CHAPTER FOUR #2
Billy tried. I’ll give him that. In two years, Billy learned that I liked chocolate chip cookies and preferred texting to calling and got cold easily.
Three facts. Two years. And even those three facts came with conditions: he knew I liked cookies because I mentioned it on our third date, and he brought them sometimes, when he remembered, when it was convenient, when he wasn’t too busy being a wolf shifter with a pack that didn’t know I existed.
Alexei has known me for three days, officially, consciously, as a person and not a name in a file, and he knows I don’t eat breakfast. He knows I arrive at 8:47.
He knows I stay late. He knows I talk to the cleaning crew.
He noticed the coffee stain on my travel mug and the next morning there was a new one on my desk, the same brand, the same size, but in the deep blue color I’d once mentioned to Trish in passing was my favorite.
He knew about the air vent above my desk.
The air vent.
Who notices an air vent? Who notices that a specific person sits under a specific vent that creates a specific draft, and then sends a maintenance crew to fix it without saying a word?
A man who is paying a kind of attention I’ve never experienced in my life. Attention that doesn’t announce itself. Attention that just...shows up, in the form of a fixed vent and a blue coffee mug and meals without fish, and expects nothing in return.
How does he know these things?
How does a prince notice the coffee mug preferences and air vent complaints of a junior product designer?
Unless.
Unless he was paying attention long before the elevator in Miami.
That thought is a door I’m not ready to open.
I leave the bathroom, go back to my desk, and throw myself into work with the focused desperation that only a woman actively avoiding her own feelings can achieve.
The V-Series Vanish prototypes need a second round of testing.
The dispersion algorithm has a calibration issue in high-humidity environments.
There are seventeen emails from delegates I met at the Convergence Expo, all requesting follow-up information, and answering them gives me three blissful hours of thinking about scent neutralization instead of the way Alexei’s lips feel against mine.
Three hours.
And then, at 6:15, when the design wing is empty and the evening light is turning the mountains outside the windows into purple silhouettes, I feel it.
The shift.
The air changes. Thickens. Warms. That gravitational pull that I’m starting to recognize the way you recognize the opening notes of a song you’ve heard too many times, instantly, with your whole body.
I don’t look up.
I keep my eyes on my screen and I keep typing and I pretend that my pulse isn’t accelerating and that the hair on my arms isn’t rising and that every cell in my body isn’t already leaning toward the door before he’s even through it.
“You’re working late.”
His voice, low and close. He’s in the design wing. At my section. Standing at the edge of my desk like he belongs there, which he doesn’t, except he does, because he owns everything in this building including, apparently, my ability to think clearly.
“The humidity calibration—”
“It can wait.”
I look up.
That’s a mistake.
Because the evening light is doing something cruel and beautiful to him.
It catches the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the blue-black sheen of his hair, and turns all of it into something that belongs in a cathedral, carved in marble, worshipped from a distance.
He’s taken off his jacket again. His sleeves are rolled.
And he’s looking at me with that expression I’m learning to recognize, not quite a smile but something that lives in the same neighborhood.
“You skipped lunch today,” he says.
“I was busy—”
“The salmon.”
I blink. “What?”
“The lunch delivery included salmon. You ate the rice and the vegetables but left the salmon. You always leave the fish.”
He notices what I leave on my plate.
He notices what I leave on my plate.
“I’m not a huge fish person,” I say, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Small. Wondering.
“Tomorrow there won’t be fish.”
And the way he says it, so simply, so matter-of-factly, like adjusting my lunch order is the most natural thing in the world, like learning my preferences and reshaping his plans around them is just what he does, something inside my chest shifts.
Not breaks. Shifts. How frozen ground shifts in spring, when warmth finally reaches something that’s been cold for a long time.
Because it’s not just the fish. It’s everything.
The breakfast deliveries that started appearing at my desk on Tuesday morning, warm, exactly the sort of food I’d choose for myself if I could afford to choose.
The car service that shows up every evening at six, whether I’ve agreed to it or not.
The new coffee mug. How he somehow knew that the draft in the design wing bothers me, because on Wednesday a maintenance crew appeared and fixed the air vent above my desk without anyone requesting it.
He’s rewriting the conditions of my daily life, one small detail at a time, and he’s doing it so quietly that by the time I notice, it’s already done.
And the thing is, I’ve seen this before.
Not with me. With Trish. Her mystery Caro, the one who sends her anonymous gourmet lunches and leaves imported chocolates on her desk and once had an entire bento delivered to her apartment when she mentioned she’d skipped dinner.
Trish, who spent weeks insisting the lunches were “just a cultural thing” and “Caros are just like that” and “it doesn’t mean anything,” until the flowers showed up at her office and she had to hide in the server room to cry.
Is this a preter thing? Do they all look at humans and just...decide we’re one missed meal away from collapse? Is there some instinct that kicks in, some deep provider impulse that compels them to monitor our caloric intake like we’re endangered species they’ve taken personal responsibility for?
Or is it something else?
Because Trish’s Caro pays attention to her the way Alexei pays attention to me, and I spent weeks telling her that the lunches meant something.
That a man who notices what you eat and remembers what you skip is a man who is paying a very specific kind of attention. That she should stop running from it.
And now the same thing is happening to me, and I can’t dismiss it with the logic I used for Trish without admitting that maybe Alexei’s attention means something too.
And I’m not ready to admit that.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper.
He doesn’t ask me to clarify. He knows I’m not asking about the fish.
He comes around my desk. Slowly. That movement that gives me all the time in the world to stop him, to stand up, to put the desk between us and say no, this isn’t happening, you can’t just walk into my life and kiss me whenever you want and notice everything about me and make me feel things I swore I’d never feel again.
I don’t do any of those things.
I sit in my chair and I look up at him as he stops in front of me, and my heart is so loud I’m sure he can hear it, and I don’t move.
He leans down. His hand comes to the side of my face, and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone, and I close my eyes because I can’t look at him this close.
It’s too much. The pale eyes, the impossible beauty, the warmth radiating from his body, it’s like looking directly at the sun and I’m not built for that kind of intensity.
“Look at me, Zia.”
I do.
Because he asked.
Because when he says my name in that voice, I do whatever he asks, and that should terrify me, and it does, but not enough.
He kisses me.
And this one isn’t like the others.
The corridor kiss was gentle. The plane kiss was brief.
The parking garage kiss was a claiming, quick and absolute.
But this is slow. This is his mouth moving against mine with a thoroughness that makes my thoughts dissolve one by one, like words being erased from a page, until there is nothing left in my head except the taste of him and the warmth of his hand on my face and the sound I make, a small, helpless, surrendering sound, when his tongue touches mine for the first time.
He makes a sound back. Low. Almost inaudible. A vibration I feel more than hear, and it sends something electric down my spine because it’s the first sound he’s ever made that wasn’t composed. The first crack in a lifetime of composure, and I caused it, and that knowledge is dizzying.
My hand finds his shirt. Not pushing. Pulling.
My fingers close around the fabric and I pull him closer, and I’m kissing him back now, really kissing him, not just receiving but giving, and some distant, still-functioning corner of my brain is screaming that this is how it starts, this is exactly how it started with Billy, this is the moment where I let myself believe—
But his hand slides from my face down the side of my neck, and the screaming stops.
His fingers trail along my collarbone, feather-light, and then lower, tracing the neckline of my blouse. Not rushing. Not grabbing. Just...exploring. Like he’s mapping me with patience, with care, with the certainty of someone who has already decided that this territory is his.
I should stop this. I know I should stop this. We’re in my office. In the building he owns. I’m his employee and his unwilling fiancée and this is objectively the worst decision I could be making right now, and I don’t care, I don’t care—
His hand finds the hem of my blouse.
I feel his fingers on my skin.
Bare skin. His hand against my waist, under the fabric, and the contact is so warm and so real and so much that a shudder runs through my entire body, not from cold, not from fear, from something that I have no name for except maybe want, pure and terrifying and so strong it scares me.
His hand moves up. Slowly. His touch flat against my ribcage, his fingers spread, and I can feel my own heartbeat slamming against his palm, and my breath is coming in short, sharp bursts, and I’m gripping his shirt with both fists now, and his mouth is on my neck, and I’m going to lose my mind in the design wing of Lykaios Holdings at 6:23 on a Wednesday evening—
His phone rings.
Not buzzes. Rings. A sharp, clean tone that cuts through the haze like a blade.
He goes still.
His palm is still on my ribcage. His mouth is still against my neck. I can feel his breath, warm and ragged.
Ragged.
His breathing is ragged.
That’s the tell. In three days of stolen kisses and quiet ambushes and the infuriating composure of a man who has spent his whole life mastering self-control, this is the first time I’ve seen a crack.
His breathing, faster than it should be.
His touch, still pressed against my skin, not moving but not withdrawing either, like he’s fighting something inside himself.
The phone rings again.
He pulls back.
When he straightens, his expression is already resettled into that mask, and if I hadn’t heard his breathing, if I hadn’t felt the tension in his fingers against my ribs in that last second before he let go, I would think he was entirely unaffected.
But I heard it.
And I felt it.
He looks at me. I look at him. My blouse is untucked. My lips are swollen. My hair, which started the day in a neat arrangement, is now something that could generously be described as “lived-in.”
He answers the phone. “Yes.” A pause. “I’ll be there in ten.” He ends the call without taking his eyes off me.
“Ruby,” he says by way of explanation.
Ruby. The woman with the sixth sense for impossible timing.
He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is so tender, so impossibly gentle compared to what his hand was doing thirty seconds ago, that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
“Eat dinner tonight,” he says. “Something other than onigiri.”
And then he’s gone. Walking away through the design wing doors like a man who has not just had his hand under my shirt, like a man whose composure didn’t crack even once.
Except it did.
I heard it.
I sit at my desk in the empty design wing with my untucked blouse and my swollen lips and the ghost of his palm on my ribcage, and I think about the week.
Five days left.
He gave me a week. Seven days to “get used to the idea.” Seven days that were supposed to be a countdown to a deadline I hadn’t agreed to, a marriage I hadn’t chosen, a future I hadn’t asked for.
Five days left.
And I’m not counting them the way I should be.
I should be counting them like a prisoner counting days until sentencing. Instead I’m counting them like a kid counting days until Christmas, and that terrifies me, because Billy taught me what happens when you let yourself want something.
But maybe Alexei is different. Maybe a man who memorizes your lunch and fixes your air vent and kisses you in daylight where anyone can see is fundamentally, structurally different from a boy who kept you in the dark for two years.
Maybe.
I’m almost starting to believe it when Ruby emails me at 9 PM to say that His Highness will be traveling Thursday and Friday for Blood Oval business in Geneva.
Two days. He’ll be gone two days. I can survive two days.
Except on Thursday night, alone in my apartment with the window cracked and the city noise drifting in, I open my phone and the preter gossip feeds are on fire.
And there he is.
The Prince of Atlantis, with a woman I’ve never seen before. A Lyccan. Golden and stunning and draped against him in photographs that look nothing like a business trip and everything like the life he had before me.
My phone buzzes. Trish.
Trish: DON’T SPIRAL. Let me look into this.
But I’m already spiraling. Because this is what Billy taught me. This is the lesson that lives in my bones.
Everyone leaves.