toward him.
My left hand finds his hair and grips, not guiding, just needing something to hold onto.
"God —" The word comes out ragged.
He makes a small sound against me that I feel in my teeth, and then his hands come up and grip my hips firmly, holding me exactly where he wants me, and he doesn't stop.