My phone buzzed as I hit the stairwell, that cold concrete echo swallowing me.
Simone: Car is on the way. You need to be at the Wellington airport in forty. The sons confirmed. You can’t postpone again.
Right.
Australia.
The deal I’d been forced to pick back up after the old man died a man I’d actually respected. Now his sons were circling like sharks, and apparently the only thing they wanted more than money was my presence.
My jaw clicked tight.
Timing couldn’t have been worse.
I wanted to stay. To go back into that glass-walled office and drop to my knees beside her chair. To cup her face and tell her she wasn’t alone. To rip Blake’s damn envelope out of her hands and burn it until not even ash remembered his name.
Instead, I shoved the phone into my pocket, exhaling against the stairwell’s chill.
My past always tasted like metal. Like broken teeth and old bruises.
Today it tasted like her tears.
At home my Wellington penthouse apartment with its sharp lines and softer regrets I packed fast. Throwing suits into a bag. Checking nothing. Thinking only of her.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her knuckles white around that napkin. Saw her mouth tremble. Saw the girl I remembered in fragments, the one I’d watched from hallways all those years ago…slipping through my fingers again.
I dragged a hand down my face.
I shouldn’t have told her I’d carry her out of that office. Shouldn’t have kissed her. Shouldn’t have called her Peach in a place full of open doors and curious eyes.
But hell, if I could regret it.
She tasted like hope I wasn’t supposed to have.
The car ride to Wellington Airport was a blur of streetlights and memories I didn’t want.
My mother’s voice.
The men in the hallway.
Their hands in my hair as I tried to do homework by the fridge light.
Their smirks.
Their praise.
Your mum’s a star, kid. Really knows how to please.
I swallowed bile.
I’d spent years burying that boy somewhere no one could touch him.
Until Penn looked at me today and he clawed himself up again, raw and shaking, she made him feel seen.
The terminal loomed ahead. My jet waited, sleek and silent, engines humming like a heartbeat on standby.
I stepped inside, nodded at the crew, and took my usual seat by the window. Wellington lay glittering beneath us, a city of ghosts and survival.
My home.
