Chapter 3

The smell hit me before I even opened the door all the way.

Sweet. Synthetic. Vanilla, the cheap kind that comes in a bottle shaped like a flower and coats the back of your throat like something you can't spit out. It was everywhere in the passenger seat, soaked into the fabric, thick and unmistakable.

I stood with my hand on the car door and breathed through my mouth.

Liam was already in the driver's seat, scrolling his phone, coffee balanced on his knee like it was any other morning. He hadn't noticed me stop. He hadn't noticed much about me in a long time.

"Ready?" he said, not looking up.

I got in. I pulled the door shut. I sat with my hands flat on my thighs and stared straight ahead at the parking garage wall while the smell wrapped itself around me.

"What is that?" My voice came out even. Neutral. I was proud of that.

Liam glanced over. "What?"

"The perfume." I turned to look at him. "In the car. It's everywhere."

He looked at the passenger seat. Back at me. And then—nothing. No flicker of guilt, no micro-hesitation, just the smooth, practiced blankness of a man who had done this before.

"Chloe," he said. "She left her jacket in here last week. You know how that stuff lingers."

Chloe. His production assistant. Twenty-two, wide-eyed, always laughing too hard at everything he said.

"Her jacket," I repeated.

"Yeah." He was already looking back at his phone. "I'll get it dry-cleaned."

I nodded. I looked back at the wall.

The apartment was in both our names, but the mortgage was leveraged against my savings—three years of it, every careful deposit, now tied up in paperwork that bore his signature alongside mine. If I pushed right now, if I let the thing cracking open in my chest actually crack, he would make it ugly. He was very good at making things ugly. And ugly meant lawyers, and lawyers meant the money I no longer had access to, and I couldn't afford to be right yet.

So I nodded. I let him have Chloe's jacket.

For now.

---

The studio was twenty minutes away, a converted warehouse space he'd rented eight months ago with the joint account. I'd helped him paint the walls. I remembered that now, standing outside the building with a manila folder of contracts he'd asked me to drop off—the excuse I'd invented on the drive over, delivered so casually he hadn't even questioned it.

The receptionist waved me through. She knew my face.

I took the stairs.

His recording room was at the end of the second-floor hallway, and I knew from a hundred visits that the soundproofing was only on the interior walls. The hallway side was just drywall and a hollow-core door that never latched properly, always sitting a half-inch open unless you pulled it hard.

I could hear them before I reached it.

Laughter first. Hers—light and practiced, the kind of laugh that knows exactly what it's doing. Then his voice, low and warm in a register I recognized from the early years, from before, from a version of our life I had apparently been the only one living.

I stopped outside the door.

I should have kept walking. I knew that. Every functional instinct I had was telling me to keep walking, to go back down the stairs, to wait until I had something solid—documents, evidence, a plan. But my feet had already stopped, and the door was already open that half-inch, and the light from inside was falling in a thin line across the hallway carpet.

I looked.

His hand was under her skirt.

She was perched on the edge of the production desk, heels hooked around his calves, phone in her free hand, reading from the screen with a smile that made my vision go white at the edges.

"'I gag every time I have to kiss mine,'" she read, in a sing-song voice, and then she laughed again—that same laugh, sticky and intimate—and tilted her head up at him. "She's so clueless, baby. Just a few more months until the funding clears, and I'm dumping that boring bitch."

Liam laughed.

He laughed, and the sound of it was easy and unguarded and more relaxed than I had heard him in two years.

I felt my nails before I felt the pain. They were pressing into my palm, hard, the way your body finds something to hold onto when the floor disappears. Harder. The sting sharpened, and I pressed deeper, because the pain was real and it was mine and it was the only thing in the hallway that made sense.

Something warm hit the carpet.

I looked down. A small, dark spot. Then another.

Blood. From where my nails had broken the skin.

I stared at it for a second that lasted a very long time.

Then I turned and walked. Fast. Faster than walking, almost running, my heels too loud on the floor but I couldn't slow down, couldn't regulate anything right now, the manila folder still in my hand and the smell of vanilla perfume still in my nose and Liam's easy laugh still bouncing around inside my skull like something I couldn't get out.

The stairwell door was at the end of the hall. I hit it hard with both hands.

And walked directly into something solid.

Not the door. The door had swung open. What I walked into was warm and immovable and smelled like dark cedar, and the impact knocked the folder out of my hand, papers scattering across the landing, and I stumbled back a step and looked up.

Silas Kade stood in the stairwell doorway.

He wasn't moving. He was just there, the way he'd been there in the rain—still and contained and taking up more space than his actual dimensions accounted for. The hallway light caught the angle of his jaw, left everything else in shadow. His eyes were on me, and they weren't surprised.

They weren't surprised at all.

He looked past me, once, toward the recording room at the end of the hall. Then back at me. And I watched him take in everything—the folder on the floor, the papers, my hands, the small dark stain on my palm where my nails had done their damage.

His gaze held mine.

Neither of us said a word.