Staff move out of their way, pulling chairs aside to clear the path. The bubble of chaos draws everyone’s attention, including the guards.
My pulse remains steady, every movement measured, every risk assessed. The painting upstairs is more than art or money to me. It’s to lay my grandfather’s greatest dream to rest, to finish what he started.
Grandfather’s voice whispers from memory.Art is patience, Ren. A heist is just another kind of art.
A tall man in a charcoal suit passes close enough for me to catch his cologne. He stares right through me, seeing nothing beyond the uniform.
I turn away, arranging dessert plates with mechanical precision.
A breeze comes from the open terrace doors, bringing with it the salt of the ocean in the distance. It mingles with the scent of aging paper from the antique books that fill the bookcases and the warmth of wood polish.
My fingers freeze mid-motion, salad plate suspended over the dinner plate. I know this particular combination the way some people recognize a song from three notes.
It’s Rockford Manor distilled into a perfume, and suddenly I’m not in Halcyon Hall at all. I’m back there, one month of my life that I’ve spent a year trying to forget, with an Alpha who looked at me like I was a piece of artwork he wanted to own.
I set the plate down too hard. It doesn’t break, but the sharp sound draws the attention of a passing Beta wearing the same uniform as me. I duck my head, adjusting the arrangement with trembling fingers.
Despite my efforts to forget, memory holds its own gravity. The harder I push it away, the stronger it pulls.
“You have incredible hands,” he says, watching me sketch in the window seat, wrapped only in a sheet, my skin still humming from a night spent tangled together.
I look up at Ezra Rockford, with his sculpted body and golden-brown hair disrupted by a startling streak of silver at his temple, a lightning strike frozen in time. The sight of him quickens my pulse, the same as it did the first time I approached him at an art gallery.
He moves with the easy confidence of a predator as he prowls closer. “Are you sure you’re not an artist?”
I close my notebook. “It’s a way to meditate.”
“Your skills are wasted on art history, Professor Knox.” His finger traces the edge of my notebook, not quite touching my hand but close enough that my skin prickles with awareness. “Are you sure you have to go back to teaching in a few weeks?”
I blink the memory away, focusing on the weight of the crystal centerpiece in my hands. This is the present. The new job.
But the Halcyon ballroom has the same high ceilings as Rockford Manor, the same gleaming hardwood floors that amplify every footstep. My body remembers these spaces even when my mind tries to reject them.
A waiter passes with more champagne flutes, and I think of Ezra’s glass collection filled with rare pieces he acquired from auction houses and private collectors, some through methods he never explained. He’d hold them up to the light, turning them to catch fire in his hands.
He studied me the same way, as if I was another beautiful and breakable piece of art to be added to his collection.
Heat creeps up my neck despite the room’s perfect temperature control, and my heart pounds. I need to focus. Need to?—
“I don’t want you to leave,” Ezra whispers into my neck, his breath hot on my skin. We stand in his private gallery, surrounded by paintings worth more than most people’s lives. His hands find my waist, possessive without being forceful. “I want to keep you here, Knox.”
My pulse skips with the same desire. “I’ve been here a month.”
His laugh comes low and hungry against my ear. “A month is nothing.”
The memory sours as it always does. Because that month meant everything to me. And then I took the check his family offered, packed my bag, and vanished on Ezra without a goodbye.
I adjust a napkin that doesn’t need adjusting, fighting to stay present. Sweat dampens my palms beneath the thin service gloves.
In my ear, I can still hear the cold voice of Aaiden Rockford, sliding the envelope across his desk.
“Fifty thousand dollars.” He focuses on a point over my left shoulder, as if I’m already gone. “For your discretion and your immediate departure.”
The check trembles between my fingers. So this is how it ends. I should have seen this coming from the powerful Rockford family, but they had treated me with such civil kindness that I had allowed myself to believe it was real.
“Does Ezra know about this?”
His dry, humorless laugh is nothing like his cousin’s. “Ezra collects beautiful things until he tires of them. Consider this a severance before the inevitable.”
