Chapter Thirteen
Eden
A week is a long time to nurse a fantasy.
I kept wishing he’d join me in my room, creep in after dark, remind my body that I belonged to him. But he didn’t.
And by Day Six, I was running on muscle memory and caffeine, and Wolfe Manor had become the setting for the world’s most exhausting slow-burn torture.
The morning of the event, I was up at five, tracing the ballroom wainscotting with a microfiber cloth to make sure not a speck of dust had been forgotten.
Maribel called it “attention to detail” when she brought me coffee. I called it due diligence. Every scuff, every hairline scratch, every invisible layer of dust was a reminder that nothing could ever be perfect enough.
Gareth had not spoken to me in three days.
Not a real conversation, anyway. He left his notes in ink, his orders in margin comments, and the rest was just stray glances that left my pulse either flatlined or leaping into arrhythmia.
It was impressive, honestly, the way he could go from inhaling my scent like oxygen to pretending I was a fixture like a lamp.
Even more impressive was how much I hated him for it.
Or maybe I hated myself more, for not hating him enough.
By six-thirty, the catering crew had arrived. There were nine of them, all wearing black aprons and the kind of expressions you only get by surviving the four-star hospitality wars. The menu was impeccable, and I’d hoped the day would serve as a shot at familial reconciliation.
Gareth’s mother was flying in from an exotic vacation. His father was rumored to have been threatened with mortal injury if he didn’t show up. I’d learned everything through whispers, old files, and rumors. Gareth hadn’t given me much of anything to go on.
I triple-checked every place setting, re-counted every name card, and then stood back to admire the perfection.
The table was obscene, forty feet long, set with bone china and more crystal than I’d ever seen in one place.
Every arrangement of roses was color-coded to the guest’s seat, a detail I’d sweated over for a full afternoon, and every fork gleamed like perfection.
It was, in every possible sense, flawless.
And still, I could feel Gareth’s eyes burning holes in my back.
He prowled the perimeter of the room, arms folded, face so tight it looked carved. He didn’t say a word, not at first. He just watched as I nudged a napkin by half a millimeter, then adjusted it back. The silence was knife-sharp. As I hovered, paralyzed, he snapped.
“Do you want to start over?” His voice was low, but there was a quiet anger in it I’d never heard before.
I flinched. “It’s fine. The alignment’s just-”
He cut me off. “No. It isn’t. And if you keep fussing with it, you’ll just make it worse.”
I wanted to throw the napkin in his face. I wanted to flip the entire table in his face. He went from making love to me, to icing me out, to criticizing my every move? What the actual heck was wrong with him? Instead, I stepped back, knuckles whitening as I tucked them behind myself.
He moved closer, not quite in my space but close enough that I could feel the charge off his body. “Go to the kitchen,” he said. “Check on the wine. I’ll handle the rest.”
It was a dismissal, plain and simple. I left the ballroom, marching down the service corridor like he’d insulted and embarrassed me. He had. My feet were numb. My hands tingled. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. But all I did was walk until I pushed through the stainless steel kitchen door.
Inside, the caterers were already in overdrive. Butter sizzling, pans clanging, the scent of browning onions making my mouth water but my nervous stomach turn. Maribel was at the helm of it all, wielding a wooden spoon like she might hit anyone who didn’t listen to her orders.
She saw me and raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just the boss,” I said, voice flat. “He wants a wine status.”
Maribel snorted. “He wants a lot of things. Most of them involve you being miserable lately.”
I tried to laugh. It didn’t come out right. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
She lowered her voice. “You okay, hon?”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say it so badly that my chest hurt. But my lips wouldn’t form the word. I just shrugged, then gestured at the stockroom. “Can I…?”
“Go,” she said, waving me off. “I’ll keep the wolves at bay.”
I didn’t doubt she could.
The walk-in wine cellar was colder than usual. I closed the door behind me and leaned my forehead against the metal shelf, letting the chill soak through my skin. For a minute, I just breathed. In, out. In, out. The cold should have helped. It didn’t.
I replayed the last week in my mind, moment by moment.
The avoidance, the clipped instructions, the way Gareth’s entire demeanor had reset to Factory Default: Arctic Bastard.
I’d barely seen him outside of the work zones.
When I did, it was always in passing, always with that same blank stare.
He didn’t ask for my help, didn’t look my way, didn’t even acknowledge the dance in the ballroom or what had happened after.
It was as if I’d imagined the whole thing.
Or, worse, as if he’d regretted it.
I pretended to check the inventory and then stood in the darkness for another full minute, savoring the quiet.
I didn’t want to go back out there. I didn’t want to see his face, or his family’s faces, or anyone’s face ever again.
But I was paid to be here, and there were only so many corners of this house to hide in.
By nine, the guests started to trickle in.
The foyer was a murder scene of luxury that I watched from afar. Fur coats, hand-stitched shoes, cologne that cost more per ounce than my entire wardrobe. The air was thick with the scent of rivalry and old money, and the conversations were already sharp enough to make my teeth hurt.
Gareth stood at the foot of the stairs, flanked by his mother, a vision in white silk and diamonds, and his father, who looked bored to the edge of death.
His sister, Victoria’s loud voice resounded through the space so sickeningly sweet I hated her from the jump, and someone I didn’t know wore a velvet blazer and permanent smirk.
I stayed at the edge of the action, taking notes and fixing minor disasters before they erupted. No one spoke to me unless they had to. Most of them didn’t even see me. I was staff, invisible, a part of the house as much as the marble floor or the antique umbrella stand.
Except Gareth. He watched me. Not openly, but always. Every time I glanced his way, his eyes snapped to mine, then away again, like I’d caught him at something.
It was infuriating. It was intoxicating. It made me want to set something on fire.
The meal was a blur, endless courses, endless toasts, endless thinly veiled insults traded across the expanse of crystal and gold.
I could feel the tension winding tighter with every minute, the room heating up until it felt like an oven.
Gareth said little, drank less, but his jaw was clenched so hard I wondered if he might shatter teeth.
Halfway through, things began to fall apart.
The velvet blazer, already drunk, raised a glass and slurred, “To the next generation, may we at least pretend to get along.”
Victoria let out a seductive laugh. Mr. Wolfe father rolled his eyes. Gareth’s mother just smiled, thin and tight.
I couldn’t breathe.
Gareth stood, glass in hand, and said, “If that’s what you want, you should have started years ago.” Then he turned, handed his glass to me, and left the room.
For a moment, everyone just stared. Then, as if on cue, they erupted into bickering.
I slipped out after Gareth, not sure what I’d do if I found him but unable to stop myself.
Heart thumping painfully, I caught up to him outside the library. With careful hands, I backed him into the dark, empty room and closed the doors behind us.
“What the hell is going on with you?” I asked, too confused and upset to figure out what was going on.
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
“Sue me. I’m not leaving until you tell me why you’ve been a complete asshole all week.”
He let out a laugh, low and bitter. “It’s my default setting.”
“Try harder,” I snapped.
He was silent for a long moment, then spoke. “They’re here so I can tell them they’re out of my life for good. All of them. I’m cutting them out. Legally, financially, everything. They don’t know it yet.”
It took me a second to process. “You’re disowning your entire family. Today.”
He nodded, eyes fixed on some point behind me. “Today.”
I stared at him, my throat aching as a painfully spiky lump began to balloon. “Why would you make me part of that? Why would you have me set this whole thing up? Make me complicit?”
His jaw tightened. “I hired you to do a job.”
The words hit like a slap. I felt my chest hollow out. “That’s it?”
He turned then, finally facing me, and his expression was wrecked. Not angry. Not cruel. Just lost. “That’s all there is,” he said.
For a moment, I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to hit him, claw at him, make him hurt the way I hurt.
Instead, I said, “I quit.”
My voice didn’t even shake.
He flinched, just a little. “You’re under contract.”
I laughed. “Fire me, then.”
He said nothing, just watched as I turned and left.
I didn’t go back to my room. I didn’t collect my things. I just walked, straight out the front door, down the driveway, all the way to the road.
The sky was gunmetal gray. The wind was slicing, raw. I took out my phone, dialed the only number I could think of.
“Ruby?” I said, when she picked up. “Can you come get me?”
She didn’t ask questions. “Text me the address. I’m on my way.”
I hung up, stood by the side of the road with the wolf gaits closed behind me, and let the cold bleed the heat out of me. I tried not to think. I tried not to feel. But the old wounds were open, and every second made them wider. My family, my parents, the betrayal I’d faced after losing my brother…
He knew.
And he let me be part of the very pain that had shaped my adult life.
An hour later, Ruby’s battered Civic pulled up. She leaned across the seat, grinning like she’d just found a hundred-dollar bill in the couch cushions. “Get in, loser. We’re going home.”
I slid into the passenger seat. The interior was warm, the radio cranked to some early-2000s pop song that used to be our road trip anthem. Ruby reached out and touched my hand, then put the car in gear and hit the gas.
We drove in silence for a while. I watched the road, the fields, the blur of the world as it slipped past, hot tears going cold on my cheeks.
Eventually, Ruby glanced over. “You okay?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She nodded, as if this made perfect sense, then turned up the radio and started singing along, badly and loudly and without any shame. I let her fill the silence with sound, with memory, with the only kind of comfort I could stand.
The tears started coming heavier somewhere around the county line. I didn’t try to stop them. I just pressed my forehead to the glass, watched the world distort through the blur, and let it all go.
I didn’t know where I was headed, or if I’d ever find my way back.
But at least I wasn’t alone.