Killian
Princess: We need to talk.
Fucking goddammit.
Four words and my whole chest goes tight around them.
I’ve read worse texts from her, sharper ones, the kind that come with exclamation points and a clear demand attached, and somehow this one is worse precisely because it isn’t any of that.
It’s flat. Controlled. The exact register I’ve been using on her for eleven days, handed back to me without comment, which tells me everything about how thoroughly I’ve taught her to talk to me this way.
I’d answered the group text within ten seconds, told everyone to meet in my suite once I finished up the work day, and then spent the rest of the afternoon unable to focus on a single line of the contract sitting open on my desk.
The past week’s been hell without her. I’ve missed her in a way that doesn’t fit cleanly into a fifty-one-year-old man’s vocabulary, and I’ve had to keep doing what I’m doing anyway, because protecting her is worth every hour of distance it’s cost me, even if it’s proving to be one of the harder choices I’ve made in five decades.
I didn’t appreciate getting ambushed by Maddox in the chai.
I also know it was entirely my own fault.
I’m old enough to recognize when I’ve fucked up my part of something, and I fucked up plenty.
I should’ve brought Asher and Maddox into the plan from the start instead of running it alone and quiet, the way I run everything, but old habits don’t die just because you’ve finally found a reason to want them dead.
He called it sanctimonious. Told me to get off the cross.
I’ve turned that phrase over more times today than I’d like to admit, mostly because he wasn’t wrong, and Maddox being right about something emotional is rare enough that it tends to stick with me longer than it would coming from anyone else.
He’s spent two weeks doing the unglamorous work in New York, building a file nobody asked him to build alone, and I let him watch me carry on like I was the only one making sacrifices for her. That wasn’t fair to him either.
I’ve built an entire life out of deciding what other people need to know and when they need to know it.
It served me well enough in business. It’s served me considerably worse in the last eleven days, and I’ve had ample time sitting through board calls and dinners I didn’t want to attend to understand exactly how badly.
Harper isn’t a shareholder I’m managing through a difficult quarter.
She’s the woman I love, currently carrying more uncertainty about where she stands with me than I have any right to have put on her.
I told Maddox I’d talk to Harper that night.
I didn’t.
Instead, I sat through a late, nauseating dinner with my ex-wife and Harper’s parasitic excuse for parents, the three of them dead set on extracting as much loyalty and capital as they could manage from one overpriced bottle of Burgundy.
Jason Miller spent forty minutes walking me through a portfolio strategy that wouldn’t survive a first-year analyst’s review, Rebecca nodding along beside him like she understood a word of it, Evelyn presiding over the whole thing with the satisfaction of a woman who’d engineered exactly the seating chart she wanted.
You can’t call something an equal-opportunity investment when the entire dossier’s shaped like a triangle.
I’ve genuinely never seen a pitch deck that cynical, and I’ve sat through hundreds of them.
How any previous investor handed these two a single dollar is beyond me.
Actually, no. Let me not say that. It’s an insult to actual con artists, who at least understand the value of a good story.
By the time dessert arrived I’d stopped pretending to listen and started running the board math in my head instead, who’s still undecided, who owes me a favor old enough to call in, who’ll vote with Evelyn out of habit rather than conviction.
Renard’s been with the estate since before Sophia was born and he’ll vote however I ask him to, no questions, but Beaumont’s harder, old enough to remember when Evelyn still ran half the social calendar for this place and sentimental enough that it might matter to him.
Delacroix is the real variable. I haven’t worked out yet whether he’s loyal to the business or loyal to the version of Evelyn who hosted his daughter’s engagement party in our south garden.
It’s slow work. Quiet work. The kind that doesn’t show progress for days at a stretch, which is exactly the problem, because somewhere in the middle of doing it properly I let eleven days pass without giving Harper a single honest sentence about why.
I close my laptop, leave the contract for tomorrow, and head for my suite.
I make it as far as the corridor outside the lift before Evelyn finds me.
She’s coming from the direction of the business wing, which means she’s been waiting somewhere along this stretch with the patience of a woman who’s done this before, which she has, more times in thirty years than I care to count.
Her hair’s down tonight, soft around her shoulders instead of the controlled twist she wears to board meetings, and it takes me a full three seconds to place what’s actually bothering me about the rest of it.
Bare feet in flat sandals instead of the heels she lives in during business hours.
No jewelry beyond a thin gold chain I don’t recognize.
Every choice tonight reads as deliberately undone, deliberately casual, in a way that doesn’t belong to the woman who’s run board meetings in this same hallway for two decades.
The dress.
Soft, pale, the kind of loose linen thing that belongs on someone twenty-five years younger and considerably more inclined to wear it barefoot in a vineyard at golden hour.
It’s the sort of dress Harper owns three versions of.
On Evelyn it reads like a costume, expensive and deliberately wrong, and I can’t decide if she chose it on purpose or if she’s lost enough of her own sense of self that she’s started reaching for someone else’s closet without realizing it.
Either way it’s almost funny. Almost.
“Killian.” She catches my arm, light, familiar, the same gardenia and jasmine she’s worn since before Sophia was born, and for the first time in thirty years it doesn’t read as elegant.
It reads like something gone slightly off in the back of a cabinet.
“I was hoping I’d catch you. Dinner? There’s a bottle of the ‘09 I’ve been saving. ”
“Can’t tonight, Evelyn.” I keep walking, which means she has to either let go or keep pace, and she chooses to keep pace, her hand sliding from my arm to rest flat against my chest instead.
“You’ve had a hard week. Let me make it easier.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. I know you, Killian.”
Thirty years ago that sentence might have meant something. Tonight it lands the way most things she says to me land lately, technically true and entirely beside the point, because knowing me has never once stopped her from acting against my best interests when it suited hers.
I stop walking and take her hand off my chest, not gently, and put it back at her side.
“Don’t touch me.”
She smiles like I’ve said something charming instead of something final, and steps in closer instead of back.
“You didn’t seem to mind my hand on your thigh in the board meeting this morning.”
Something in me that’s been stretched thin for eleven days finally lets go.
I move into her space without touching her, close enough that she has to tip her head back, close enough that I watch her breath catch on something she mistakes for the start of a different kind of conversation.
There’s a version of tonight where I just walk past her, where I let the silence do what it usually does and save both of us the trouble.
I’m tired of that version. I’ve been living in it for thirty years and it’s never once gotten either of us anywhere worth being.
“You and I are never going to be a thing, Evelyn. Hell, even when we were together, we weren’t together.
It’s been over thirty years of trying to make it work, making excuses for you, tolerating you, and feeling relieved every time you walked out the door.
I’d call you a sadist, but you’ve failed so often at provoking me that you might just be a masochist without a cause. ”
Her mouth falls open. No sound comes out of it.
“I loved you, for a time,” I continue, and I mean it, which is the part she’s never going to be able to use against me.
“And I’m grateful, forever grateful, for the daughter we share.
But whatever was between us, whatever explained two people deciding to marry each other, it breathed its last breath decades ago.
So please, for both our sakes, stop shuffling the cards and fold.
You haven’t won a hand in a very long time.
It’s time to stop playing. I’ll continue to respect your space in this business and in our daughter’s life.
Anything beyond that, after I step away from this conversation, is entirely your own doing. ”
She finds her voice somewhere around the third sentence and pulls herself back into the shape she likes best, chin up, eyes narrowed, the board-room version of herself sliding back into place like armor.
“Is that a threat, Killian?”
“No. It’s my word.” I hold her gaze and let the next part land slow. “And to make up for having fallen short on my word recently to the woman I love, I intend on keeping this one. Regarding the woman who taught me the difference between what you used to call love and what love actually is.”
Her eyes go wide for half a second before the sneer arrives to cover it, late and unconvincing.
“You think you love her?” A short, ugly laugh. “She’s a doll, Killian. A step up from a blow-up and a step down from a Fleshlight.”
I almost laugh too, though not for the reason she wants. I shake my head, let one brow lift, and find that the anger’s already burned off into something closer to pity, which is somehow worse for her than the cold ever was.
Thirty years ago I’d have argued the point.
I’d have defended Harper, defended myself, spent another half hour standing in a corridor trying to win something that was never actually a contest. I don’t have the energy for that tonight, and more than that, I don’t have the interest. Evelyn doesn’t get my energy anymore.
She hasn’t earned it in years, and I’m done pretending otherwise out of habit or guilt or whatever’s kept me circling back to these conversations for three decades.
She’s still waiting for me to take the bait, chin tipped up, that particular brittle confidence she wears whenever she’s said something cruel enough to draw blood.
It doesn’t draw any tonight. Whatever she’s trying to provoke in me left the building eleven days ago, somewhere between Midsummer and this corridor, and I find I don’t miss it.
“Goodnight, Evelyn.”
I step back and walk away, and I don’t look behind me to see what she does with her face once there’s no one left to perform it for.
I already know I’m going to keep my word about her, the board seat, the vote, all of it, the same way I’ve kept my word about almost everything else in this life that’s actually mattered.
The corridor’s quiet behind me. No footsteps following, no second attempt at my name.
Whatever she’s doing back there, sitting with it or already composing the version of tonight she’ll tell herself later, it’s hers to manage now.
I’ve spent thirty years managing it for her, and I find, walking away from it for what feels like the first time in longer than I can name, that I’m not particularly interested in picking that habit back up.
I’m late.
I take the elevator up, willing it to move faster than it does, and somewhere between the second and third floor I catch myself in the polished steel of the doors, jacket still bunched in one fist, tie loosened, looking like a man who’s spent the last eleven days losing an argument with himself and finally lost it for good tonight in a corridor with his ex-wife.
It’s not a flattering reflection. It’s an honest one, and honestly is apparently the only currency I have left to spend with anyone tonight, starting with the people waiting for me on the other side of these doors.
I can hear them before the doors even open onto my floor, Maddox’s voice doing something halfway between a story and a complaint, Asher’s low laugh under it, and underneath both of those, hers. That particular sound she makes when she’s trying not to find something funny and losing.
I haven’t heard that sound directed at anything in my own suite in eleven days.
I’ve heard it in passing, across a terrace, through a closed door I didn’t have the right to open, but never here, never close enough to feel like it belonged to me too.
Standing here listening to it now, I understand exactly how much I’ve cost myself by staying away as long as I did.
I stand outside my own door for one second longer than I need to, just listening to it, just letting it land.
Then I go in.