“I followed the smell of coffee,” I answer, keeping my tone light.
He looks at his mother, then his sister, then back at me. “You’re settling in?”
I nod. “Your family’s been very kind.”
“Good.” His voice softens a fraction. “Eat as much as you want. You’ll need your strength.”
Iris rolls her eyes. “You make it sound like you’re sending her into battle.”
He gives her a look that makes her smirk and look away.
Saoirse wipes her hands on a towel. “Breakfast first, battles later.”
I take another bite, pretending not to notice the way Liam’s gaze lingers on me even now, like he’s memorising the sight of me sitting at his family’s table. I shouldn’t feel at home here. Not with his family laughing around me, not with the smell of coffee and cinnamon curling through the air, not with the way Saoirse squeezes my shoulder before setting down a mug. But something inside me loosens, like I’ve been holding my breath for years and only just remembered how to exhale.
Liam
Hartley’s name shouldn’t still be in my head. But it is. It’s there when I sit down at my desk, when I open my laptop and start issuing orders through encrypted channels, when I think about the way Grace’s hands trembled slightly as we left the hotel after the masquerade had officially ended.
That bastard’s face is plastered across half the country’s news cycles, righteous and untouchable. But not for long.
I start with what I know. The offshore accounts Kozlov mentioned once, the shell companies buried under corporate fronts. I pull strings, make calls, issue instructions that ripple out across jurisdictions. Names, bank codes, transfers. Within an hour, the senator’s hidden funds are flagged, his assets frozen under “routine anti-corruption checks.”
Within the first hour, two of his associates receive polite but pointed messages reminding them of their own liabilities, the sort that ensures no one comes to his defense.
By the second hour, his career begins to bleed quietly in places he can’t see yet. A journalist I trust owes me a favor; she will receive an anonymous package in the next twenty-four hours containing documents she won’t be able to ignore. All roads will lead to him.
When I’m done, I close the laptop and lean back, letting the silence of my study stretch. The satisfaction that usually followsa takedown doesn’t come this time. There’s only a strange kind of restlessness.
Because this isn’t just business anymore.
It’s her.
I leave the study and follow the scent of coffee and cinnamon downstairs. Voices drift from the kitchen, my mother’s polite and friendly tone, Iris chattering about something inconsequential. And Grace.
Her hair is a mess of pale waves now, loose around her shoulders. She doesn’t see me right away, and I take a moment I shouldn’t, to watch the way she fits into this house so effortlessly.
Sunlight softening the sharp edges of her face, laughter threading through her voice when Iris teases her. I didn’t realize how much I wanted that sound until I hear it unguarded.
It shouldn’t matter. It does.
My mother catches sight of me first, her knowing glance flicking between us before she excuses herself. Iris follows, smirking as she disappears down the hallway, leaving us alone.
Grace looks up then, eyes bright in the morning light. “Everything alright?”
“Better than alright.” My voice comes out lower than I intend. I step closer, watching the pulse jump in her throat. “Hartley’s about to learn what it feels like to lose everything.”
She blinks. “You—what did you do?”
“Handled it.”
There’s a pause. “You mean you ruined him.”
“Semantics.”
Something flickers in her expression. Disbelief, awe, fear, maybe all three. “You really can just… do that.”
I move closer still, until I’m near enough to smell her shampoo. “When someone hurts what’s mine, I don’t hesitate.”
