Chapter 12
A tticus handed his card to the counter without looking at it. The staff pretended not to stare.
“Stop it,” he said mildly to me, and the command made my mouth go dry. “If you need to pay for something, buy the lip balm.”
“I already own every lip balm,” I muttered, but I picked one up and paid for it, anyway, because he wasn’t wrong.
We walked three doors down to lingerie. The air changed when we entered. Salespeople in black moved the way dancers do, all sleek efficiency and soft voices. The room was dove-gray and feminine without being sweet. I felt my skin tighten.
He didn’t follow me into the fitting room this time. He sat outside with an ankle propped on a knee and a look that made even the mannequins stand straighter. The fitter, a woman whose hands had seen a thousand bodies and no illusions, measured me with the kind of competence that felt like a mercy.
“We’ll start here,” she said, pressing a set into my hands that was all clean lines and fine mesh, nothing girlish, everything adult. A second set was darker, a suggestion rather than a statement. A third—ivory, whisper-thin—made my breath hiccup.
I put the first on and looked at myself. Shoulders back because she told me to. Stomach soft because I am alive. The mesh smoothed and revealed at once. I hated that I cared what he would think. I loved that I already knew.
I stepped out.
He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t let his gaze drop like a man in a movie. He looked at my face first and let the rest be an extension of what he found there.
“Turn,” he said, and the word was a warm hand on my lower back.
I did. The band hugged me. The briefs were cut high enough to make my legs look carved, low enough to leave too much of me bare. I swallowed.
“That one,” he said.
“We still have two more,” I said.
“We’ll take them. But that one,” he repeated, and then, very quietly, for me alone: “for today.”
I changed, my fingers clumsy on hooks and straps. I faced a mirror and told the woman in it that she was not a visitor in her own body.
He paid again. He didn’t look at the total. I sucked in a breath that tasted like expensive silk and realized I had to eat something soon or I’d fall over.
He must have read that calculation on my face because he steered me, hand at the small of my back, into a place two doors down where the tables were small and the napkins were thicker than the towels in my bathroom.
He didn’t ask what I wanted. He told the server.
Oysters, a salad with more adjectives than lettuce, sparkling water, one glass of Chablis that I sipped slowly to keep from floating into the ceiling.
“You going to ask me more questions,” he said, after the oysters arrived, “or are you going to rehearse all the reasons you shouldn’t be here and say none of them out loud?”
“Both,” I said primly, stabbing an avocado. “Are you Alpha Mail?”
“I told you what you get.”
“Vague,” I said. “Maddening. On brand.”
He didn’t apologize. “You don’t want the mechanics, Lady. They’ll spoil the taste.”
The word hit me harder than it should have. Lady again. Not Simone. Not Rogers. Lady.
My skin prickled with recognition because it couldn’t be coincidence.
He had to be Alpha Mail—there was no other explanation.
The women I’d overheard in The Nesting Place had whispered about it with reverence, laughing nervously when they admitted all the women were called that.
Lady, like it was a code. A cover. A way to keep things anonymous, even when you were naked and begging.
Only, here, the anonymity was broken. He knew my name. He knew my brother. That made the title feel both protective and absurd, like he was trying to layer secrecy over a connection that already existed. It twisted me up inside, making me question what game we were really playing.
“Everything has a mechanism,” I said, because if I didn’t intellectualize a little, I would crawl into his lap.
“Who read my letter first? Who sent it to you? How did you get my number? Why were you at Stephen’s party, if you’d already read it?
Where does your life intersect with mine when it shouldn’t? ”
His gaze didn’t move off me. The server might as well have been a ghost. “Your letter was read,” he said.
“By the person who reads them, because that’s their job.
It was sent to me because that’s what I wanted.
Your number came because I asked for it.
And I was at your brother’s party because I’m your brother’s friend. It’s that simple.”
“You make it sound so tidy.”
“It is tidy,” he said. “You want it to be chaos so you can call it fate and not choice.”
The worst part was how much I enjoyed being called out when he did it like that. “Stephen trusts you.”
“He should.”
“He thinks you’re good people,” I said, not hiding the skepticism, and his mouth did that curve like he’d tasted a good whiskey.
“I’m good to the people who are mine,” he said. “He’s not in danger from me. Neither are you.”
“You can’t know that,” I said. “You say that like you haven’t built a life on decisions other people would call dangerous.”
I didn’t know any of that for sure. I was guessing.
He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t confuse appetite with risk.”
“And what am I?”
“Appetite.”
I had to put the fork down because my hand wasn’t steady.
We didn’t talk for a while. We ate. He watched me as if he had a right to, which made something low and traitorous in me preen.
The room hummed around us, all clink and muted talk and linen, and I felt the bubble of unreality thin enough to press my finger through.
This could be a day in a life that wasn’t mine.
It could also be the first day of a life that was.
“Tonight,” he said, when the check disappeared and the car reappeared like we’d conjured it, “you’ll come back to the suite. You’ll put on the dress. You’ll take it off only when I say.”
“Possessive,” I said.
“Honest,” he returned.
He didn’t take me straight back. We stopped at a salon with frosted windows and a hum behind them.
A receptionist looked up, looked at him, and reorganized her afternoon in thirty seconds.
A woman with quick hands washed my hair, blew it out, coaxed it into something that looked like I’d woken up in a commercial.
Another woman slicked a sheer wash of color on my mouth, courtesy of the lip balm he’d made me buy.
It was all done without talk about my “big night.”
No winks. No conspiracies. Just a team that understood a transformation without belittling it.
I watched myself become the version of me who could stand next to a man like Atticus in a glass box and not look like she’d gotten lost. I didn’t know if I liked her. I didn’t know if I was her.
Back in the car, garment bags rustled. I laid a hand over them like a mother hen and rolled my eyes at myself.
“You’re careful with things you’ve decided to keep,” he said.
“I’m careful with things that cost more than my mortgage.”
“You’re careful with yourself,” he corrected, and I didn’t answer because the answer was yes and also not nearly enough.
We were quiet up the elevator. The suite opened, bright and the same and somehow not. He set the bags down across the sofa and untied one, lifted the silk dress free with a reverence that made my throat feel pinched.
“Six o’clock,” he said. “Put this on. Shoes. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” I repeated, and the air in the room changed shape around those words.
He didn’t step closer. He didn’t press. He only looked at me with that patient hunger and then turned away, pulling his phone from his pocket like a man with calls to make and men to command, and all of that existed in a parallel plane that had nothing to do with me until he decided it did.
“Atticus,” I said, before he disappeared down the hall, because there was still one more thing gnawing.
He paused.
“If I panic,” I said, the words too honest for how lacquered my hair suddenly looked, “if I decide tonight that I can’t do this—if the glass, or the way you don’t touch me until I’m shaking, or the fact that you know my brother, if any of it gets to be too much?—”
“I’ll take you home,” he said. He didn’t even let me finish. “I’ll put you in a car and I won’t follow. I won’t call. I won’t make it a lesson.”
I believed him.
“And if I don’t panic?” I asked.
His gaze dropped very deliberately to my mouth. “Then you’re in for a memorable night.”
My knees threatened to give.
He was halfway down the hall when my phone buzzed. Stephen.
I stared at the screen until the buzzing stopped, started again, stopped. Three texts came in a row.
Stephen: You alive?
Stephen: Mom says she senses a shift in the universe. Did you do witch stuff again?
Stephen: Also the twins want to borrow your blender????
I typed: Alive. Busy.
Three dots. Stephen: Okay. Dinner this week?
My thumbs hovered. I typed, Soon , and set the phone facedown like it might see something it shouldn’t.
I slipped out of my clothes and stepped under the spray just long enough to rinse the city from my skin.
No shampoo, no scrubbing—just heat and steam loosening the tension from my shoulders, a reset before the night ahead.
I patted carefully around my salon-styled hair, protecting the blowout like it was crown and armor both, then smoothed lotion over my legs.
I told my thighs they were welcome in every room I walked into, even this one, and slid into the dress.
The shoes made me taller, not because of the inches but because of the way they asked my spine to behave. I didn’t put on the new lingerie. I put on the lip balm, let my mouth look like it always did but better, and looked at the woman in the glass.
She didn’t look small. She didn’t look like an imposter. She looked like a woman who had written a letter and then walked into it.
A knock sounded on the bedroom door like a punctuation mark.
“Come in,” I said, and my voice held.
He filled the doorway without trying. His gaze did the thing it did, sweeping slow, cataloguing, not lingering too long on any one place, as if making me guess at his favorite detail was part of the point.
“That,” he said, not a question.
I smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle at my hip because my hands needed somewhere to go. “You did pick it.”
“I chose it,” he said. “You made it something I want to ruin.”
Every muscle in my body turned into a yes .
He came closer. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to breathe the same air. The sun slid lower beyond the glass, gilding the bridge, turning the harbor a color that had no name.
“Last chance to say no,” he said.
“No,” I said, meaning don’t stop.
His mouth curved. “Good.”
He didn’t kiss me. Of course, he didn’t. He stepped back, offered his hand like a gentleman, and led me into the main room where the city waited to watch.
I took his hand.
I didn’t look away from the glass. I didn’t hide.
He poured champagne into the flutes without taking his eyes off me and handed me mine. The bubbles rose like a countdown. The clock on the mantle ticked in a room that didn’t need ticking to know where we were headed.
“Eat,” he said, and I glanced at the tray I hadn’t noticed on the sideboard—slices of pear, a handful of almonds, squares of dark chocolate that made my mouth water just to look. I picked up a pear.
It hadn’t even been that long since we’d knocked back oysters downtown. Afterward, he must’ve clocked how the hunger had hit me, filed it away, and now feeding me was on his radar. I often got so busy, I forgot to eat. Apparently, Atticus intended to put an end to that.
He watched me take a bite. He watched my mouth. He watched my throat when I swallowed.
“You still haven’t answered,” I said, because I couldn’t leave the question alone. “Where do we put this? What is this? Alpha Mail and Stephen and you and me and this.”
“We don’t put it anywhere,” he said. “We live in it. We don’t have to name it. At least, not yet.”
“And Stephen?”
“Stephen gets the part he already has,” he said. “He gets your laugh at his parties and your opinions at his dinner table. He does not get this.”
“‘This’ being the part where I’m—what—your appetite?”
“My Lady,” he said, and there was a hunger in the word that went through me like a wire pulled tight. “Tonight.”
My phone buzzed on the table again. I didn’t look. The city shone. The dress whispered when I breathed.
I set the flute down very carefully.
“Tell me what to do,” I said, finally honest.
“Turn around,” he said. “Face the glass.”
I did.
“And put the palms of your hands on it.”
I lifted my arms. Pressed my hands flat. The glass was cool under my skin from the air conditioning. The city was so bright I could see our reflection in it, me and the man behind me, my mouth parted, his eyes lowered to a place the dress had left bare.
“I’ll tell you the rest,” he said, voice low enough that the window almost held it. “And you won’t ask me again today if I’m the man from Alpha Mail. You’ll ask me for what you really want.”
“And what’s that?” My breath ghosted the glass.
“To stop thinking,” he said. “To surrender without apology. To be mine.”
I closed my eyes.
“Okay,” I said.
He waited a beat that made me want to beg.
“Good girl,” he said, and everything in me went soft and dangerous at once.
The day laid itself down at our feet. And the rules—the ones that had always kept me safe—went quiet long enough for me to hear what I’d asked for answer back.