Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
Lucian
The elevator doors close on my wife.
For one suspended second, I stare at the seamless metal as if the force of my will can reverse what just happened.
Then I wrench against Caleb’s grip a second time.
“Get your fucking hands off me.”
“Not yet.”
“She’s leaving us.”
“I know.”
The calm in his voice makes something vicious tear loose inside me. I shove him hard enough that another man would stumble. Caleb absorbs the impact, plants himself between me and the elevator, and catches my forearm when I reach for the call button.
“Move.”
“No.”
The illuminated numbers above the elevator begin their descent.
Thirty-seven.
Thirty-six.
I could take the stairs. I could have another car waiting before she reaches the lobby. One call to Derek and he would bring her straight back upstairs, no questions asked.
My phone is already in my hand before I consciously decide to reach for it.
Caleb looks at the screen.
“Don’t do it.”
“She’s exhausted. She’s upset.”
“She is.”
“Goddamn it. She is my wife. Our wife.”
“And that doesn’t mean you get to keep her here.”
His words land harder than the shove.
The elevator continues downward.
I find Derek’s number.
All I have to do is press it.
The same impulse has governed almost every important decision of my adult life. Identify the outcome I want. Anticipate resistance. Remove obstacles. Control enough variables that chance becomes irrelevant.
It has made me rich.
Powerful.
Very nearly untouchable.
And tonight it cost me Sophie.
My thumb hovers over Derek’s name.
I hear my own voice from years ago, cold and absolute as I dismissed Malcolm Voss.
“A woman who chooses to leave is not property to be retrieved.”
At the time, the principle had seemed obvious.
It is considerably less appealing when the woman walking away belongs at the center of my fucking life.
The elevator reaches the parking garage.
I lower the phone.
The choice does not feel noble. It feels like failure.
Caleb exhales.
I want to hit him for that too.
“If you’re relieved, I swear to God—”
“I’m not.”
“You stopped me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His expression hardens. “Because she was looking at you like she expected you to prove her right about every fucking thing she said.”
The anger drains out of me so abruptly that I feel unsteady.
For several seconds, neither of us speaks.
Then Caleb glances past me.
I know what he sees before I turn.
Three rings lie on the kitchen counter beneath the pendant lights.
The engagement ring catches first, the emerald-cut diamond flanked by sapphires, exactly as I chose it. Beside it are the two wedding bands.
My chest tightens.
I cross the room.
The last time I stood at this counter with Sophie, her books were scattered nearby and the ridiculous mug she favors sat beside the coffee machine. Evidence of her is everywhere now. A cardigan over the chair. A notebook she left near the window. One of her pens on the counter.
And her rings.
I pick up the engagement ring.
I remember the first time I put it on her finger.
She shoved the box back toward me.
I captured her wrist and slid the ring into place anyway.
I told her it would fucking stay there.
At the time, I considered her resistance temporary. Another variable to manage. Something patience, pressure, and desire would eventually overcome.
The ring presses into my palm.
Caleb remains behind me.
“Did you know?” I ask.
“Know what?”
“That this is where we’d end up.”
“No.”
“I did.”
He says nothing.
“Not specifically.” I close my fingers around the rings. “But I knew there was a chance she would hate us when she learned everything.”
“And you kept going.”
“So did you.”
“Yes.”
No defense.
No attempt to make himself less guilty than me.
Normally I would appreciate that.
Tonight I despise him for sharing the blame because I need somewhere to put the fury that is turning inward.
“We lost her.” My voice is stark, my words broken.
“And it’s our own fucking fault.”
Because for the first time since our partnership was formed in the gutters of Geneva, we’ve lost.
I don’t go to bed. I torture myself in the building’s workout room, take a cold plunge, spend far too long in the sauna, consume pot after pot of coffee till I’m blurry eyed.
Then as soon as my club opens, I’m there, in the bar, alone, determined to drink myself into oblivion with outrageously expensive Bonds whiskey.
Nothing can make the haunted look in Sophie’s eyes disappear from my mind.
Around me, the club is offensively normal.
Men finish rounds of golf and complain about scores that do not matter. Someone at the other end of the bar laughs too loudly. A television above the shelves of liquor is tuned to a game I have not watched for a single second.
No one here knows that my entire life came apart in a penthouse kitchen sometime after midnight.
By the time the bartender places another glass in front of me, I’ve stopped caring.
I drink.
For eight years, I’ve known my next move.
When Adrian intended to marry Sophie, we removed him.
When Richard needed money, we made certain the right doors opened and the wrong ones closed.
When Sophie resisted the engagement, I put the ring on her finger.
When she resisted the wedding, I scheduled it.
When she fought the penthouse, I made room for her until she began filling it with pieces of herself.
Every obstacle had a solution.
Every outcome could be pushed.
Every road could be redirected.
Now Sophie is in the apartment she kept because Caleb, in one of his rare moments of wisdom, insisted she needed something that still belonged only to her.
And I have absolutely no idea what to do.
I could send flowers.
The thought is so absurd I almost laugh.
Flowers are pressure dressed in petals.
I could go to her office.
No.
Her apartment.
Fuck no.
I could call.
Ask her to dinner.
Arrange for us to encounter one another somewhere neutral.
I take another drink.
Even my attempts at restraint turn into strategy.
That realization is unpleasant enough that I empty the glass.
“Hawthorne.”
I don’t look around.
“Go away.”
Caleb takes the stool beside mine.
The bartender approaches.
“Coffee,” Caleb says.
“For you?”
“For both of us.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“I know.”
The bartender wisely leaves before I can explain that I am capable of ordering my own fucking beverages.
Caleb looks at the row of empty glasses.
“This is pathetic.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I turn enough to glare at him. “You tracked me.”
“You weren’t difficult to find.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
“That’s how I knew it was bad.”
I would smile if anything were remotely funny.
Instead, I stare at the amber remaining in my glass.
“Is she safe?”
“Yes.”
The answer comes immediately.
Something clenched inside me loosens by a fraction.
“Derek watched her enter the building. She told him she didn’t need him to wait.”
“And?”
“He waited until her lights came on.”
The bartender arrives with coffee and discreetly removes my whiskey.
I consider objecting but decide the effort isn’t worth it.
Caleb pushes one of the cups toward me.
“You need to come home.”
“She isn’t there.”
“No.”
The simple answer guts me.
I look away.
For a while, the noises of the club wash around us. Glasses. Conversation. The muted announcer on the television. Ordinary people continuing ordinary lives.
Finally Caleb speaks.
“You know what the problem is.”
I laugh once. “Please enlighten me.”
“You think this is another problem to solve.”
“Everything is a problem to solve.”
“No. Sophie isn’t.”
I turn toward him.
His expression is grim.
“You’re already doing it,” he continues. “I can see you calculating. What can you send? Where can you appear? How long do you wait before contacting her so it feels like enough time without being too much?”
“Fuck you.”
“Am I wrong?”
I say nothing. I have spent the last twelve hours scrambling to find the next, correct move.
There isn’t one.
Or worse, there are hundreds, and I no longer trust myself to know which are legitimate and which are simply control wearing better clothes.
“I love her.”
The words leave me before I realize I intend to say them.
Caleb goes utterly still.
I stare down at the coffee.
I have spent most of my life regarding love as a weakness people use to justify stupidity. Richard Langford nearly destroyed everyone around him in its name. Malcolm Voss turned love into possession and expected us to accept the definition.
And now here I am, drunk at Braes before even eating breakfast because my wife left me.
A more rational part of my brain scoffs at that thought. My wife didn’t fucking leave me. I drove her away. “I love her,” I repeat.
Caleb’s voice is quiet. “I know.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
That admission costs more than the first.
He waits.
I tighten my hand around the cup.
“I know how to protect her. I know how to give her anything she wants before she knows she wants it. I know how to destroy anyone who threatens her. I know how to make certain she never worries about money, safety, her mother’s treatment, her practice, any fucking thing for the rest of her life.”
None of it matters.
Because Sophie did not leave for lack of protection.
She left because I kept stripping away her right to decide what happened to her own life.
My throat burns and so does my determination. “I can get her back.”
Caleb’s expression hardens.
“Give me a week, and I could manufacture ten reasons she has to see us. A month and I could make half of Houston conspire to put her in the same room with me without her ever knowing.”
“And then?”
The question stops me.
I look at him.
“And then when she finds out?”
I don’t answer.
There is nothing to say.
The very skills I have always relied on are useless to me now.
Worse than useless.
They are dangerous.
I stare into the black coffee and finally say the one thing I have been avoiding since those elevator doors closed.
“I don’t know how to get her back without doing it again.”
Caleb is silent for a long moment.
Then he leans forward, forearms resting on the bar.
“Then we don’t get her back.”
I turn my head slowly. “What?”
“You heard me.”
The alcohol in my bloodstream does nothing to dull the surge of fury. “If you think I’m giving up on her—”
“I didn’t say give up.”
“Then what the fuck are you saying?”
His gaze meets mine. “We have to stop trying to make her come back.”
The words settle between us.
My first instinct is rejection.
My second is to demand an alternative.
Caleb gives me one before I can ask.
“Pull your head out of your fucking ass, and let’s give her a reason to want to come back.”