The Wife He Lost Forever (Ruthless Billionaires #5)

Chapter One

The Name He Called

ELENA

The champagne fountain had stopped working an hour ago, and nobody had

noticed except Elena Marchetti, who stood near the back terrace doors

counting the small failures of the evening the way she once counted

blessings. The string quartet was playing the same four bars on a loop

because the fifth sheet of music had blown off the stand into the

reflecting pool. Three of the valet attendants were the wrong height for

their borrowed jackets. And her husband was upstairs, in the east wing

study that overlooked the city\‘s diamond grid of light, getting quietly

and thoroughly destroyed by a bottle of 1982 Pétrus that had cost more

than most of the catering staff made in a month.

She had married into this. The noticing. The cataloguing of things going

wrong while three hundred guests in sequins and tailored wool sipped

Wolfe Industries\’ signature cocktail and congratulated themselves on

being invited. Three years ago she would have been one of them, dazzled

by the chandeliers shipped in from a deconsecrated Venetian palazzo, by

the way Damian Wolfe could walk into a room and make the air pressure

change. Now she just wanted to know why he\‘d disappeared from his own

anniversary gala without telling a single person where he\‘d gone.

She found him by the sound. A low, rough murmur leaking under the study

door, words she couldn\‘t make out until she was close enough to touch

the brass handle. The lamps were off. The only light came from the

half-open terrace doors, blue-black and cold, and Damian was a shape in

it, slouched in the leather chair with his tie undone and hanging loose

around his throat like something he\‘d lost a fight with.

“Damian.”

He didn\‘t look up. His head was tipped back against the chair, eyes

closed, and his voice when it came was nothing like the voice he used on

boards of directors or on her, on the rare occasions he used a voice on

her at all anymore. It was younger. Frayed at the edges. A voice with

the varnish stripped off.

“Sienna.”

Elena\‘s hand stayed on the door handle. The word didn\‘t register as a

word at first —- it was just sound, just syllables shaped by a drunk

man\‘s mouth —- and then it did, and something in her chest dropped the

way it did in the elevator at Wolfe Tower when the express car skipped a

floor.

“Sienna,” he said again, softer, almost tender, the way he had never

once said Elena\‘s name in the three years she had been his wife. “I

didn\‘t —- I should have —-” The sentence collapsed into a low,

wordless sound, and his hand came up and pressed against his sternum

like he was trying to hold something in that had already gotten loose.

Elena did not move. She had gotten very good, over the last six months,

at not moving —- at standing perfectly still while things were said or

not said around her, absorbing them like a wall absorbs weather. But

this was a different kind of stillness. This was the stillness of

someone watching their own house burn from the outside, too late to do

anything but catalogue which rooms were already gone.

She had heard the name before. Once, early on, at a dinner with his

mother, when Eleanor Wolfe had let it slip with the particular cruelty

of women who consider honesty a virtue only when it wounds someone else.

“Sienna would have understood the Hamptons house,” she\‘d said, apropos

of nothing, slicing into her sole meunière. “But then, Sienna understood

quite a lot of things.” Damian\‘s jaw had gone tight. He hadn\‘t

corrected his mother. He hadn\‘t explained. Elena had filed the name

away in the part of her mind where she kept things she wasn\‘t ready to

look at directly, the way she\‘d once filed away the lump in her

grandmother\‘s voice when she talked about a house that no longer

existed.

Now here it was again, summoned not by his mother\‘s malice but by his

own unguarded want, in a room he probably believed was empty.

* * *

She got him to bed the way she\‘d learned to do most difficult things in

this marriage —- efficiently, silently, without asking for help she

knew wouldn\‘t come. One arm under his shoulders, his dead weight

listing into her, the smell of bourbon and grief sweat and the cologne

she\‘d bought him for his birthday two years ago, back when birthdays

between them had still meant something. He didn\‘t wake. He didn\‘t say

the name again. By the time she got his shoes off and pulled the duvet

up to his chest, he was breathing slow and even, his face slack in a way

it never was awake, all the careful architecture of Damian Wolfe —- the

jaw, the control, the cold blue assessment he turned on the world like a

searchlight —- dismantled into something almost boyish.

She sat on the edge of the mattress for a long moment, watching him

sleep, feeling the strange grief of loving someone whose unconscious

mind had just told her, more honestly than he ever had while sober, that

she was not who he wanted.

Down the hall, the gala thinned and emptied. Somewhere below, a member

of the household staff was apologizing to a senator\‘s wife about the

broken champagne fountain. Elena went to the window instead, and looked

out at the city, and did not cry, because she had promised herself

eleven months ago, at the fertility clinic, in a beige room with a

watercolor of irises on the wall, that she was done crying over things

that weren\‘t her fault.

* * *

DAMIAN

He woke at six-fourteen with his mouth full of cotton and his skull

cracked open like an egg, and for the first ninety seconds of

consciousness he had absolutely no memory of how he\‘d gotten into bed,

who had taken off his shoes, or why there was a glass of water and two

aspirin sitting on the nightstand exactly where his hand would land if

he reached for them —- which told him, with the particular shame of a

man who prides himself on never needing to be taken care of, that

someone had taken care of him.

He sat up too fast. The room tilted, righted itself, and the previous

night arrived in fragments —- the gala, the toast he\‘d given that had

gone on a beat too long, the moment somewhere after his fourth glass of

Pétrus when the noise of three hundred people congratulating him on

three years of a marriage that felt, lately, like a boardroom he

couldn\‘t get out of, had become unbearable, and he\‘d walked out

without telling anyone. After that: nothing. A wall of black.

Except for one thing, surfacing now with the unwelcome clarity of a

stone breaking the surface of still water. A voice. His own voice, low

and urgent, saying a name. Not Elena\‘s.

He didn\‘t let himself finish the thought. He was already moving,

already reaching for his phone on the nightstand, already composing the

version of the morning where this was a logistics problem and not

anything else, because logistics problems were the only kind of problem

Damian Wolfe had built an entire empire out of being able to solve

before breakfast.

His assistant, Priya, answered on the second ring, the particular

brightness in her voice telling him she had been awake and braced for

his call since approximately five a.m., because she always was. “Mr.

Wolfe.”

“Who put me to bed last night.” It wasn\‘t a question. He didn\‘t ask

questions when he wanted facts; he issued requests for retrieval, like

he was pulling a file.

A pause, brief enough that someone who didn\‘t know Priya Anand as well

as he did might have missed it. “Mrs. Wolfe, sir.”

Something in his chest did something complicated that he chose not to

examine. “Find the woman from last night,” he said instead, pivoting

around the answer he hadn\‘t wanted, the way he pivoted around most

things that threatened to cost him something. “The one I was talking to

before I left the ballroom. Find out who she is.”

There was a longer silence this time. “Sir,” Priya said carefully, “you

didn’t speak to anyone before you left. You were alone for the last

forty minutes of the event. Several guests asked where you’d gone.”

Damian stood at the window with the phone against his ear and looked

down at the gardens, where two members of the cleanup crew were fishing

sheet music out of the reflecting pool, and felt the particular vertigo

of a man who has just been told that the thing he remembers happening

did not, in fact, happen the way he remembers it. He had been alone.

There had been no woman in the ballroom. Whatever conversation he

believed he\‘d had —- whatever face he\‘d been imagining when that name

had come out of him in the dark of the study —- had not occurred

anywhere except inside his own skull, in a room with no witnesses except

the wife he\‘d apparently forgotten was the one who\‘d carried him to

bed.

“Find her anyway,” he said, and hung up before Priya could ask which her

he meant, because he wasn\‘t entirely sure himself, and some animal part

of him did not want to say the name out loud in daylight and make it

real.

* * *

Elena was at the breakfast table when he came down, dressed for an

office she no longer technically had to report to but went to anyway,

because the alternative was staying in this house and rattling around

its forty-two rooms like the last coin in an empty jar. She had a cup of

coffee in front of her she wasn\‘t drinking and the financial section of

a newspaper she wasn\‘t reading, and when Damian walked in, freshly

showered, jaw freshly shaved, every hair of him reassembled into the man

the world expected, she watched him over the rim of a mug she\‘d stopped

lifting to her mouth three minutes ago.

“Good morning,” he said, the words coming out clipped, the way they came

out when he was working hard to sound like nothing had happened, which

was, in Elena\‘s experience, the surest sign that something had.

“Is it,” she said. Not a question either. She\‘d learned the trick from

him.

He poured his own coffee instead of waiting for staff to do it, which

was unusual enough that she noted it, filed it next to all the other

small data points she\‘d been collecting for months, the way an analyst