Chapter 10 Vasso
VASSO
She runs.
Not in the conventional sense, with panic or agitation. Even at her most desperate, Naomi has never fled like prey at risk of being cornered.
She strides off with that clipped, measured, furious grace that turns corridors into catwalks and doors into movie frames.
The greenhouse air is still warm on my skin when the night cuts across my face. I follow the scent of jasmine and her, past the gallery, up the floating stairs and along the cedar hall that still lingers with ghosts of arrogant Kanes, to the guest wing.
Her door is open.
She stands in front of the mirror with her back to me, her dress half-zipped and my diamonds burning at her throat. Her hands fumble at the clasp, breath stuttering in a way she’s trying to swallow. The sound hits me harder than any insult could.
I approach, and she stiffens but doesn’t acknowledge me. “Turn around,” I say, softer than I mean to.
“It’s fine. I’ve got it,” she answers, voice too thin, too brittle.
“You don’t,” I counter, moving in, and when my fingers find the tiny hook my hands are steady even if the pulse in my wrist isn’t. I ease the clasp free. The rivière slackens; the stones sigh against her skin.
“Thank you,” she says to the edge of the mirror, not to me.
“It was a poorly constructed joke,” I offer, and we both hear how insufficient that is.
“It was a tell,” she says, fingers closing around the necklace like she could crush diamonds. “And you told on yourself.”
“I told you what I want.” I take the necklace from her hands before she can hurt herself with it and set it—carefully, because I’m not the monster she keeps trying to make—on the dresser. “That’s not a crime.”
She laughs once, sharp as a tear drips down her flushed cheek. “Just a possession order disguised as romance.”
I brush it away with my thumb, then step back because if I don’t I’ll drag her against me, and kissing her while she’s crying is a cruelty I’ve committed once in my life and refuse to repeat. “You don’t cry over jewelry, Naomi.”
Her gaze cracks to mine in the mirror, eyes glassy, feral. “No. I cry because for one beautiful, stupid hour you saw me and wanted me and then you reminded me I’m a trophy in your display case.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant.”
Silence holds for three breaths. In the glass, I watch her gather herself with the discipline of a woman who’s had to. She blinks the wet back, lifts her chin, zips the dress the rest of the way with a vicious little jerk.
“You don’t get to rewrite me,” she says, facing me now. “Not after the last ten years. Not after erasing me from your life as if I didn’t exist while you plotted your revenge.”
There it is. The landmines between us again.
“You want honesty?” My voice goes low, even, the way it does right before I close a deal.
“There is no going back, not for you or for me. The same way there’s no denying the past formed us.
We walked away from the boy and girl in that greenhouse and became people who do not make vows with their eyes closed.
We don’t get to pretend this is simple. That the driveway didn’t happen. ”
Her jaw works. “You say that like I’m the one who left.”
My laugh barks out of me. “Are you serious? Of course you are.” The words land before I filter them. Good. Filters have ruined enough nights. “You looked me in the eye and promised forever, and two days later you put on a dress and a smile and promised yourself to someone else.”
She flinches and it’s a small and entirely unwelcome bite in my chest. “You don’t get to weaponize something you don’t understand. I was always going to find a way, Vasso. Always. You didn’t give me a chance.”
“Because I understood enough.”
“Do you?” She steps in, heat snapping back into the air like we’re striking flint.
“Do you understand what it’s like to watch your grandfather clutch his chest every time the phone rings with another scandal?
Do you understand the very real probability that telling Harrison no would put Theodore in the ground?
I chose a terrible thing to stop something worse. ”
“You chose him,” I snarl, my voice too quiet for the roar in my chest. “Leo Goldstein—pedigreed on paper and shrink-wrapped in fucking gold for the society pages. Over me. Because I was the lowly housekeeper’s son who wasn’t fit to even soil your clothes, never mind be on your arm, right?
” All these years later, the searing ache of humiliation still burns harder than I want it to.
Exposes wounds I thought had calcified. Dammit.
“I chose Theodore’s life.” Her eyes shine again, and this time the tears are not fragile; they’re molten.
“And the punchline is that it didn’t even work.
The Goldsteins walked after the next scandal.
I was sacrificed for nothing. Dropped like a toxic hand grenade and treated like a venereal disease.
So if we’re talking humiliation, you’re not the only one with a monopoly on it. ”
The words punch through me, clean and vicious.
I knew the Goldsteins walked. Hell, I’d raised a glass of cheap bourbon to celebrate the news, even while my fury with Naomi still burned, but I didn’t know she carried the humiliation like a diseased organ.
There you go, softening like a high school schmuck for her again. All because she let you inside that sublime pussy.
I grit my teeth as my body responds far too eagerly to the reminder.
“And where the hell were you?” she goes on, the hurt catching fire into fury. “You left without a word. No note. No goodbye. Just gone. You don’t get to stand here and talk about vows, Vasso? You abandoned me first.”
“No, baby. I didn’t leave without first putting a few words to paper,” I say, and it sounds like a defense when it should sound like a confession. “But I guessed, correctly I see, that you would probably never get the letter.”
She blinks, thrown. “You did? When…how—who did you give it to?”
“My mother was no longer your housekeeper by then, so I gave it to the next best person. Or so I thought. Harrison’s fixer intercepted it,” I say.
“I learned later. It doesn’t matter anymore.
” Except that it does” I drag a hand down my face, grit under my palm that isn’t there.
“Because, yeah, I still left. Because I looked at a house that could have swallowed me whole and spat me out, and chose to become something it couldn’t digest. Something that stuck in the Kane’s craw. ”
The room hums with the past. She swallows hard. “And you succeeded, evidently. You came back as the man who could buy the house. Buy the island. Buy me.”
“Marry you,” I correct, because accuracy is cowardice’s only honest friend. “And yes. Own the thing that owned me.”
Her laugh is a cracked bell. “And you’re fine, throwing the label of love on that clever scheming?”
“If we’re being truly honest, after what your family did to mine, we can agree to call it justice.” I step closer and the electricity jumps, because attraction does not care for moral clarity. “And strategy. And something that refuses to die even when it should.”
We’re too near again.
Her breath catches; mine answers.
The revived anguish and new knowledge—humiliation, letter, interception—moves like a riptide under our anger, dragging us toward a shore we didn’t plan to reach tonight. Old wounds are being scraped raw and neither of us are ready to bleed.
“I can’t be your whipping post, Vasso,” she says, softer, and it hurts more than it should. “Not for a whole year. You don’t want me to truly hate you. And I will.”
I tilt my head. “You said you hate me already. Was that a lie?”
Her eyes shadow, then her lashes sweep down, hiding her expression.
When she lifts them, the shine. With courage.
Daring. “We both know it was. I wouldn’t have slept with you tonight if I really did.
But…I’m afraid if we don’t…” She stops, closes her eyes again.
When she opens them, she squares herself.
“What do you want from me? A confession? Fine.” She lifts her chin.
“I still want you. I hate it a little. I hate you for making it this way. But I want you. And it terrifies me that the moment I gave in, you stamped me with a claim.”
“Fine. Let’s make a new deal. Stop making me your penance,” I say, equally soft.
“Stop pretending every time you want me it’s a debt you’re paying down.
I already have what I want. The island. And my ring on your finger.
Tonight was several cherries on top.” I lean, brush her ear with my next words.
“And as for what I want?” I echo, and the answer is so simple I almost don’t trust it.
“Everything. On purpose. With your eyes wide open so you can’t pretend this isn’t happening.
And I won’t pretend otherwise to make you comfortable. ”
“Then you don’t know what comfort is,” she whispers.
I pull back and brush another tear away, wishing it didn’t affect me so savagely. “Neither do you. Because while comfort is great, we’ve always craved the friction and the fire and the thunder and lightning more. Haven’t we?”
We stare each other down, breathing hard, the argument crackling through the charged space where our bodies keep trying to write a different script.
I want to pull her in and apologize with my mouth. I want to throw the necklace into the ocean and watch the diamonds sink like a superstition I don’t need. I want absolution I haven’t earned. None of those choices make us less doomed.
She reaches for the necklace case on the dresser again, thumb worrying the satin hinge. “I’m sleeping in my room tonight.”
“Like hell,” I grit out. “We’re not going back to separate beds and separate lives and polite lies. We are not resetting because you’re scared I meant the worst part of the sentence and not the best.”
She glares. “You don’t get to dictate where I sleep.”
“Watch me,” I say, because I am not here to be better than the truth. I’m here to conquer, and keep conquering until I’m drowning in reparations. “There’s no going back. Or are you planning to go back on your word again?”
Her head snaps up. “Again?”
“You vowed to be mine,” I say, stepping into the very wound I regret opening, but we’re here, so be it.
“In a greenhouse with dirt under our nails and the world asleep. Then you put on someone else’s ring and smiled for the cameras.
Don’t tell me it was for Theodore—I know.
But I’m sorry, but for what I thought we meant to each other?
That wasn’t good enough. Don’t tell me you didn’t have a choice.
I know that, too. But tell me you didn’t break me with it and make no move to stop the fucking bombshell in that driveway, and I’ll call you a liar to your face. ”
She staggers a half step, like I’ve shoved her. For a second I hate myself for the aim. Then she straightens and glares like a woman who survived worse than my accuracy.
“Fine,” she says, voice scraped raw. “I broke you. And you built an empire out of the pieces.”
“I built an empire so I could come back in the front and not ask to go to the back.”
“Congratulations, then,” she spits.
We breathe.
The air tastes of glass and things we can’t take back. I’m aware, stupidly, of how beautiful she is when she’s furious, how the pulse in her neck flickers, how the dress clings to her like a secret she refused to share and then did.
She turns to the bed like a dare. “Out. I’m done for tonight.”
I step into the doorway and place my hand flat on the jamb, because if I touch her, we’ll end the fight the way we always end things and nothing gets said that should.
“This is the last time you sleep alone, Naomi. Upset, happy, sad, incensed, or drunk, you sleep in my bed from tomorrow.”
Her eyes flash. “And I’ll be counting every single day until I leave it.”
I stiffen.
Fury climbs my spine like a fuse lighting. “Keep telling yourself that bullshit,” I say, letting the promise ride my voice, “and I’ll make it my goal to make you beg to stay.”
I turn, walk out, and let the corridor take the brunt of my furious, impotent growl.