9. Sloane
NINE
SLOANE
I sat alone in the suffocating quiet.
I hadn't moved from that spot since I came back from the front steps, the suite pitched in darkness around me.
The distant sounds of the mansion dissolved into nothing as the last stragglers from the reception found their beds.
I stayed stranded in the dead center of that silence, my mind looping around the single loaded question he'd dared to ask me.
Did you ever regret it?
I'd confessed that I did. I handed him the truth because I was exhausted from carrying that secret alone. But sitting here with the midnight air pressing against my chest, I replayed the whole evening, and the pieces refused to form a logical picture.
The sapphire ring had been tucked inside his jacket through everything.
It had witnessed the ceremony, the raucous reception, the claustrophobic cellar, our raw conversation on the steps.
It had been riding in his pocket while he caged me against the wooden racks, his lips hovering close to my ear as he asked if I could feel his sincerity, a flirtatious current pulsing under it that neither of us moved to shut down.
He'd packed that velvet box on purpose. He'd smuggled it into his suit pocket and traveled all this way, and there was no version of that behavior that ended in a platonic friendship.
The ring was riding in his jacket because he wanted me to stumble onto it.
He was quietly handing me an ultimatum, stepping back into the shadows to see if I had the courage to fight for him, because that was who Xavier Paige was at his core.
If you want this love, it's right here waiting for you.
But I had to be the one to close the gap.
The years had shifted our reality. My tyrannical father had been the sole architect of our original wreckage, forcing a breakup I never chose.
He'd handed me that horrific ultimatum like a royal decree, and I'd bent the knee because I was a terrified twenty-one-year-old and he knew which triggers to press to break me.
Xavier had been a surgical resident back then, a defenseless target my father could've ruined with one phone call, and I'd believed the monster when he swore he'd burn Xavier's future to the ground.
I surrendered because I was paralyzed by fear, and because fearful obedience was the only survival strategy I'd ever known under that roof.
But I'd been building my own empire for years.
I'd built a successful tattoo studio from nothing.
I'd secured my own financial freedom. I'd thrown out my father's name, his expectations, his specific brand of warfare, wearing his influence down until standing in a room with him no longer locked my shoulders up in terror.
Xavier wasn't a defenseless resident anymore either.
He ran a medical network across four states, a man my father couldn't threaten because the footing had shifted for good.
There was no leverage my father could hold over either of us now.
Xavier had been right during our dance. I'd bolted the second things got difficult, and I'd wasted eight years calling that cowardice a noble choice when it was raw terror wearing the expensive clothes of a decision.
I wasn't that helpless twenty-one-year-old anymore, and I was done running from the only man who mattered.
I shoved my feet back into my shoes and marched out the door.
The corridor was deserted, the estate wrapped in a cathedral stillness. I counted the brass room numbers on the mahogany walls until I found his suite. I lifted my shaking hand and knocked.
The door swung open.
I hadn't gotten the room number wrong.
The woman in the doorway was tall, a few inches over me.
Slim, with a waterfall of ink-black hair spilling over her bare shoulders and flawless tan skin.
Breathtakingly gorgeous. She wore a crimson lace nightgown, a red chosen on purpose, and she looked me over, her chin tilting up as her dark brows pinched together in a flash of irritation before smoothing into polite boredom.
My mouth opened to stammer out an apology.
Before a word escaped, heavy footsteps echoed from deep inside the suite.
Xavier appeared behind her shoulder. He wore low-slung pajama pants and no shirt, a white toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, his jaw working the bristles as he drifted into the entryway without a hint of hurry.
The second his eyes flicked over her bare shoulder and landed on my face, his hand stilled around the toothbrush.
The gorgeous woman glanced back at his bare chest, her shoulder dropping against his torso as an intimate smile lit up her face.
"Baby," she purred, her eyes tracking his shock. "Do you know her?"
Xavier pulled the foaming toothbrush from his mouth, his fingers crushing the handle. He stared straight at me. His jaw went level, his dark eyes raking over my face before locking onto mine. A muscle in his brow twitched once before settling into indifference.
"Yeah," he said, his voice empty. "This is Sloane. Violet's friend."
He hadn't called me our friend. He hadn't called me his. I belonged to Violet.
"Sloane," he prompted, his tone conversational. "What are you doing down here?"
He delivered it like a logistical question.
We were two people who had loved each other, who had screamed that love out loud across years and sacred rooms, and he was asking why I was standing there with nothing but cold air in his voice.
"I got the room number wrong," I lied, forcing a brittle smile across my face.
"I'm so sorry to bother you. I've been drinking champagne all night and lost track of my floor.
I was looking for—I thought this suite belonged to—" I cut off the rambling and locked it in place.
"My apologies. Congratulations on the relationship, I guess. Enjoy the rest of your evening."
I spun on my heel.
I walked.
I kept my spine straight, pacing down the endless corridor at a mechanical gait.
Behind me, the suite door clicked shut with a final snap.
The second I rounded the far corner, I started sprinting blind down the hall.
I didn't stop until I slammed into my own room, twisted the deadbolt, and pinned my back flat against the wood.
My strength drained out of me, and I slid down the door until I collapsed into a heap on the floorboards.
The tears erupted before I could dam them.
I didn't let a single sob out. I rammed my palm against my mouth, strangling the sound, while burning tracks of grief spilled over my cheeks.
I let them fall, because there was nothing else to do with the wreckage.
For eight years I'd been building a romantic delusion, a fairy tale assembled out of the details I needed to be true.
And then Xavier Paige had wrecked the fantasy by standing in a doorway in his pajamas, wearing an unrecognizable face, reducing my whole existence to Violet's friend.
I hadn't invented the charge of the sapphire ring, the heavy flirting in the cellar, his lips close to my ear, the closeness on the steps.
None of it had been a hallucination. But I'd weaponized those desperate scraps and turned them into a romantic answer when they were never a solution.
They were the hollow actions of a broken man who still carried the shrapnel of an old war and hadn't figured out how to set it down.
Carrying the grief of a ghost wasn't the same as wanting to resurrect the relationship.
I'd mistaken his mourning for intention.
I'd misread his unfinished trauma as a desire to begin again.
The man had moved on. He was locked in that suite with a stunning woman in crimson lace who called him baby in the threshold, and he'd looked straight through me and labeled me a stranger's friend.
He hadn't been keeping obsessive tabs on my life. He wasn't tracking my social media, auditing my tattoo business, carrying a hollow ache in his chest that echoed my name. He'd cleanly moved past the trauma, built a spectacular life, and found a breathtaking partner.
He'd looked at me, the woman he'd once loved so hard he dropped to both knees in a field of a hundred candles, and filed me under background noise.
He owed me nothing, not a trace of his old devotion, not a residue of our sacred years.
I'd packed up all of that love myself, loaded it with toxic lies, and fired it straight at him in a handwritten letter.
He'd survived the impact, processed the grief, and done what resilient people do.
I was the lone idiot left holding the baggage of a contract I'd torn up a lifetime ago.
I'd never moved on.
I hadn't even tried.
A parade of men had drifted in and out of my life, and I'd withheld every real piece of my heart because not one of them was Xavier.
I'd never given them a fighting chance to compete with his memory.
I'd kept my whole soul hollow for eight years on the certainty of our connection, and that certainty had just opened a door in red lace and smiled at my stupidity.
I pressed my palm harder to my lips, crushing the cry in my throat.
He'd told me on the sidewalk that things were better this way. He'd calmly said we should go our separate ways, and my delusional brain had decided his rejection carried some coded message, some romantic promise that really meant come find me the second you pick the lock on your cage.
The man had meant what he said.
I stayed pinned to the hardwood against the locked door until the crying burned itself out. My eyes were dry and heavy, the skin of my face tight and salt-masked, the dark room ringing with a quiet that felt total.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.
I'd kept my father's private number blocked for months.
I'd done it during a brutal stretch when his demanding calls were flooding my screen, back when I didn't have the armor to survive whatever corporate transaction he was going to force on me.
I unblocked the contact. The restriction vanished, and three missed-call notifications populated the screen, all of them from his office.
I dialed him back.
He answered on the first ring.
"Did you block my line?" His voice was a clinical plateau, not raised in anger, not sharp with offense. I could picture the set of his jaw, his eyes already fixed on the verdict, while he waited for me to confess. "I've been calling your cell for days."
"Yes," I said, matching his ice. "I blocked you."
A long silence held the line.
"Why are you calling me at this hour?"
I stared at the floorboards, tracing the grain bleeding through the dark.
"You asked about my thoughts on Andrew," I reminded him, my tone even.
He hesitated a fraction of a second.
"Have you evaluated the arrangement?" he pressed, his corporate register clicking into place.
"I have."
"And what's your verdict?"
My mind flashed back to the suite doorway, to the red nightgown, the toothbrush, the words Violet's friend.
"I'll meet him." I kept my voice level. "I want to get to know him."
The line went quiet.
"Good." The single word came out settled and certain, the decision already finalized in his mind weeks ago, me a piece of inventory finally catching up to the ledger. "I'll arrange the introduction."
The line went dead.