“No, baby. I didn’t leave without first putting a few words to paper,” I say, and it sounds like a defense when it should sound like a confession. “But I guessed, correctly I see, that you would probably never get the letter.”
She blinks, thrown. “You did? When…how—who did you give it to?”
“My mother was no longer your housekeeper by then, so I gave it to the next best person. Or so I thought. Harrison’s fixer intercepted it,” I say. “I learned later. It doesn’t matter anymore.” Except that it does” I drag a hand down my face, grit under my palm that isn’t there. “Because, yeah, I still left. Because I looked at a house that could have swallowed me whole and spat me out, and chose to become something it couldn’t digest. Something that stuck in the Kane’s craw.”
The room hums with the past. She swallows hard. “And you succeeded, evidently. You came back as the man who could buy the house. Buy the island. Buy me.”
“Marry you,” I correct, because accuracy is cowardice’s only honest friend. “And yes. Own the thing that owned me.”
Her laugh is a cracked bell. “And you’re fine, throwing the label of love on that clever scheming?”
“If we’re being truly honest, after what your family did to mine, we can agree to call it justice.” I step closer and the electricity jumps, because attraction does not care for moral clarity. “And strategy. And something that refuses to die even when it should.”
We’re too near again.
Her breath catches; mine answers.
The revived anguish and new knowledge—humiliation, letter, interception—moves like a riptide under our anger, dragging us toward a shore we didn’t plan to reach tonight. Old wounds are being scraped raw and neither of us are ready to bleed.
“I can’t be your whipping post, Vasso,” she says, softer, and it hurts more than it should. “Not for a whole year. You don’t want me to truly hate you. And I will.”
I tilt my head. “You said you hate me already. Was that a lie?”
Her eyes shadow, then her lashes sweep down, hiding her expression. When she lifts them, the shine. With courage. Daring. “We both know it was. I wouldn’t have slept with you tonight if I really did. But…I’m afraid if we don’t…” She stops, closes her eyes again. When she opens them, she squares herself. “What do you want from me? A confession? Fine.” She lifts her chin. “I still want you. I hate it a little. I hateyoufor making it this way. But I want you. And it terrifies me that the moment I gave in, you stamped me with a claim.”
“Fine. Let’s make a new deal. Stop making me your penance,” I say, equally soft. “Stop pretending every time you want me it’s a debt you’re paying down. I already have what I want. The island. And my ring on your finger. Tonight was several cherries ontop.” I lean, brush her ear with my next words. “And as for what I want?” I echo, and the answer is so simple I almost don’t trust it. “Everything. On purpose. With your eyes wide open so you can’t pretend this isn’t happening. And I won’t pretend otherwise to make you comfortable.”
“Then you don’t know what comfort is,” she whispers.
I pull back and brush another tear away, wishing it didn’t affect me so savagely. “Neither do you. Because while comfort is great, we’ve always craved the friction and the fire and the thunder and lightning more. Haven’t we?”
We stare each other down, breathing hard, the argument crackling through the charged space where our bodies keep trying to write a different script.
I want to pull her in and apologize with my mouth. I want to throw the necklace into the ocean and watch the diamonds sink like a superstition I don’t need. I want absolution I haven’t earned. None of those choices make us less doomed.
She reaches for the necklace case on the dresser again, thumb worrying the satin hinge. “I’m sleeping in my room tonight.”
“Like hell,” I grit out. “We’re not going back to separate beds and separate lives and polite lies. We are not resetting because you’re scared I meant the worst part of the sentence and not the best.”
She glares. “You don’t get to dictate where I sleep.”
“Watch me,” I say, because I am not here to be better than the truth. I’m here to conquer, and keep conquering until I’m drowning in reparations. “There’s no going back. Or are you planning to go back on your word again?”
Her head snaps up. “Again?”
“You vowed to be mine,” I say, stepping into the very wound I regret opening, but we’re here, so be it. “In a greenhouse with dirt under our nails and the world asleep. Then you put onsomeone else’s ring and smiled for the cameras. Don’t tell me it was for Theodore—I know. But I’m sorry, but for what I thought we meant to each other? That wasn’t good enough. Don’t tell me you didn’t have a choice. I know that, too. But tell me you didn’t break me with it and make no move to stop the fucking bombshell in that driveway, and I’ll call you a liar to your face.”
She staggers a half step, like I’ve shoved her. For a second I hate myself for the aim. Then she straightens and glares like a woman who survived worse than my accuracy.
“Fine,” she says, voice scraped raw. “I broke you. And you built an empire out of the pieces.”
“I built an empire so I could come back in the front and not ask to go to the back.”
“Congratulations, then,” she spits.
We breathe.
The air tastes of glass and things we can’t take back. I’m aware, stupidly, of how beautiful she is when she’s furious, how the pulse in her neck flickers, how the dress clings to her like a secret she refused to share and then did.
