Chapter 14
Pauline
The penthouse smelled like cedar and something faintly citrus that I couldn’t place.
I’d been staring at the guest room ceiling for forty-seven minutes.
I knew because I’d checked my phone six times, which was pathetic, and each time I checked I told myself I’d stop and then three minutes later I checked again.
The sheets were obscenely soft—the kind of thread count that made you wonder what you’d been sleeping on your whole life—and the bed was enormous, wide enough to fit three of me and still leave room for my emotional baggage.
Jack had brought me here. Walked me through the front door without a word, guided me down a hallway that smelled like him, opened the guest room door, and stepped back.
“There are towels in the bathroom,” he’d said.
“Extra blankets in the closet. If you need anything—” He’d gestured vaguely toward the rest of the apartment.
Toward himself. Then that cool indifferent mask slid over his face, smooth as glass, and he’d said goodnight and pulled the door shut between us.
And that was it.
Clean towels. A phone charger when mine turned out dead. A glass of water on the nightstand, the ice still crackling as it settled. Everything I could possibly need, delivered with the warmth of a man tending a guest he intended to keep at arm’s length.
The man who’d held me on a dark floor and murmured I’ve got you against my hair had vanished somewhere between the parking garage and this hallway. In his place was a concierge. A ghost wearing Jack’s face.
I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow. It smelled like laundry detergent. Nothing else. Not him. Not anything that might anchor me to the reason I was here instead of in my own apartment, alone with my pigeon and the dark I’d asked him to save me from.
Take me to your place. I don’t want to be alone tonight.
I’d said that. Out loud. With my whole chest. And he’d brought me here and given me a guest room and closed the door like I was a package he’d signed for.
Sleep wasn’t coming. My blood was still fizzing, that low electric hum that hadn’t stopped since the building went black—since his hands found my face in the dark.
My body wouldn’t settle. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in that stairwell, or back in his arms, or back in the parking garage watching his expression when I asked him to take me home with him.
That flash of something raw and stunned before he locked it away.
I kicked the covers off.
The robe he’d left folded beside the towels was heavy silk, dove grey, pooling past my wrists when I shrugged it on. I tied the sash and padded to the door before I could think about what I was doing—because thinking was the enemy. Thinking was seven years of running dressed up as common sense.
The hallway stretched ahead, all clean lines and low light, and the living room opened at the end of it like a breath someone had been holding.
Glass. That was the first thing—an entire wall of it, floor to ceiling, and beyond it the city lay spread open, glittering and restless, a million small fires burning against the dark.
I stopped walking. My hand found the doorframe.
The view was so vast it felt like standing at the edge of something, like one more step and I’d fall into all that light.
I lived in an apartment where the window overlooked a brick wall and a pigeon with a grudge. Jack lived above the world.
The room itself was enormous—dark hardwood underfoot, warm where I expected cold.
A deep charcoal sectional curved around a glass table.
Bookshelves lined one wall, packed tight, spines cracked, not arranged for show.
The kitchen gleamed to the left, marble and steel, a wine rack set into the island holding rows of dark bottles.
Art on the walls—not the corporate kind, but pieces chosen by someone who actually looked at them.
A painting near the window, abstract, all deep blues and fractured gold, caught the city light and seemed to move.
But my eyes snagged on the small things.
A blanket thrown over the arm of the sofa, bunched like someone had kicked it off mid-sleep.
A mug on the coffee table with a pale ring beneath it.
A pair of reading glasses—Jack Specter wore reading glasses—folded on top of a book whose title I couldn’t make out from here.
These tiny cracks were evidence that a man actually lived inside this monument to solitude, even if that man was currently doing his best impression of someone who felt nothing at all.
He was at the far end of the sectional, laptop casting blue-white light across his face. He’d changed out of his suit—grey sweats, a black t-shirt stretched across his shoulders. His hair was wrecked, shoved back like he’d been dragging his hands through it for hours.
He didn’t look up when I appeared.
My pulse was doing a deep thud I could feel in my fingertips.
“Are you busy?”
His gaze lifted. Found me in the hallway entrance—bare feet, his robe, my hair doing whatever it pleased.
He looked at me. One second. Two. His eyes dropped—fast—to my bare calves below the silk hem, the exposed line of my collarbone, then he dragged his attention back to the screen, his jaw tightening, his eyes flickering with something.
Want. I could see it, but it was gone in the next second.
“Not that busy.” He typed something. The clicking of keys was the loudest sound in the room.
I crossed the floor and sat at the other end of the sectional, pulling my knees up, the robe falling around me in grey folds.
“You disappeared,” I said. “Before this week. The office didn’t see you for a while.”
“I had things to handle.” His eyes were on the screen. “Business.”
One-word answers. I was getting one-word answers from a man who’d once talked to me until three in the morning about a cult documentary. Something hot prickled behind my ribs.
“And the part where you looked through me like I was invisible? Was that business too?”
His fingers stopped.
The silence held for three heartbeats. Four. Then he closed the laptop—a single, definitive click. He stared at the city through the glass like it owed him something.
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” he said.
“You called me Wells. In your office. While I was standing right in front of you.”
His jaw worked. He didn’t deny it.
“The handover’s already in motion,” he said. And the flatness of his voice—no heat, no edge, just a man reading out the terms of a surrender—made my stomach drop. “California Times is being transferred. Media group from New York. They’ll keep the staff, the editorial direction. Clean deal.”
I blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Today was my last day.” He said it to the window, not to me. “I won’t be in the building again.” He paused, and the pause was the worst part—heavy, final, like a door being eased shut. “You won’t have to see me again, Pauline. I mean that.”
The words hit me straight in my heart. Not sharp—worse than sharp. A dull, spreading ache, like something vital being slowly pulled loose.
He was leaving.
He was actually, genuinely leaving.
My throat burned. That fierce, terrible heat that came right before tears—my chest seizing, everything inside me rebelling against the calm face I was trying to hold together.
“Why now?” It came out barely above a whisper.
He turned around then. Confusion flickered across his face. Those blue eyes were focused on me now.
“Why are you giving up now?” My voice climbed, and I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t shove it back down where it belonged.
“All this time I’ve been telling you to leave me alone.
I’ve pushed you away and slammed every door I could find and you never listened.
Not once. You bought my entire company, Jack.
You followed me into a building full of men who wanted to hurt me.
You ran through a blacked-out building because you saw my car in a parking lot. ”
I was breathing too fast. My nails were biting into my palms. “So why is now—when I’ve finally—why is this the moment you decide to stop?”
He was watching me, and I could see it—his hands were locked together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.
“I heard you went on a date.”
Everything in me went quiet.
“I was at Claudette’s.” His voice was stripped bare, his eyes dim with emotions.
Like those words had been hitting him alive.
“You’re already moving on,” he said. “You’ve finally found someone who made you happy.
I no longer have the right to keep—” He stopped.
His throat moved. “I decided to let you go.”
The silence rang in my ears. My heart was doing something arrhythmic and painful.
“I did go on a date with Ethan,” I said.
He nodded. One tight motion. Already retreating, already rebuilding, and I could see it happening in real time—the walls going back up, brick by brick—
My chest cracked open.
“He didn’t make my heart race.” The words came out soft, almost desperate. “Jack—I was thinking about you.”
Jack went still. Completely, utterly.
“He didn’t make my hands forget how to work when he walked in.
” I unfolded from the couch. My bare feet found the cold floor.
“He didn’t make me lose my breath just because he said my name in a certain way.
He was kind and he was good and I sat across from him eating incredible pasta and feeling like the worst person alive because I wanted to want him. ” My voice broke.
“I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to feel something—anything—that didn’t hurt.
And all I could feel was wrong. All I could think about was you standing in that parking lot looking at me like I’d destroyed you, and how much I wanted to take it back, and how terrified I was that I’d already burned it all down. ”
I was standing now, the robe loose around me, the city blazing behind him. My throat was so tight I could barely force the words through.