Chapter 48
Chapter Forty-Eight
Caleb
I know because I have been staring at the exterior feed for forty-three minutes, waiting for exactly that moment.
The camera is mounted above the entrance where she knows it exists, one of the security measures she argued with us about until we’d finally reached something resembling an agreement. No cameras inside her apartment. No hidden feeds.
And even after she moved out of the penthouse, she didn’t tell Hawkeye to remove them.
I’m relieved, because we would have had a fight. After all, she’s still our wife.
She hasn’t filed for a divorce.
Even if we deserve exactly that.
Her hair is pulled back, though strands have escaped around her face, and even though the image is imperfect, I see exhaustion in the way she pauses before starting toward the curb.
I close my hand around the edge of the desk.
I have watched Sophie sleep. Bathe. Work. Laugh. Come apart with my hands on her body and Lucian’s mouth on hers. I have carried her. Held her. Woken with her soft and warm between us.
Now the sight of her standing beneath a security camera nearly stops my fucking heart.
The office door opens again, and Elena comes hurrying out. Sophie turns back, and whatever her assistant says makes her laugh.
The sound doesn’t reach me.
That bothers me more than it should.
I want to hear her.
I want to know whether the laugh is real or something she assembled because Elena is watching her too closely.
I want to see her face without compression and distance.
I want to know whether she slept last night, whether she ate today, whether she still wakes, reaching across the bed before remembering neither of us is there.
Most of all, I want to go to her.
The thought is so immediate that I’m on my feet before I recognize what I’m doing.
My jacket is hanging over the back of the chair, and my ride is a simple text away.
I could bring dinner, make sure she’s okay, let her yell at me if she needs to. Sit on the other side of the room if that makes her feel safer.
“Going somewhere?”
Lucian’s voice comes from the doorway.
Goddamn it. What the hell am I thinking?
He follows my gaze to the screen, and for several seconds, neither of us says anything.
Pain lances his eyes before he manages to hide it. “Is she all right?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
Lucian looks back at the screen.
A car pulls to the curb. Sophie hugs Elena, opens the rear door, and slides inside.
I automatically catalogue the vehicle details, including the license plate number.
His expression goes cold. “Where’s Derek?”
“Not assigned.”
“I fucking hate this.” A tic throbs in his temple. “I want our man with her.”
“So do I.”
“I want to know where she’s going.”
Again, I have to agree.
The reality is, a single call would put Derek two cars behind her.
She’d never know.
But that was the old logic.
I turn off the feed.
No harm done if she never knew.
“You were going to her.”
It’s not a question.
“Why didn’t you?”
I look back at the empty exterior feed.
Because that would have been the wrong thing to do.
Lucian tackles situations head-on. He orders, arranges, controls the room until everyone else is reacting to him.
I prefer to read people. To wait.
I know when pressure needs to ease.
With Sophie, I told myself that made me safer.
Maybe it did.
It also made me more dangerous in a different way.
Because it gave me the arrogance to believe I knew what she needed.
“She might talk to you,” Lucian says quietly.
I glance at him. “You know she would.”
He hates that, and yet he’s willing to seize the opening if I offer it.
Lucian walks to the windows and stares. Probably unseeingly. “So we do nothing.”
Lucian considers inactivity a character defect, and I know the situation with Sophie is tearing him up. It’s destroying both of us. Neither of us are sleeping. We’re exercising compulsively, working too many hours, emptying a bottle of Bonds whiskey a night.
“Is that your goddamn plan? Do nothing?”
“It’s the right thing.”
He curls his hand into a fist, and he’s driven it into a punching bag so often over the last few days that his knuckles have split.
“What if she needs us?”
My chest tightens. “She knows where we are.”
“And if she never calls?”
There it is.
The question neither of us wants to face.
For years, we constructed every road so eventually it would lead Sophie to us.
Now there is no road.
Lucian looks away.
The silence echoes obscenely.
He and I always know what to do.
Or we make certain we do.
Resisting the impulse to look at the blank feed, I glance at Lucian. “You know what I keep thinking about?”
He waits.
“Voss’s text.”
His face shutters.
“I could have told her myself.”
Lucian goes very still.
“I decided being loyal to you mattered more than giving her information that belonged to her.”
“This isn’t on you.”
For years, there were Lucian’s part and my part. Strategy and execution. Vision and instinct.
When it came to Richard, there was no clean line.
I made calls.
I watched patterns.
I knew when a lender needed encouragement and when pressure needed time to work.
I’ve been every bit as involved because, the truth is, I wanted her as desperately as he did.
Whatever it took, I did it.
Lucian studies me for a long moment. Then, quietly, he says, “You love her.”
There is no point pretending surprise. “Yeah. I do.” I’m not sure when it happened, but I’ve never experienced anything like this soul-crushing devastation.
To regain control, I drag a hand over my jaw. “I love the way she thinks. I love that she calls bullshit before she considers whether it’s wise. I love that she worries about everyone else and cares about her clients so deeply that she forgets to eat lunch.”
I hold his gaze.
“We don’t fucking deserve her. Probably never did.”
Lucian doesn’t argue.
That bothers me more than if he had.
For four days, every conversation we’ve had has eventually circled back to the same question. Whether Sophie will call. Whether she’ll come home. Whether there’s anything we can do that will make her want us again.
Even our remorse has an objective.
Get Sophie back.
Fuck.
I straighten.
“That’s the problem.”
Lucian frowns. “What is?”
“We’re still doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to engineer the ending.”
He goes utterly still.
“Going to the Braes. Staying away. Giving her space. We keep talking about all of it like if we make enough correct moves, eventually Sophie comes back.”
“I want her back.”
“So do I.”
The truth tears through me.
“But no matter what, we have to do the right thing. Even if that means she never comes back.”
Silence stretches between us.
“What the hell do we do?”
“We give her back what we took.”
Lucian goes still. “Her choice?”
“Every fucking bit of it.”