Chapter 3 #2
"I'm back." My voice comes out smooth. Practiced. Like I'm reading from a script I wrote during the flight home. "Got in a few days ago. Sorry, I've been slammed with work stuff."
"Work stuff. You literally just came back. What work stuff could you possibly—"
"Sorry. It’s been chaotic since I’ve been back."
The lie slides out like silk. Easy. Seamless.
A year ago, lying to Emilia made my stomach twist.
She's been my best friend since we were sixteen, since her father—Judge Hart—took me in after my parents were murdered and gave me a bedroom with yellow curtains and a door that locked from the inside.
Emilia was the first person who touched me without wanting something in return.
She braided my hair while I cried. Watched bad movies with me when I couldn't sleep. Held my hand at the funeral without saying a single word, because she understood that silence was the only thing that didn't hurt.
I loved her for it. I still love her for it.
But love and honesty aren't the same thing. I learned that the hard way.
"That's amazing!" she says. "Okay, but you have to make time for brunch. Saturday? That place on Seventh with the bottomless mimosas?"
"Saturday works."
"Perfect. Oh, and Dad says hi. He's been asking about you. You know Dad; he won’t relax until he’s actually laid his eyes on you."
I laugh. It sounds real. I've practiced. "Tell him I'll make sure we have family dinner sometime in the next couple weeks."
"Perfect. Okay, I have to go. Tyler is being impossible about wedding venues. Did I tell you he wants a destination wedding? In Cabo? I said, Tyler, we are not getting married in Cabo; my grandmother is eighty-seven."
She keeps talking. I make the right sounds at the right moments. Ask the right questions. Laugh at the right jokes. The performance is flawless, and the ease of it terrifies me more than anything I've done in the last three days.
Because Emilia is telling me about wedding venues and mimosas and her father's political jokes, and I'm sitting on silk sheets, wearing a diamond collar given to me by a crime lord whose belt marks are still pink on my wrists.
And I feel nothing.
No guilt. No conflict. No pull toward the life she represents—the brunch life, the normal life, the life where the worst thing that happens is your fiancé wants to get married in the wrong country.
That life is a costume I've outgrown.
"Sel? You still there?"
"Still here. Saturday. Bottomless mimosas. I'll be there."
"Love you."
"Love you, too."
I hang up, set the phone face-down on the nightstand and stare at it for a moment.
Emilia Hart is the last good thing in my life.
The last thread connecting me to the girl I used to be—the orphan, the victim, the one who needed saving.
I don't need saving anymore.
The thought should scare me. Instead, it settles into my bones like a key turning in a lock.
Click. Done. Decided.
Cassius appears in the doorway.
His tie is loosened. His jaw is tight. Whatever the phone call was, it wasn't good news.
"Everything okay?" I ask.
"Business." He crosses to the bar cart, pours two fingers of whiskey, and drinks half of it in one swallow. "Nothing you need to worry about yet."
Yet.
"Who was on the phone?" he asks, nodding toward my cell.
"Emilia. I’m not sure if you remember her, but she’s my friend."
"The judge's daughter." He says it the way he says everything—flat, informational—but something flickers behind his eyes. There and gone.
"She wants to do brunch on Saturday."
"And you said yes."
"I said yes."
He watches me over the rim of his glass. "Can you handle that? The two lives?"
I think about the ease of the lie. The smoothness of the performance. The total absence of guilt.
"I'm already handling it."
He nods, finishes the whiskey and sets the glass down and looks at me with an expression I'm learning to read. The one that means he's seeing something he didn't expect, and recalculating.
"Vincent is impressed," he says.
"Vincent is cautious."
"Same thing, coming from him." He pulls his tie off, drapes it over the chair. "He's setting up your office. You'll have full access to financial systems by morning."
"I know. He told me."
Something that might be amusement crosses his face. "Already going around me?"
"Not around. Alongside." I lean back against the headboard. "Isn't that the point?"
He stares at me. The room is quiet—that heavy silence that isn't really silence.
"A couple of days," he says. "You've been back for a matter of days, and you've restructured a debt recovery, solved a laundering vulnerability, neutralized a city councilman, earned Vincent's respect, and lied to your best friend without blinking."
I hold his gaze. "Is that a compliment or a concern?"
He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
He runs his thumb along the collar at my throat, tracing the diamonds like a rosary.
"Both," he says quietly.
I turn my head and press my lips to his palm, a gesture that's half affection, half claiming.
"I told you. I'm not the girl you sent away."
"No." His hand cups my jaw. Gray eyes searching mine. "You're not."
I lean into his touch, and somewhere deep in the machinery of my mind—the part that catalogues and calculates and files everything away—I know that this is exactly where I need to be.
Not just in this bed. Not just in this building.
In this life.
This sharp, dangerous, morally bankrupt life where a diamond collar is a crown and a lie to your best friend is a random day of the week and the man holding your face killed people before breakfast and will kill people after dinner, and you don't care.
You don't care because the power feels like oxygen and the darkness feels like home and the girl who used to flinch at bloodshed now restructures it into profit margins.
I belong here now.
The thought doesn't frighten me.
It fits.