Chapter 9 AVERY
AVERY
I've been walking for nearly an hour, and being in the city has absorbed some of my sharp edges, the crisp air and chaotic energy outside allowing my mind to recalibrate.
I left the penthouse without telling Nick where I was going.
He was still in his office when I left. And I needed air.
I needed to think without the weight of his presence pulling at me, making it impossible to sort my own feelings from the gravity of him.
The plainclothes security tail that followed me from the building stayed half a block behind me the entire time. One of Gabe's men, obviously. Military demeanor, measured distance, the careful invisibility of someone trained to watch without being seen. He wasn't invisible to me.
But I understand why he's there. I’m sure Nick’s been aware of my location from the moment I stepped out of the penthouse. He couldn't come after me himself, so he sent eyes instead. Part of me resents it. A larger part of me knows it's just my fiancé’s way of showing he loves me.
Even if his dismissive attitude earlier didn’t feel like it.
This is my world, Avery. I know how it works. You don't.
The words have been circling inside me for the past hour, scraping against my pride and something even more tender.
Gabe's team flanks the entrance as I return to our building. The paparazzi are nowhere to be found. That’s no small relief. Manny, our doorman, greets me with a sympathetic nod, and I slip inside without meeting anyone's eyes.
The elevator carries me upward to the ninety-third floor, and in the mirrored walls I catch my reflection. Pale, drawn, the careful composure I thought I was holding in place stripped away, replaced with a bone-deep exhaustion I can hardly reconcile.
I hate that Nick and I are out of sync. It’s beyond rare that we’re not on the same page, that we’re not so elementally attuned to each other that our friends often joke we’re two halves of the same person.
My stomach turns, a queasy roll that has nothing to do with the elevator's ascent. I'm wrung out. My emotions have been swinging wildly all day. Too hot, too on edge, my feelings bigger than the circumstances should warrant.
I take a fortifying breath as the doors slide open.
I'm nervous about what awaits me inside.
My body knows it before my mind catches up, the tightness in my chest, the way my pulse kicks even before I step into the foyer.
I can feel Nick somewhere in the penthouse, that pull that's lived between us since the night we met.
Even furious, even hurt, my nervous system still orients toward him like a compass finding north.
I make myself cross the threshold.
He's waiting in the living room, standing near the bar with a whiskey glass in his hand.
He's shed his jacket, rolled his shirt sleeves to his forearms, loosened his tie—armor partially stripped away, though what remains is armor enough.
The late afternoon throws long shadows across the room, and one of them cuts across his face, darkening the hollow beneath his cheekbone, the tight line of his mouth.
Even now, my body responds. The breadth of his shoulders. The way his scarred right hand grips the glass, tendons visible beneath the damaged skin. The coiled stillness in him that I've learned to read as danger held carefully in check.
I set my keys on the entry table. The sound is sharp in the quiet.
He takes a drink, not yet looking at me. "You didn't answer my texts."
His voice is low, tightly controlled, and it carries an accusation that lands somewhere beneath my ribs.
"I needed space." I don't move deeper into the room. "I'm sure you knew exactly where I was."
"Gabe's man was the only thing that kept me from coming after you myself."
"I know. I saw him."
His shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly.
"You don't understand what I'm trying to do.
" He sets the glass down and turns to face me fully, and even from across the room I can feel the force of his attention, the weight of it.
"The press wants to tear you apart, Avery.
They want to drag you through the mud and make you feel small. Unworthy."
I swallow, hearing the anger in his low, careful tone. "I've survived worse than tabloids, Nick."
“This is different. Now, you have your own career. Your own success. It won’t be enough for them to make you feel you don’t deserve to be with me. Given half a chance, they’ll try to take away everything you have. Everything you’ve fought so hard to become.”
“I’m not afraid of them. They ambushed me yesterday, then again today with that article.
Yes, that caught me off guard. You saw me fall apart.
But even in the middle of that panic, do you know what kept cutting through?
The thought of what this might do to you.
What people would say about you for being with me. ”
“It’s not your job to worry about me.” The words are clipped and sharp. Almost as though I’ve insulted him somehow. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be protecting you. Protecting us.”
"You need to stop treating me like I'll shatter, Nick.
" I step forward now, into the room, closing some of the distance between us.
"I survived my stepfather. I survived prison visiting rooms and police interrogations and years of whispers.
I survived things you know about and things I have to carry alone for the rest of my life. I'm not fragile. I never was."
He looks at me like I've struck him. The mask slips, just for a heartbeat, and I see something raw underneath. Something wounded.
I press on, because I need him to hear me. "I'm not some broken thing you rescued. I was surviving long before you, and I'll survive this too. But not if you keep trying to lock me away every time something threatens us."
"That's not what I'm doing." His voice has dropped, rough at the edges. "I'm trying to protect what we have. Why can't you see that?"
"Really? Because from where I'm standing, it looks exactly the same as control."
The word hangs in the air between us. I watch his face shift, hurt flickering beneath the surface before he buries it under something harder.
"You think I'm controlling you." He moves toward me, and my body responds despite everything, a flush of heat I resent and can't suppress. "After everything we've been through to get here. That's what you think."
"I think you're so afraid of losing me sometimes that you can't see you're pushing me away."
He stops. The space between us feels charged, dangerous. Barely three feet of floor that might as well be a minefield.
"You want to control everything," I say, and my voice wavers but I don't stop. "Even how I handle my own shame."
He blows out a curse. “This is about our life." He closes another step, and I can smell the whiskey on his breath now, sharp and medicinal. "Our future. Everything we're building together. You think I'll let some tabloid profit from hurting you?"
"And destroying them undoes the hurt? Erases what they wrote?"
"It makes sure no one else tries."
"You can't burn down everyone who wounds me, Nick." I'm trying desperately to reach him. I can hear the plea underneath my own anger, the need to make him understand. "That's not protection. That's—"
"That's what?" He's close now, too close, his presence overwhelming my senses even as my mind screams at me to hold my ground. "That's loving you, Avery. That's refusing to let anyone touch what's mine."
Mine.
The word hits something old in me. Something we've struggled with before.
I force myself to breathe. To stay present instead of spiraling into old wounds.
"What happens when I disagree with you?" My voice shakes, but I hold his gaze. "When I have a different opinion about my own life? Do I just fall in line? Is that how this marriage is going to work?"
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it? You made a decision tonight that affects both of us, and you didn't ask. You didn't even pretend to consider what I wanted."
"I'm trying to protect—"
"I don't need you to protect me from my own choices!"
The words ring through the penthouse. We're both breathing hard now, standing too close, and even through the anger I'm aware of the heat between us—that current that never dies, no matter how much we're hurting each other.
I step back. Force myself to think. Nick walks back to the bar where his whiskey sits.
"The article," I say, hating to rehash everything again. But I need to know. I need something to hold onto. "Did they take it down?"
He blinks, recalibrating. "Yes. Their lawyers contacted Beck about twenty minutes ago. A retraction's being drafted."
The tension in my chest loosens, just slightly. A fragile, tentative relief. Maybe he heard me. Maybe some part of what I said broke through. I take a step toward him, my voice softening despite myself.
"Thank you. That's... that's good, Nick. Maybe we can let it end there. Let it die down."
He doesn't answer. Doesn't move.
"Nick?"
He reaches for his glass. Drains the last of the whiskey. Sets it down with precise, deliberate care.
"Every action has consequences." His voice has gone cold. Decided. "They never should have run the story in the first place."
The fragile relief in my chest turns to ice.
"So, you're still going through with it." My words sound hollow, even to my own ears. "All of it. The debt acquisition, the advertising pull. Everything."
"Yes."
"Even though the article is down. Even though I asked you not to."
"This isn't about one article. It's about making sure no one else ever—"
"Nothing I said mattered." The realization hits me like a physical blow, stealing the air from my lungs. "Nothing I felt. None of it made any difference to you at all."
"That's not—"
"Is that where we are now?" I'm shaking, something hot and uncontrollable building in my chest, too big for my body to hold.
The exhaustion is crushing, the emotions churning again, and I don't understand why I feel so volatile, so unmoored.
"You decide, and I fall in line? Is that the marriage I'm signing up for? "
He slams his glass down on the bar.
The sound cracks through the room—sharp, violent, a detonation.
"Everything I do is for you!"
I flinch.
My whole body jerks backward, shoulders curling in, and for one terrible moment I'm somewhere else—sixteen years old, small and trapped, terrified of what’s going to come next. The reaction is involuntary, visceral, written into my bones by years I've spent trying to heal.
The silence that follows is worse than the shouting.
Nick's face goes white. I watch the rage drain out of him, replaced by something that looks like horror. His mouth opens for a moment, but no sound comes out.
We stand there, frozen, the echo of his voice still ringing off the walls.
He's never raised his voice at me like that. In all our disagreements, through all of the secrets that should have torn us apart forever—through all the painful rebuilding—he's never once made me flinch.
Until now.
My heart pounds so hard I feel it in my throat, my temples, the tips of my fingers. But I don't run. I don't retreat. I force myself to straighten, to lift my chin, even though my legs are trembling beneath me.
"No, Nick." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Not this time."
He hasn't moved. Hasn't breathed, it seems like.
"You're not doing this for me." The words scrape past the ache in my chest. "You're acting like they ran that article about you. Like you're the one the press is trying to destroy."
His hands clench at his sides. His scarred right hand, the one I've kissed in the dark, the one I've traced with my fingers while he slept. The knuckles go white.
"Whatever you're doing right now—" I have to push the words out, past the knot of emotion lodged in my throat. "It's for yourself. Not me."
I watch his face go carefully blank, the way it does when something has cut too close to the bone.
I don't know what nerve I've struck. I don't know what wound I've found with my desperate, blind swing.
But I've drawn blood. I can see it in the stillness of him, the way he's holding himself like any movement might shatter something.
The silence stretches. Thick. Airless.
I want him to deny it. Want him to cross the distance and pull me close and tell me I'm wrong, that he hears me, that we can find our way through this together. Want him to fight for us the way he's fighting against everyone else.
His phone buzzes.
The sound cuts through the silence. He glances down at the screen. For one heartbeat, he looks at me. I wait, silent. Hoping for an apology, an explanation, anything. Some bridge across the distance that's opened between us.
But he doesn't speak.
He turns and walks toward his study, already lifting the phone to his ear. “Yeah, Beck. Where are things at?”
He passes within inches of me, close enough that I could reach out and touch him, close enough that I feel the heat of his body, catch the familiar scent of him beneath the whiskey.
He doesn't slow. Doesn't look back.
His footsteps fade down the hallway. A door closes.
I stand alone in the living room, my heart still hammering, my body still trembling with the aftershocks of everything that just happened. The penthouse feels cavernous around me. Empty. The shadows have deepened while we fought, and now they pool in the corners like something waiting.
I don't follow him.
I walk to our bedroom instead, my legs heavy, each step requiring effort I'm not sure I have. The hallway has never felt so long. The door has never felt so heavy beneath my hand.
Our bedroom. The word feels hollow tonight.
I curl up on the bed without undressing, pulling my knees toward my chest, wrapping my arms around myself. His side is cold. The sheets hold his scent, and I breathe it in despite myself, despite everything.
The exhaustion presses down on me, flattening me into the mattress. It's too heavy for one bad day. Too consuming.
A little more than three weeks until our wedding. Three weeks until I promise him forever in front of everyone we know.
I don't know if he'll come to bed tonight.
I don't know if I want him to.
The penthouse is silent around me. Somewhere down the hall, he's talking to Beck, planning strategies for a war I never asked him to wage. Unable to hear that I'm the one he's breaking.
I close my eyes.
The cold sheets are the only answer I get.