Chapter 2

The car ride was silent except for the hum of the engine and my own ragged breathing.

Adrian didn't ask me to explain. He didn't fill the silence with questions I wasn't ready to answer. He just drove, one hand loose on the wheel, glancing over every few minutes like he was checking I hadn't fallen apart completely in his passenger seat.

When we pulled up outside my building, he finally spoke.

"You going to be okay?"

"I don't know," I admitted, because lying felt pointless. "Probably not tonight."

He nodded like that was an acceptable answer. "Take care of yourself, Elena."

That was it. No questions about what happened. No smug little comment about his son. Just those five words and then he waited, engine idling, until I made it to my door before he pulled away.

I didn't sleep that night. I lay in bed replaying the sound Sophie made, the way Ryan's eyes had been closed, the three months he said like it was nothing, like it should soften the blow somehow. Three months of him coming to my apartment smelling like someone else's perfume and me never once suspecting a thing.

My phone buzzed at two in the morning.

Ryan: I'm so sorry. Please call me.

I didn't answer.

By morning there were eleven more messages, each one more pathetic than the last. He loved me. He made a mistake. Sophie meant nothing. He wanted to fix this. He couldn't lose me.

I blocked his number before I even had coffee.

That should have been the end of it. It wasn't.

Three days later my phone rang from an unknown number, and stupidly, I answered. It was Ryan, calling from someone else's line.

"Please don't do this," he said the second I picked up. "Five years, Elena. You're going to end five years over one mistake?"

"You already asked me that. In your driveway. With a sheet wrapped around your waist." My voice was ice. "The answer is still yes."

"I love you."

"You had someone else in your bed for three months and you still have the nerve to say that to me?"

He didn't have an answer for that. He never did.

I thought that would be the worst of it. I was wrong.

A week later, my friend Kayla sent me a photo from Ryan's cousin's birthday dinner. Ryan was there. Sophie was next to him, laughing at something his aunt said, wearing a dress I recognized because we'd shopped together for it months ago. His family was treating her like she belonged there. Like she hadn't spent three months screwing her best friend's boyfriend behind closed doors.

I stared at that picture until my hands shook.

He humiliated me in the worst way possible, and now he was parading the woman he did it with around his own family like nothing happened. Like I was the problem. Like I was some inconvenient chapter he'd already closed.

Something ugly settled into my chest that night. Not sadness anymore. Something sharper.

I wanted him to hurt.

I wanted Ryan Carter to feel exactly what I felt walking into that bedroom. I wanted him gutted the way I was gutted, and crying alone in my apartment wasn't going to do that. Being sad wasn't going to do that. I needed something that would actually land.

That's when I thought of Adrian.

I don't know exactly when the thought crossed from grief into something colder and more calculated. Maybe it had been sitting there since the night he drove me home. Ryan had always been strange about his father. Jealous, almost. Adrian had the empire, the respect, the women who actually wanted to be around him instead of tolerating him. Ryan spent half his life trying to prove he wasn't just Adrian Carter's son, and the other half hating that he'd never measure up.

If there was one thing that would destroy Ryan completely, it was this.

Me. With his father.

I told myself it was just an idea. A stupid, dangerous idea that I'd never actually follow through with.

Then Adrian texted me two days later.

Adrian: Checking in. You holding up okay?

I stared at that message for ten full minutes before I answered.

Me: Better than I was. Thank you for that night.

Adrian: Anytime. Ryan's an idiot. You deserved better than what he did.

I read that line four times. Ryan's an idiot. Even his own father saw it.

We texted back and forth for the rest of the week. Nothing inappropriate, nothing that crossed any line. He asked how work was going. I asked about his latest business deal, mostly to be polite. It was easy talking to him in a way it had never been easy talking to Ryan, not even in the early days.

By the following Friday, he invited me to dinner. Said it was to make sure I was actually eating and not living off wine and self-pity.

I said yes before I let myself think about why.

I wore the red dress. The one Ryan always said made him crazy, back when he still looked at me like I was the only woman in the room. I wore it deliberately, and I hated myself a little for that, but not enough to change.

Adrian noticed. Of course he noticed. He was too experienced not to.

"You look incredible," he said when I sat down across from him at the restaurant.

"Thank you." I let my fingers brush his hand when I reached for my water glass. Small. Deliberate. Testing.

He didn't pull away, but his eyes sharpened, like he was recalculating something.

Dinner went on like that. I laughed a little louder than necessary at his jokes. I leaned in closer than I needed to. I asked him questions that had nothing to do with genuine curiosity and everything to do with keeping his attention on me.

It was working. I could feel it working, in the way his gaze lingered a beat too long, in the way his voice dropped lower when he talked about the past.

Then, right as dessert arrived, he set his fork down and looked at me directly.

"Elena. What are you doing?"

My stomach dropped. "Having dinner with you."

"That's not what I mean." His voice wasn't angry. It was worse than angry. It was patient, like he was talking to someone he'd already figured out completely. "I know my son. I know what he did to you. And I know exactly what it would do to him if he found out you and I were spending time together like this."

I opened my mouth to deny it, but he kept going before I could.

"Don't use me to punish my son."

The words landed like a slap. Because he'd seen straight through me, straight through every calculated smile and every deliberate touch, and he'd said it so calmly I couldn't even work up the anger to argue properly.

"I'm not using you," I said, but even as it left my mouth I heard how weak it sounded.

Adrian just looked at me. He didn't call me a liar. He didn't need to.

I knew.

Deep down, in the part of me that still wanted Ryan to feel exactly what I felt, I knew he was right.

At least for now.