Chapter 3
HAYES
The rain had not stopped. It beat a relentless, driving rhythm against the reinforced glass of my corner office, turning the downtown Seattle skyline into a smeared, weeping canvas of gray and steel.
I stood by the windows, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my trousers, staring out at the miserable morning without really seeing it.
I stood at the absolute pinnacle of my industry.
The executive boardroom of Easton Capital occupied the entire top floor of the high-rise, a sprawling, intimidating monument to the wealth and power I had spent the last decade ruthlessly consolidating.
The room behind me featured a massive, thirty-foot custom mahogany table surrounded by ergonomic leather chairs that had hosted the most ruthless negotiations on the West Coast.
Today, it was just an empty, echoing tomb.
I turned away from the glass and walked back to the head of the table.
My laptop sat open, the screen glowing with a dozen different spreadsheets, risk assessments, and real-time market analyses.
The German data privacy regulations were threatening to suffocate a fifty-million-dollar logistics acquisition.
Warren Carmichael and his syndicate of investors were officially wavering, their capital hanging by a frayed thread after my beautifully orchestrated dinner party had abruptly imploded the night before.
I stared at the columns of numbers. They were the language I spoke fluently. They were predictable, logical, and entirely subject to my control. If a metric was failing, I leveraged assets to fix it. If a competitor moved against me, I bought them out or bled them dry.
But looking at the screen this morning, the numbers just blurred together into a meaningless, static hum. I couldn’t force myself to care about the acquisition. I didn’t care if Warren pulled his money. I didn’t care if the entire European deal burned to the foundation.
All I could see was Delaney’s face right before she shoved me.
My chest tightened, a sharp, physical ache seizing the space behind my ribs.
I dropped into the leather executive chair and dragged both hands roughly over my face.
My eyes burned from a profound lack of sleep.
I hadn’t gone to bed last night. After she walked out the heavy oak door of the Medina estate, leaving me standing in the foyer like a fool, I had poured a punishing amount of scotch and waited for her to come back.
I had tracked the GPS in her car. I watched the digital blip cross the bridge and park in the gritty, industrial district outside Second Chance Haven.
I had sat in the dark, staring at the tracker on my phone for seven hours, waiting for the blip to move. Waiting for her to realize she was exhausted, that the midnight-blue gown she had been wearing was ruined, and that she needed to come home.
She never moved. She had stayed at the clinic all night.
You don’t need a wife. You need a prop.
Her words played on a relentless, agonizing loop in my brain.
The sheer, vibrant hatred in her eyes when she said it had knocked the breath completely out of my lungs.
No one spoke to me that way. No one denied me.
Yet the woman I had built this entire empire for had placed her hands flat on my chest and pushed me away as if the very touch of my tailored suit sickened her.
I pulled my hands away from my face and rested my elbows on the mahogany table. My pulse was a heavy, irregular thud in my ears.
I didn’t understand how we had gotten here.
I had given her everything a woman could possibly want.
I had purchased a sprawling, multi-million-dollar estate so she would have a secure, beautiful sanctuary.
I had bought her a luxury vehicle to keep her safe on the slick winter roads.
I fully funded her rescue through my philanthropic trust, writing massive, unquestioned checks so she could pursue her passion project without ever having to worry about keeping the lights on.
I provided a life of absolute, bulletproof stability.
Why wasn’t that enough?
A sharp knock on the frosted glass door of the boardroom broke through the suffocating spiral of my thoughts.
I straightened my spine instantly, rolling my shoulders back and locking my jaw. The vulnerability was shoved down, buried beneath the cold, impenetrable armor I wore for the rest of the world. “Come in.”
The heavy door swung open, and Rowe stepped into the room.
Rowe was the head of my private security detail.
He was a quiet, fiercely competent former military contractor whom I paid an exorbitant retainer to ensure the physical safety of my assets—including my wife.
Given the nature of my wealth and the enemies I had made climbing the corporate ladder, leaving Delaney unprotected while she worked in a high-crime industrial neighborhood was out of the question.
She didn’t know about the discrete security detail.
She would have hated it, viewing it as an invasion of her independence, but I refused to compromise on her safety.
“Morning, Mr. Easton,” Rowe said, his tone perfectly neutral. He walked the length of the boardroom and stopped at the edge of the mahogany table.
“Rowe,” I acknowledged, offering a short nod. “Tell me you have the weekly brief.”
“I do, sir.” Rowe set a thick, un unmarked manila folder down on the polished wood, sliding it precisely until it rested next to my laptop.
“Standard perimeter checks around the Medina property and the downtown offices. No anomalies. The bulk of the report covers the activity at the clinic over the last twenty-four hours.”
My gaze locked onto the manila folder. “Give me the summary.”
“It was a chaotic night down there,” Rowe reported, clasping his hands behind his back.
“Animal Control brought in a massive haul from a breeding operation bust in Tacoma. Over sixty animals. Our detail observed Mrs. Easton arriving at the facility shortly after eight-thirty last night. She didn’t leave the premises.
The clinic was operating at full emergency capacity until sunrise. ”
I ground my teeth together, the muscle in my jaw ticking. While I had been sitting in a silent, empty mansion waiting for her to realize she needed me, she had been drowning in the blood and chaos of an underfunded shelter.
“Is she secure?” I asked, my voice dropping an octave.
“She is entirely secure, sir. The detail is maintaining a two-block perimeter,” Rowe confirmed. “I’ve included the surveillance updates and the requested visual confirmations in the file.”
“That will be all, Rowe. Close the door behind you.”
He offered a crisp nod and exited the boardroom. The heavy door clicked shut, plunging the massive room back into absolute silence.
I stared at the manila folder for a long moment before reaching out and flipping it open.
The first few pages were standard logistical reports—license plates of suspicious vehicles parked near the shelter, volunteer shift logs, perimeter breach assessments. I bypassed them entirely, flipping to the back of the file where the visual confirmations were clipped.
I expected to see grainy, distant shots of Delaney hauling crates or managing the loading dock. I expected to see the exhaustion I knew she had to be feeling.
Instead, the first photograph felt like a physical blow to the sternum.
It was a high-resolution, long-lens shot taken from across the street, capturing the glow of the clinic’s back loading bay under the harsh yellow security lights. It was timestamped at 4:12 AM.
Delaney stood by the open bay doors. She looked like an absolute wreck.
Her hair had completely escaped the elegant, severe twist the stylist had pinned it into for the dinner party, falling in damp, tangled waves around her face.
She wore an oversized, faded surgical scrub top pulled directly over the ruined, mud-splattered bodice of her expensive velvet gown.
There was a dark smudge of dirt across her cheekbone.
And she was laughing.
It wasn’t the polite, measured, painfully curated smile she wore when she stood next to me at galas and corporate fundraisers.
It was a genuine, chest-deep laugh. Her head was thrown back, her eyes crinkled at the corners, her entire body radiating a raw, unadulterated joy that I hadn’t seen directed at me in over a year.
My breath completely stopped. My eyes tracked frantically to the right side of the photograph to see what had caused that brilliant, devastating reaction.
Brooks.
The rescue’s lead veterinarian was standing less than a foot away from her.
He was a rugged, broad-shouldered man in a faded flannel shirt and denim, looking entirely at home in the gritty grime of the loading dock.
He held out a steaming styrofoam cup of coffee to her, a relaxed, easy smile on his face.
But it wasn’t the coffee that made the blood roar in my ears. It was his left hand.
Brooks’s hand was resting casually on Delaney’s shoulder. His fingers were curled lightly over the fabric of her scrub top, a gesture of comfortable, deeply rooted intimacy. He was invading her personal space, touching her with the casual ease of a man who knew he was entirely welcome there.
And Delaney was leaning into it.
The paper crinkled violently in my grip as my hand clenched into a fist. A dark, toxic wave of panic and possessive jealousy violently crashed over me, drowning out every rational thought in my head.
I stared at the veterinarian’s hand on my wife’s shoulder, my vision swimming with red.
Brooks.