I clawed my way out of that hellhole, turned my family’s shattered reputation into currency and then into a continent of assets; I bought back this island acre by acre with blood and grit and signatures that no one dared forge, and I told myself that the house where I once wasn’t permitted to cross the threshold would feel different once it belonged to me.
It doesn’t.
Or rather, it does, but not in the ways a sane man would hope.
Not yet. Not when every room has a ghost shaped like her.
The gallery windows hold the afterimage of a girl laughing at the gulls; the service corridor has the echo of a boy too proud to look up; the drive is a scar that throbs when I breathe wrong.
I’m thirty-two, and I hate that she can still make me feel eighteen and invincible and desperate in the same heartbeat.
So I force myself to think about the path that brought me back—the years of making myself untouchable, of learning the men who write out the checks and the men who actually sign them, of discovering that revenge requires patience and an appetite for detail.
The deal calendar in my head clicks forward: the conservation lease vote that will put the island’s stewardship in hands I control; the fund that wants a domesticated narrative to go with its capital; the hospitality roadshow that prefers a reformed sinner to an unapologetic one.
And now the story comes with a bonus I didn’t plan for but wholly embrace.
Naomi Kane—no, NaomiDillinger—still burns for me.
The princess still craves the former pauper.
The girl the world said was out of my league reaches for me with her eyes, her fuckable mouth, her beautiful tits and her yoga-supple hips, even as she glares, and it makes something feral in me bare its teeth.
There’s a satisfaction in that I won’t pretend not to taste, a dark little sweetness at the back of the tongue; revenge is a cold knife, but it can also be honey, and the combination is heady.
I tell myself, out loud, because sometimes you need to hear the words to believe them. I didn’t come back for love. I came back for balance sheets and signatures and the click of a lock when the key turns and barred doors finally open in welcome.
I came back to make sure certain names never sit above mine again. I came back because there’s an old debt carved into the bones of this place, and every day I’m here I intend to collect.
It will be sweeter now.
Because she wants me and I know it.
Because when I put my hand at the small of her back and guide her through a room full of people who once wouldn’t let me through the front door, she’ll lean helpless and willing, and they’ll see, and every eye that ever slid past me will have to watch.
The wind shifts and brings me salt and night-blooming jasmine and the faintest trace of her perfume riding the currents through an open window, and for a reckless second I picture going back down the hall, knocking once and not waiting, telling her the truth with my hands and mouth and my cock instead of in diamonds and embossed paper.
Then I remember the driveway and the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes that night ten years ago, and whatever softness the perfume suggested hardens into the thing that kept me alive when softness was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
She’s a liability, I tell myself.
A weakness.
A fire I can’t feed without burning the scaffolding I’ve built to hold everything else.
And yet I know how this goes: I’ll feed it in controlled portions, I’ll let it lick at my knuckles but not take the hand, I’ll give the performance the world wants and take what I’m owed in quiet moments where the cameras can’t follow. I’ll exact every single pound of flesh until?—
I stop, because endings have weight, and the one that wants to finish that sentence is not the one I should allow.
Her light goes out. The bourbon is gone. The house settles and the island breathes.
I toss the glass over the balcony and watch it crash onto the marble below, someone else’s job to clean up this time, not my beloved mother.
Then I spin around, watch my reflection—a man who finally made it inside and still suspects that the lock was the simplest problem to solve.
It’s a good thing then that I’m used to harder challenges.
Like how to sleep when all I see is the way her lips parted when I got too close.
