And I am left with breath that won’t behave and fury that has nowhere to go and a burn in places that have no business burning, the ring heavy on my hand and the island heavy in my chest.
“Goodnight,Mrs. Dillinger,” he says without looking back, and the formal address is a brand and a benediction and a dare, all at once.
When the door clicks again, I realize with bone-deep dread that I’m not playing the game anymore.
I’m losing it.
5
VASSO
Ishouldn’t have touched her.
Not the cheap, offensive cotton she now wraps her body in that I wanted to tear off and replace with silk.
Or that delicate wrist. Or fuck, that smooth place beside her ear where her breath still hitches the way it did when I used to kiss her there.
I shouldn’t even have stayed in the same room long enough to remember the exact heat of her skin beneath my hand—but I did, and of fucking course, the moment I did, every line I’ve drawn for a decade blurs like chalk in rain.
I stand on the master balcony now with a raging erection that won’t quit, a glass of bourbon that tastes like varnished oak and old decisions as the Atlantic wind climbs the cliff face to lay cold fingers against the back of my neck as if the night itself wants to cool what it can’t contain.
Across the endless lawn the lighthouse turns its patient eye, the beam grazing the sweep of beach below and the black bite of the rocks to the north, and for a second—all of one second—I let myself imagine the island as it was when I was a boy whowasn’t allowed up these steps, never mind the inner sanctum of its suites.
A boy who tracked sand into service corridors and learned to make himself narrow in doorways so he wouldn’t be seen.
This fucking house used to spit me out every single time.
Now it wears my name.
You’d think the satisfaction that sings through my veins on that knowledge alone would be enough. That owning the keys to a place that locked you out, holding the deed to every acre where you were told to keep your head down and your voice lower, would roar its own triumph.
But bricks don’t apologize and glass doesn’t grovel, and standing in the rooms where my mother once scrubbed salt from the windows while men in Savile Row suits either leered or ignored her, I feel something tighter than triumph coil in my chest.
Hell, I should tear the entire thing down, starting with that fucking driveway where I came within a whisker of begging the daughter of the man who had already broken my family to choose me anyway, to run, to say no to a future that didn’t have my name in it. I should replace the gravel with fire and leave nothing for memory to cling to.
Her light is still on.
Of course it is.
I told her goodnight because I know the choreography of restraint, but I didn’t mean it, not when walking away cost me skin; if I’d stayed one second longer in that room I would have undone the knot at her waist and swallowed every reason why this needs to play out as I swore and decreed.
She still wants me.
She can dress it in hate and rancor, but her body doesn’t speak that language; it speaks pulse and breath and the way dilated pupils widen when old heat flares.
Naomi’s body remembers me as clearly as mine remembers her, with whispers of lighthouse nights and greenhouse shadows and that precise, impossible summer when forever felt like a thing two people could actually promise and keep.
I drink and let old man Theodore’s vintage bourbon—the one I stopped the estate from selling to pay off their debts—burn a path down my throat in smug, orderly fire.
I remind myself what this is: a game, a controlled burn, a marriage of convenience, public lies, and private test of wills, my hand at her back on cue and eyes that say the right story when the cameras blink. I try to remind myself I built this plan on logic and leverage, not on the kind of hunger that makes a man ruin his own strategy.
Except now I’m remembering everything I swore I wouldn’t let myself touch.
The way she used to look at me like I was the only fixed point on a tilting map.
The way my name sounded in her mouth when it was soft.
The way that last week’s betrayal swallowed me whole.
