12. Alex #2
“I’ve always worried about you, asshole. I just usually have the decency not to mention it. You’re working fourteen-hour days. I don’t think you are even sleeping. You’ve missed board calls. Christopher told me you signed the wrong contract revision.”
“Christopher talks too much.”
“Christopher is doing his job. And apparently part of that job now involves making sure my brother remembers which numbers he approved.”
I say nothing.
Danny sighs. “Whatever is happening between you and Belle, avoiding your own house until she goes to bed isn’t fixing it.”
My eyes narrow. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Because I know you.”
For once, I have no answer.
“Go home, Alex.”
“You first.”
Another silence. This one feels different.
“Yeah,” Danny says at last. “Working on that.”
We end the call soon after. I do not need to ask what is keeping him in New York , and he clearly is not ready to say it out loud.
Fine. I have enough going unsaid under my own roof.
Polanski calls before I leave the office.
“Dante was right about Mark.”
I sit back. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that gambling wasn’t a habit. It was his life. Sports books, private games, borrowed money, then more borrowed money to cover what he’d already lost. We’ve found debts stretching back years.”
“How much?”
“Enough that he was never paying all of it back.”
I rub a hand over my mouth. “Who was he borrowing from?”
“We’re still putting names together. Some legitimate lenders. Some very much not.” Polanski pauses. “And there’s something else. A few people connected to those debts disappeared. Others died younger than they should have.”
My hand stills.
“Do you think Mark had something to do with it?”
“I think there’s enough here that I’m no longer willing to call any of it coincidence.”
I look down at the file on my desk.
For ten years, I had made Belle part of Mark’s sins because it was easier than admitting how little I understood about what had happened in that house.
She had been a kid herself, trying to keep another kid safe while the adult who was supposed to keep them safe buried them both in problems she could never have fixed.
And somehow, she had carried it alone.
The question comes back harder than ever.
Why didn’t she come to me?
I would have sold my soul to help her.
By the next morning, I am buried in meetings and contract reviews, but my attention keeps slipping back to Belle.
I call Frank between appointments, then Steven before lunch, even though both have already sent updates.
She has not left the penthouse, not even for the bodega she likes, and the additional security is in place at every entrance.
“Nothing unusual?” I ask Frank again.
“Nothing.”
I should be satisfied with that.
I’m not.
By afternoon, I have sat through every meeting Camille put on my calendar except one.
“Seattle called again,” Christopher says from the doorway.
“Move it.”
“They asked for another date.”
“Don’t give them one. Tell Camille the same thing.”
He hesitates. “Your grandfather won’t like that.”
“I don’t have the headspace for Edward today.”
Christopher nods and leaves. Edward will have to wait.
The door closes, but his voice follows anyway.
Softness killed your father.
I have heard some version of that sentence over and over. I put it where I put everything Edward taught me, somewhere useful, somewhere I do not have to look at too closely.
The Mireille Bay deal falls apart a few days later. Months of negotiations gone because Miller lost his nerve with the contract sitting in front of him.
I should have seen it coming.
That is precisely what Edward says when he finally gets past Camille and Christopher and reaches me directly.
“Six months at the table and Miller walks at signature. Are you losing your edge?”
“No, Miller lost his nerve.”
“And you failed to see it coming.”
“If you called to tell me something I already know, this conversation is wasting both our time.”
A beat of silence. “You sound distracted.”
I lean back in my chair. “Be very careful what you mistake for silence, Edward.”
There is a pause on the other end, the kind Edward uses when he wants me to feel twelve years old again.
I end the call before he can say anything else.
By the time I step out of the conference room, Christopher is already coming toward me with another file. I keep walking.
“Not now.”
I take the keys and drive myself.
By the time I reach the penthouse, I take three turns in the wrong direction before I finally point the car toward home. My jaw hurts from clenching it, and there is a dull pressure behind my eyes that has been building since Edward called.
I drop my keys on the entry table harder than I mean to. The sound carries into the apartment, followed by running water from the kitchen and the quiet clink of ceramic against the sink.
Belle.
I stop before I reach the doorway.
She is rinsing a mug with her back partly turned to me, unaware that I am there.
Jeans, a white T-shirt, bare feet. Nothing remarkable, except I have spent days organizing my days around not seeing her and now I cannot seem to move.
When she reaches for the dish towel, her shirt lifts enough to show a strip of skin above her waistband, the line of her spine disappearing beneath the cotton.
My grip tightens around the doorframe.
Exhaustion does nothing to blunt this. Neither does anger. My body has never been interested in the reasons I should stay away from her.
She turns.
The mug stops halfway to the counter.
For a second, we just stare at each other. Water runs over her fingers and drips from the base of the cup while her eyes travel over my face, taking in more than I want her to.
“What happened?”
I shrug out of my jacket and drop it over a stool.
“None of your concern.”
“You look like you’re about to put your fist through a wall.”
I walk farther into the kitchen.
She turns back to the sink, but her shoulders have gone rigid.
I look at her hands.
There is a small scar on her thumb.
I remember exactly where it came from.
A metal shelf caught her while she was working at the library. I wrapped her bleeding hand in my shirt and drove her to urgent care as if she were dying. She mocked me the entire way there, then held my hand in a death-grip when the needle went in.
I remember being offended when she laughed at me afterward. I also remember kissing the bandage before I took her home.
My gaze moves from the scar to the line of her neck, where her dark hair brushes her shoulders.
I know what it feels like wrapped around my fist, except it used to be a different color, my favorite shade.
I know how it looked spread across my pillow years ago.
I know how it looked again in New York. I should not know any of those things anymore.
I should not have new memories to add to the old ones.
“Why do you care?” I ask.
“I don’t.” Belle reaches for the towel and dries her hands without looking at me. “I don’t. Do you want coffee? Something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
She hangs the towel over the oven handle and turns back to the sink. “Then I don’t know what you want from me, Alex.”
Neither do I, and after weeks of avoiding this apartment because I could not answer that question, admitting it even to myself feels like failure.
I cross the kitchen and stop behind her. I leave enough space that we are not touching, but not enough for her to ignore me. Her hands slow beneath the running water.
“You’ve been here for weeks. You cook for me, clean this place, make my coffee exactly the way I like it without ever asking.”
“It is what I’ve been hired to do.”
“Is that all this is?”
The plate in her hands settles into the sink. She braces both palms against the counter. “It needs to be.”
“Belle. Look at me.”
“I’d rather not.”
I reach past her and shut off the tap. The sudden silence makes her breathing easier to hear.
My arm is beside hers, my chest close enough to her back that one small movement would bring us together.
Her shampoo reaches me, familiar, comforting and floral, and for one exhausted second I want to bury my face in her hair and stay there until my head finally shuts up.
“You should go back to the office,” she says.
“I’ve spent enough time there.”
“Then I’ll go to my room.”
She turns, and I shift before I think better of it, blocking the narrow space between the counter and the island. I still do not touch her.
Belle looks up at me, irritation sharpening those hazel eyes, gold flashing in the kitchen lights, and an old, ugly question rises before I can stop it.
Whether anyone else has stood this close.
Whether another man has watched her eyes change when she wants something she refuses to admit she wants.
Whether anyone else knows the rhythm of her pulse when she is trying to pretend she feels nothing.
I hate the thought enough to want names.
I hate it enough not to want the answer.
“Alex, move.”
Instead, I hear myself ask, “Do you ever think about the night you left?”
The anger leaves her face so fast I almost regret asking.
“What about it?”
“If you could go back, would you change anything?”
Her lips part, but no answer comes at first. When it does, her voice has lost all its fight.
“I think about that night every day.”
I had expected her to defend herself. Maybe argue. Anything but this.
Belle drops her gaze to the counter. “I think about what I would have said to you, how I could have explained it so you might understand. I’ve gone over that conversation more times than I can count.”
Her throat moves before she looks at me again.
“And every time, I end up in the same place.”
“What place?”
“I could not have changed anything.”
There is no accusation in her voice, only a tired sadness that reaches somewhere deep enough to make my chest ache. She sounds as though she has gone over that night so many times she has worn every possible ending smooth and found none that saved us.
I want to take that look off her face.