CHAPTER 7
POV: Cassian
I dropped the flash drive on her desk.
Sienna looked at it, then at me, and did not pretend to be surprised.
“You already know what’s on it,” I said.
“I do.”
Her voice was steady. Clinical. The same tone she used when she walked the board through worst-case projections.
“You paid him.”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No apology. Just the fact, clean and sharp.
I waited for the rest of it—the justification, the strategy, the part where she told me it had been necessary to protect the company. Instead she leaned back in the chair that used to be mine and folded her hands.
“She was never strong enough for this life, Cassian. You knew that when you married her. The studio was a pretty cage. What happened there was a kindness. She needed to understand the work never mattered. Only the role did.”
Something cold and precise snapped behind my ribs.
“Get out.”
She didn’t move.
“I said get out. You’re fired. Effective immediately. Security will escort you.”
Sienna stood slowly. She smoothed the front of her jacket. The expression on her face was almost pitying.
“You can fire me,” she said. “But you can’t fire the board’s confidence in me. They’re already drafting the statement. I’m the one who pulled the recovery numbers back from the edge. You’re the one who let a personal distraction become a liability.”
She walked out without another word.
I called an emergency session for the same afternoon.
The boardroom was all glass and quiet money. I laid out the evidence—payment trails, the hired man, the footage. I kept my voice level. Controlled. The same voice that had closed billion-dollar deals and survived three market crashes.
They listened.
Then they sided with her.
Not openly. Not with raised voices. Just the careful language of men who had already decided. “Perhaps a cooling-off period.” “Optics are delicate right now.” “Sienna’s continuity may be more valuable than the alternative.”
I left the room before I said something that could not be walked back.
That night I drove north.
Rain hammered the windshield in solid sheets. The wipers could not keep up. Headlights from oncoming trucks turned the water into white explosions. I kept both hands on the wheel and the speedometer twenty over the limit.
I did not know where she was.
I only knew she was no longer in any of the places I had ever looked for her.
The coastal highway unspooled in front of me, black and shining.
I tried to remember the last real conversation I had had with Vivienne.
Not logistics. Not schedules. Not the polite exchange of information required to keep a household running.
A conversation where I asked a question I did not already know the answer to.
Nothing came.
I could not remember the name of the first piece she ever fired in the Oregon studio.
I could not remember the color of the clay she preferred.
I could not remember whether she worked in silence or with music.
Seven years of marriage and the woman I lived with was a collection of blank spaces I had never bothered to fill.
The realization sat in my chest like a stone.
I stopped for gas in a town too small to have a traffic light. The attendant looked at my car the way people look at things that do not belong. I bought a coffee I did not drink and kept driving.
Marcus had given me one more piece of information before I left the city: a possible location. A cash rental in a fishing town farther up the coast. No name on the lease. Paid in full for three months. It was thin, but it was all I had.
The rain lessened as I reached the outskirts. Streetlights were few. The warehouse sat alone at the end of a short road that smelled of salt and diesel. Lights were on inside. One high window glowed yellow against the dark.
I parked across the street and shut off the engine.
Through the rain-streaked glass I could see her.
Vivienne stood at a makeshift table, sleeves rolled to the elbows, hands buried in a mass of dark clay.
She worked with her whole body—shoulders driving, arms braced, the same focused intensity I had only ever seen when she was managing one of my events to perfection. But this was different. This was hers.
The form rising under her hands was large. Twisted. A human figure forced down onto its knees, head bowed, spine curved in a shape that looked like surrender or prayer or both. Even from this distance, even through rain and dirty glass, I recognized the set of the shoulders.
It was me.
I sat in the dark car and watched my wife shape my defeat with her bare hands, and for the first time in seven years I had no strategy, no next move, and no idea how to get her back.