He kisses my forehead, a benediction I resent for how much it undoes me.
“You’re not—” My voice is a rasp. “You’re not going to take?—”
“No.” He brushes hair from my cheek, knuckles grazing like he’s memorizing my temperature. “Not yet.”
“Why?” I hate the sound like a plea.
“Because I want you desperate.” His mouth edges a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “And unraveled. And very sure. When you come to me, I’ll take everything.” He straightens, steps back. “I’ll wait as long as necessary.”
“Even if it takes the agreed year,” I say, reckless, “and I walk away after?”
He stills, hand on the doorknob, a muscle in his jaw tightening as if the wordafterhas sharp edges. “We both know it won’t take that long.”
The door clicks. He’s gone.
I stare at the ceiling, heart skittering, the taste of him still on my tongue, the echo of my own want still humming under my skin. Somewhere beneath the anger and the history and the pain, I know I’m not playing anymore.
I’m just standing in front of the one man who has ever made me feel seen. And broken. And real.
And I don’t know how to survive that.
9
VASSO
Two days. That’s all I manage to give her in the end.
I wrestle my willpower down from four and lose in forty-eight hours, and even now I can’t stop myself from checking my phone like a teenager waiting for a breadcrumb.
One glance. Then another. The screen stays black, and I hate myself for the dip in my stomach every time it lights up and it isn’t her.
I tell myself I’m monitoring logistics—pilot schedules, security rotations, preservation chatter, the private fund’s mood—but the truth is simple and ridiculous.
I miss her.
The house sounds wrong without the echo of her footsteps, the doorways feel too wide without her shoulder brushing the frame, the balcony air is colder without a woman who turns salt into electricity just by standing in it.
She went to see Theodore two mornings ago, kissed my cheek like a staged photograph, and I’ve been walking around this place like a man who misplaced his reasons.
I didn’t plan the honeymoon.
It fell out of my mouth at breakfast like a provocation and I didn’t pull it back because the image hit me too hard.
Naomi stretched on the foredeck of my yacht, the Aegean throwing diamonds at her skin while the world watches and pretends it’s the boat it envies.
It turns more than my ego on. And the octogenarian who runs the private fund is a creature of theater; two days on the water, and a weekend in his vineyard outside Montalcino will give him all the “stability optics” he craves, right down to a photograph of us tasting Brunello while he mutters about hope springing eternal with wife number seven at his elbow.
Before we sail, I want something rooted here. Something that cements my ownership of this rock in a way contracts can’t. Paper is leverage; memory is law.
I want Naomi to feel Dillinger Island under her feet and know it’s mine—and that she is, for now, too.
The study smells like cedar and old maps. Evening tints the bay iron blue; the lighthouse turns its patient eye, a pulse I learned to count by in a life that didn’t belong to me. I rest my phone on the blotter and don’t touch it for a full minute, which is the kind of discipline I pretend comes naturally. Then I give up the pretense and call.
She answers on the second ring, breath a little quick, road noise low behind her. “Vasso.”
“I’m calling to ask why the house is quiet,” I say, because the alternative is something I don’t say into phones.
“I’m on my way back,” she answers. “Felix insisted I take the SUV. We hit traffic near Wickford, but we’re clear now.”
