40. CHAPTER 37 #3
I stared at my hands, flexing them once.
Visions flashed behind my eyes, uninvited and devastating: Léa on my kitchen counter offering me something I didn’t deserve.
Her laughter echoing from her studio. The way she threw those pregnancy tests at my face, while her eyes swam with a hurt that I had put there.
My chest clenched so hard it felt almost like dying.
“I love my wife,” I heard myself say. The words feeling more like submission than an actual confession.
“Shit,” Zane said under his breath.
Marcus winced as if I’d punched him. “Maybe this would be a good time to take your mother up on that mistress offer,” he said after a beat. “Purge yourself of this… love plague. Before it kills you for good.”
Zane snorted, tipping his glass. “Yeah, Marc’s right. Take two blondes tonight and call us in the morning. You need to reset the system, Orion.”
“I’m not interested in taking anything but a ride back to the person I just destroyed,” I said, my voice dangerously mild.
They shut up. The humor died instantly.
Elias whistled low. “Six months ago, you could barely say her name without sounding like you'd bitten into something sour. Now I'd hate to be the poor bastard standing between you and your woman.”
“So would I,” I said, rubbing a hand over my jaw. “She just doesn't know that yet.”
Julian had been quiet this whole time, assessing, his detached gaze pinned on me. “You’ve always been in love with her, Orion,” he said, as if stating a fact.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have.” He didn’t even blink. “Since the moment you put Stratum surveillance on her and started being unavailable for sessions. You didn't fail to love her; you just failed to identify the symptoms.”
I glared. “I lied to her and kept my distance after—” I didn’t finish. “That’s not love, Julian. That’s just me being an asshole.”
“That’s fear,” Julian said. “We lie when we’re afraid to lose something that’s important to us. And you’re never afraid of anything Kade. Unless it has the power to destroy you.”
Sometimes I hate how well Julian knows me.
And he’s right. There were only two things in this world I was afraid of.
My father nearing the end of his life and the prospect of losing Léa.
I’d made an agonizing peace with my father’s mortality, but the thought of Léa walking away came with a deep visceral pain I wasn't prepared to bear.
“You look like a fucking mess, Orion,” Marcus said, his eyes scanning me with a mix of pity and irritation.
“That’s because he’s miserable,” Julian corrected. He turned to face me fully, his expression cold. “What exactly happened? We’re listening. No judgment.”
I sighed deeply, and started talking. I told them everything.
How I’d tracked her cycle like a psychopath, only to find out on that first night that I was the only man who had ever touched her.
I told them about the guilt that had eaten me alive in Singapore, and the cowardice that kept me from telling her how I felt.
Zane looked at me like I was speaking a dead language. Adrien just stared as though he couldn’t understand the words coming out of my mouth.
“So, technically, you lied by omission?” Adrien asked.
“A little lie never hurt anyone,” Zane interjected with a shrug.
Elias shot him a look that could kill, and Zane threw his hands up.
“What? God forbid I try to lighten the pathetic, damp mood this place has suddenly become.”
Marcus stifled a laugh, forcing his face into a stern mask. “So you were miserable because we encouraged you to fuck your wife—”
“I don’t need encouragement,” I snapped, my temper flaring.
“Okay, wrong choice of words,” Marcus relented, tipping his glass.
“But still. You did it. Now you’ve fucked her but you’re still miserable.
And instead of signing a termination clause and cutting her loose like our fathers would have, you sent her chocolates, bath oils and pregnancy test kits?
Then you crowned the night by threatening your own mother?
” He scoffed. “Thankfully, it’s just us in this room hearing this shit. ”
Adrien threw a pack of cigarettes at Marcus’s head. “Whatever happened to ‘no judgment’?”
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to rein in the storm.
If anyone understood me, it was these men.
Marcus wasn’t being an ass—okay, maybe he was a bit.
But he was only upset because he saw this as a weakness—the one thing he never expected from me.
If I was breaking the rules of the Sanctum and letting a woman in, it meant the walls were truly coming down.
“We can't help who a man falls in love with,” Julian’s voice cut through, silencing the room.
I heard Adrien gasp in horror at the word.
Julian, Marcus, and I were cut from the same darkness. We understood the mechanics of power, not the mechanics of the heart. I wasn’t expecting encouragement when I chose to come here; I just needed to vent the pressure before I exploded.
“As much as it disgusts me,” Julian went on, “and I will never encourage it, you’re my brother. It’s only right that I direct you to confront your ailment head-on.”
“Ailment,” Zane echoed under his breath. “God, you’re dramatic.”
Julian ignored him. “If you truly love her, you can’t run operations on her heart. You can’t treat this like she’s just business and expect her to say thank you. She heard about the clause from her brother, Orion. Not you. To her, you aren't a husband; you're a threat.”
I ground my teeth. “I know.”
“Do you?” Julian pressed. “Because you disappeared for three weeks after taking something obviously precious to her, let your mother parade a replacement, and then sent her test kits like a CFO checking inventory. None of those things inspire trust.”
The accuracy stung deeply. I hated every second of hearing Julian lay it out so plainly.
“Wait…are you on her side or his?” Marcus asked, confused.
“I’m on his,” Julian said coolly. “We can’t change his feelings, but we can help him get around them by admitting where he was wrong. He needs to stop looking like the world has ended. I’m fucking sick of it.”
“I’ve fucked this up,” I admitted mostly to myself.
“Spectacularly,” Elias agreed.
“I don't know how to fix it.” The words felt foreign, like confessing to total bankruptcy.
Julian smirked. “First step is to stop stalking her through a screen; she lives in your house. Try a conversation instead. Second, neutralize that clause or find a way it benefits her as much as you. Thirdly, just tell her the truth.”
“What truth?” I asked warily.
“That you’re in love with her and too emotionally stunted to say it without hyperventilating,” Zane supplied.
“Well, it's a start,” Adrien added, sipping his whiskey.
Marcus raised his glass. “To emotional dysfunction,” he said dryly.
“Shut up,” I snapped at him.
Julian moved closer, his tone low and more sincere.
“Go home, Orion. Don’t send Mrs. Lewis, don’t text, or hide behind gifts.
Go home. Tell her about the stipulations of the clause in your own words, and about the situation with your mother and her obsession with heirs and mistresses.
Tell her what you feel—however pathetic and undercooked it sounds.
Then give her the choice to stay. Because you clearly can't let her go.”
The idea of her deciding to leave made my vision go white for a second. “I can’t—”
“You can,” Julian said. “You’ve faced worse men than a heartbroken wife with a sharp tongue.”
“Not to him, he hasn't,” Elias mused.
He’s right. To me, her anger felt worse than facing a firing squad.
I stared at the floor. At the small, dark stain of spilled wine on the beige carpet, then at the mask I’d worn here, sitting uselessly on the table.
I’d come to the penthouse to get wasted, to talk shit, to find something to destroy to drown out my thoughts.
I wanted to hide in the only space where nothing could affect me.
Instead, I sat here sober, talking about feelings with men who didn't believe in them.
“Glad this is done. I didn’t give up an orgasm to be your therapist,” Zane grumbled.
“No one asked you to sacrifice anything,” Julian said. “You were done in five minutes anyway.”
“Watch your fucking mouth, Okoye,” Zane warned, though there was no heat in it.
The tension cracked. Marcus snorted, and the room felt a little less like a funeral.
I stood up. Julian looked up at me. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
None of them stopped me.
By the time the cold night air hit my face outside the lobby, I knew two things for certain. One, I’d ruined something irreplaceable, and if I wanted any hope of getting it back, I’d have to stop hiding.
Two, I had to put the one thing on the table I’d sworn never to offer anyone—my heart, messy and late and terrified—in her hands. Only if she’d still have me.